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sob on felon disenfranchise by pal

an 12 23

even after she testified before the January 6 Select Committee in 2022, far-right GOP activist Ginni Thomas continued to embrace the Big Lie and maintained that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Donald Trump — a claim that conservative then-Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) and others on the Committee repeatedly debunked.

In an article published by Politico on December 21, former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori lays out the implications that Trump's legal problems have for Ginni Thomas and her husband, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Two of the four criminal indictments that Trump is facing are related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results —one being prosecuted by special counsel Jack Smith for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the other by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis for the State of Georgia.

According to Khardori, there is both good news and bad news for the Thomases where Trump's indictments are concerned.

POLL:Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?

The good news for the Thomases, Khardori writes, is that Ginni Thomas probably doesn't have any legal exposure. The bad news is that Trump's prosecutions could seriously "embarrass" and humiliate the Thomases.

"If Trump proceeds to trial in the Justice Department prosecution and is found guilty of the alleged offenses, then Ginni Thomas will come off looking even worse for immersing herself so thoroughly in his lies, for repeating his bogus conspiracy theories and for lobbying White House and state officials to do his corrupt bidding," Khardori explains. "Justice Thomas would go down in history as a Supreme Court justice whose spouse participated in an unprecedented, illegal and corrupt effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in this country."

Khardori, however, seriously doubts that Ginni Thomas has any "criminal liability" and argues that a "far likelier scenario" is that she actually believes Trump and his allies' claims of election fraud but did not break any laws in the process.

But that lack of "liability," Khardori writes, doesn't mean that Justice Thomas shouldn't recuse himself from any Supreme Court cases involving Trump and the 2024 election. Trump is claiming that Smith's election interference case against him should be thrown out because he was still president in late 2020 and early 2021 and therefore, enjoys "immunity" from prosecution — a claim that Smith totally disagrees with and is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to evaluate as soon as possible.

"Justice Thomas should recuse himself because Ginni Thomas — an apparent true believer in Trump's election-fraud claims — is a victim of Trump's alleged crimes," Khardori argues. "That means that both Ginni Thomas and Justice Thomas have a direct reputational stake in the outcome of the proceedings — one that further calls into serious question the justice's ability to render an independent decision strictly on the merits of either case."

*ReadAnkush Khardori's full op-ed for Politico at this link.

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no lnx

https://yyy.theguardian.com/world**/2000/dec/13/**uselections2000.usa

florida's legislature last night began the process of trying to force the presidential selection in favour of the Republicans by approving a list of 25 electors pledged to select George W Bush.

The resolution was designed to hand all the state's votes in the electoral college to the Texas governor and assure him of victory whether or not a recount was approved by the US Supreme Court. It was fiercely opposed by Democrats who accused the Bush camp of trying to hijack the election and creating a dangerous constitutional precedent.

The vote took place in the lower house and the resolution will pass to the state senate - with an inbuilt Republican majority of 25-15 - today. It is not clear whether the senate will wait for a US supreme court verdict on whether Florida recounts can continue before it ratifies the pro-Bush list.

if the court finds in favour of Mr Gore but the legislature goes for Mr Bush, then the US could find itself in the midst of a constitutional crisis.

Yesterday it was revealed that the wife of one of the nine US supreme court justices whose decision could hand the White House to Mr Bush is helping to recruit political staff to a Bush administration.

Ginni Thomas, whose husband Clarence Thomas is one of the conservative group of judges that has supported Mr Bush in two actions in the past month, is working at a prominent conservative think-tank in Washington where she is coordinating rightwing recruitment for the Republican leader.

Mrs Thomas works for the Heritage Foundation and is actively approaching Republicans to come and work for Mr Bush if he becomes president. Earlier this month, she sent an email to Republican political staff members on Capitol Hill inviting them to submit their CVs "for transition purposes".

Justice Thomas has played a low-key role in the Bush v Gore case in which the supreme court heard oral arguments in Washington on Monday.

Alone among the nine justices, Justice Thomas did not ask a single question on Monday. But Judge Gilbert Merritt, a federal judge in Tennessee with personal ties to the Gore family, said in an interview yesterday that Justice Thomas faced a conflict of interest due to his wife's involvement and should stand down from the case.

If he were to step down, the court could be split 4-4 on the Bush v Gore case. In the event of a tie, the original ruling by the Florida supreme court allowing counts of Florida's "undervotes" would stand.

"The spouse has obviously got a substantial interest that could be affected by the outcome," Judge Merritt said. "You should disqualify yourself. I think he'd be subject to some kind of investigation in the Senate."

Judge Merritt cited section 455 of Title 28 of the United States Code in support of his call. The provision requires court officers to excuse themselves from a case if their spouse has "an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding".

"There is no conflict here," Mrs Thomas told the New York Times yesterday. She said she rarely discusses court matters with her husband.

Kathy Arberg, a spokeswoman for the supreme court, said she had no comment on the claims. She also refused to comment on a separate revelation thatEugene Scalia, the son of a second conservative member of the court, Justice Antonin Scalia, is a law partner of Ted Olson, who acted for Mr Bush in the two cases he brought to the court in the past two weeks.

As the Thomas row flared yesterday, America had no option but to submit itself to a nerve-wracking national ordeal by tension.

But the country could be waiting for some time for a ruling. Lawyers pointed out that the supreme court's record fastest time for handing down a judgment following oral argument is three days after the hearing.

The two men at the centre of the storm continued to watch and wait along with everyone else. Mr Gore, whose mood was described by his aides as "determined and resolute", spent another day at his official residence in Washington.

Meanwhile, Mr Bush planned another business-as-usual day in Austin, saying that after talking to his lawyers he was "cautiously optimistic" about the outcome of the court's decision.

===

why? cleta citizens united quid pro quo?

An anonymous $500,000 donation to start up Liberty Central came from Harlan Crow, a Dallas real estate investor and Republican financier, Politico reported.

MARTENS

...Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas,who was firing off all of those emails to Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, to press for the attempted coup, had previously received$1,051,214 in compensation from the Heritage Foundationover a number of years. Clarence Thomas failed to report that compensation on his financial disclosure forms at the Supreme Court, even though he was required to do so.

The ties between Ginni Thomas and another attempted coup collaborator, Cleta Mitchell, run deep – with all roads leading to Koch money. As we reported in March:

In the emails that Ginni Thomas sent to Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, one of the people that she told Meadows to listen to was attorney Cleta Mitchell – a woman who has both a longstanding association with Ginni Thomas as well as with Koch front groups. Trump’s phone log for January 6 shows that Cleta Mitchell was one of the people that Trump spoke with at 7 :53 p.m. on the evening of the attack on the Capitol.

Cleta Mitchell has been in the news previously as the lawyer who was on the January 2, 2021 call with Donald Trump when he phoned the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, and told him: “I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.” That call took place two months after the presidential election. (Mitchell stepped down from her long-term employment at law firm Foley & Lardner after her presence on that call was made public.)

Cleta Mitchell is also the attorney who filed an amicus brief in the Citizens United case before the Supreme Court that was decided on January 21, 2010. That case would be the tipping point to allow unlimited sums from corporations – like Koch Industries — in U.S. elections.

Just eight days after Justice Thomas voted in favor of that decision to open the floodgates to corporate money in campaigns, Cleta Mitchell made a move that looked very much like a quid pro quo to Ginni Thomas. Mitchell, then still a partner at Foley & Lardner, filed an application with the Internal Revenue Service to set up a nonprofit called Liberty Central, Inc. on behalf of Ginni Thomas. According to IRS tax filings, Liberty Central received a combined $1.478 million from dark money donors in 2009 and 2010.

On the IRS tax filings for Liberty Central for 2009 and 2010, Ginni (Virginia) Thomas is listed as President and CEO. The 2010 tax filing shows that Ginni Thomas received $120,511 in compensation from Liberty Central that year. She eventually stepped down from an official post at the nonprofit, stating she would serve as a consultant.

Liberty Central had the fingerprints of Charles Koch all over it. Acting as General Counsel in 2010 for Liberty Central was a former lawyer for the Charles G. Koch Foundation, Sarah Field. A former Koch lobbyist, Matt Schlapp, served on the Board of Liberty Central at inception.

Mitchell’s law firm, Foley & Lardner, employed three attorneys working as lobbyists for a Koch Industries affiliate, Koch Companies Public Sector, LLC in Madison, Wisconsin in 2011. The Koch-related lobbyists were Ray Carey, Jason Childress and Kathleen Walby.

Mitchell was a former lobbyist at the federal level in years 2005 through 2008 for the Alliance for Charitable Reform, a project of The Philanthropy Roundtable, another tax-exempt organization. Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, two dark money groups which also have Charles Koch’s fingerprints all over them, were spun off from the Philanthropy Roundtable in 1999. (See our report: Koch Footprints Lead to Secret Slush Fund to Keep Fear Alive.)

The financial disclosure forms filed by Clarence Thomas show that from 2011 through 2017, Ginni Thomas received a “salary” from the Daily Caller, a right-wing spin organization founded in 2010 by Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson and former Dick Cheney aide Neil Patel. Its creation was announced at a gathering at the Heritage Foundation. The Daily Caller’s affiliated News Foundation has received funding from the Koch Family Foundations and the Charles Koch Institute.

Despite the previous scandal over Clarence Thomas failing to report that Ginni Thomas had received income from the Heritage Foundation, there are no dollar ranges listed on his financial disclosure forms to show the range of “salary” Ginni Thomas actually received from the Daily Caller from 2011 to 2017.

From 2011 through 2020, Clarence Thomas shows that his wife was receiving “salary and benefits” from Liberty Consulting. But again, there is no range of salary and benefits shown. Instead, Liberty Consulting is listed under “Investments” and shows a “book value” of $100,000 to $250,000 in 2019, which then drops to $15,000 to $50,000 in 2020....[CONLON CORKERY?]

nyt

Friendship of Justice and Magnate Puts Focus on Ethics

Justice Clarence Thomas was given a $15,000 bust of Lincoln in 2001 by a group for which a friend is a trustee.

By Mike McIntire

June 18, 2011

PIN POINT, Ga. — Clarence Thomas was here promoting his memoir a few years ago when he bumped into Algernon Varn, whose grandfather once ran a seafood cannery that employed Justice Thomas’s mother as a crab picker.

Mr. Varn lived at the old cannery site, a collection of crumbling buildings on a salt marsh just down the road from a sign heralding this remote coastal community outside Savannah as Justice Thomas’s birthplace. The justice asked about plans for the property, and Mr. Varn said he hoped it could be preserved.

“And Clarence said, ‘Well, I’ve got a friend I’m going to put you in touch with,’ ” Mr. Varn recalled, adding that he was later told by others not to identify the friend.

The publicity-shy friend turned out to be Harlan Crow, a Dallas real estate magnate and a major contributor to conservative causes. Mr. Crow stepped in to finance the multimillion-dollar purchase and restoration of the cannery, featuring a museum about the culture and history of Pin Point that has become a pet project of Justice Thomas’s.

The project throws a spotlight on an unusual, and ethically sensitive, friendship that appears to be markedly different from those of other justices on the nation’s highest court.

The two men met in the mid-1990s, a few years after Justice Thomas joined the court. Since then, Mr. Crow has done many favors for the justice and his wife, Virginia, helping finance a Savannah library project dedicated to Justice Thomas, presenting him with a Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass and reportedly providing $500,000 for Ms. Thomas to start a Tea Party-related group. They have also spent time together at gatherings of prominent Republicans and businesspeople at Mr. Crow’s Adirondacks estate and his camp in East Texas.

In several instances, news reports of Mr. Crow’s largess provoked controversy and questions, adding fuel to a rising debate about Supreme Court ethics. But Mr. Crow’s financing of the museum, his largest such act of generosity, previously unreported, raises the sharpest questions yet — both about Justice Thomas’s extrajudicial activities and about the extent to which the justices should remain exempt from the code of conduct for federal judges.

Although the Supreme Court is not bound by the code, justices have said they adhere to it. Legal ethicists differed on whether Justice Thomas’s dealings with Mr. Crow pose a problem under the code. But they agreed that one facet of the relationship was both unusual and important in weighing any ethical implications: Justice Thomas’s role in Mr. Crow’s donation for the museum.

The code says judges “should not personally participate” in raising money for charitable endeavors, out of concern that donors might feel pressured to give or entitled to favorable treatment from the judge. In addition, judges are not even supposed to know who donates to projects honoring them.

While the nonprofit Pin Point museum is not intended to honor Justice Thomas, people involved in the project said his role in the community’s history would inevitably be part of it, and he participated in a documentary film that is to accompany the exhibits.

Deborah L. Rhode, a Stanford University law professor who has called for stricter ethics rules for Supreme Court justices, said Justice Thomas “should not be directly involved in fund-raising activities, no matter how worthy they are or whether he’s being centrally honored by the museum.”

On the other hand, the restriction on fund-raising is primarily meant to deter judges from using their position to pressure donors, as opposed to relying on “a rich friend” like Mr. Crow, said Ronald D. Rotunda, who teaches legal ethics at Chapman University in California.

“I don’t think I could say it’s unethical,” he said. “It’s just a very peculiar situation.”

Justice Thomas, through a Supreme Court spokeswoman, declined to respond to a detailed set of questions submitted by The New York Times. Mr. Crow also would not comment.

Supreme Court ethics have been under increasing scrutiny, largely because of the activities of Justice Thomas and Ms. Thomas, whose group, Liberty Central, opposed President Obama’s health care overhaul — an issue likely to wind up before the court. Mr. Crow’s donation to Liberty Central was reported by Politico.

In January, the liberal advocacy organization Common Cause asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Justices Thomas and Antonin Scalia should have recused themselves from last year’s Citizens United campaign finance case because they had attended a political retreat organized by the billionaire Koch brothers, who support groups that stood to benefit from the court’s decision.

A month later, more than 100 law professors asked Congress to extend to Supreme Court justices the ethics code that applies to other federal judges, and a bill addressing the issue was introduced.

It is not unusual for justices to accept gifts or take part in outside activities, some with political overtones.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer has attended Renaissance Weekend, a retreat for politicians, artists and media personalities that is a favorite of Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg participated in a symposium sponsored by the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, and a philanthropic foundation once tried to give her a $100,000 achievement award. She instructed that the money be given to charity.

[Algernon Varn, whose grandfather once ran a seafood cannery where Justice Clarence Thomas's mother worked, on the site of the old cannery. Mr. Varn said Justice Thomas put him in touch with a buyer to restore the property and build a museum.]

But in the case of Justice Thomas and his dealings with Mr. Crow, the ethical complications appear more complex.

Conservative Ties

Mr. Crow, 61, manages the real estate and investment businesses founded by his late father, Trammell Crow, once the largest landlord in the United States. The Crow family portfolio is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and includes investments in hotels, medical facilities, public equities and hedge funds.

A friend of the Bush family, Mr. Crow is a trustee of the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation and has donated close to $5 million to Republican campaigns and conservative groups. Among his contributions were $100,000 to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group formed to attack the Vietnam War record of Senator John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, and$500,000 to an organization that ran s urging the confirmation of President George W. Bush’s nominees to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Crow has not personally been a party to Supreme Court litigation, but his companies have been involved in federal court cases, including four that went to the appellate level. And he has served on the boards of two conservative organizations involved in filing supporting briefs in cases before the Supreme Court. One of them, the American Enterprise Institute, with Mr. Crow as a trustee, gave Justice Thomas a bust of Lincoln valued at $15,000 and praised his jurisprudence at an awards gala in 2001.

The institute’s Project on Fair Representation later filed briefs in several cases, and in 2006 the project brought a lawsuit challenging federal voting rights laws, a case in which Justice Thomas filed a lone dissent, embracing the project’s arguments. The project director, an institute fellow named Edward Blum, said the institute supported his research but did not finance the brief filings or the Texas suit, which waslitigated pro bono by a former clerk of Justice Thomas’s.

“When it came time to file a lawsuit,” he said, “A.E.I. had no role in doing that.”

Coming Up With a Plan

In addition to his interest in politics and policy, Mr. Crow is well known for his keen devotion to history.

A backyard garden at his $24 million Dallas residence is dominated by old statues of dictators he has collected from fallen regimes, including Lenin and Stalin. His private library is packed with 8,000 rare books and artifacts, including a Senate roll call sheet from Justice Thomas’s confirmation and a “thank you” letter from the justice, according to local news reports.

There are a number of reasons Justice Thomas might be thankful to Mr. Crow. In addition to giving him the Douglass Bible, valued 10 years ago at $19,000, Mr. Crow has hosted the justice aboard his private jet and his 161-foot yacht, at the exclusive Bohemian Grove retreat in California and at his grand Adirondacks summer estate called Topridge, a 105-acre spread that once belonged to Marjorie Merriweather Post, the cereal heiress.

Christopher Shaw, a folk singer who said he had been invited several times to perform at Topridge, recalled seeing Justice Thomas and his family “on one or two occasions.” They were among about two dozen guests who included other prominent Republicans — last summer, the younger Mr. Bush stopped by.

“There would be guys puffing on cigars,” Mr. Shaw said. “Clarence just kind of melted in with everyone else. We got introduced at dinner. He sat at Harlan’s table.”

Mr. Crow’s $175,000 donation to the library in Savannah in 2001 started out anonymous, but it was eventually made public amid opposition to the project by some local black leaders who did not like Justice Thomas’s politics. Similarly, Mr. Crow sought to keep his role in the museum quiet.

At first glance the Pin Point Heritage Museum, scheduled to open this fall, would seem an unlikely catalyst for an ethical quandary. That Pin Point’s history is worthy of preservation is not in dispute.

Part of the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor designated by Congress, it is representative of tight-knit Southern coastal settlements that trace their roots to freed slaves and were often based around fishing. In Pin Point, the Varn crab and oyster cannery, founded in the 1920s, was a primary source of jobs until it closed in 1985.

Mr. Varn and his wife, Sharon, said they had long hoped the property could be saved from commercial development but had little success coming up with a plan. That changed after their chance encounter with Justice Thomas, who was visiting his childhood home with a television news crew.

Justice Thomas, 62, was born and raised near the cannery overlooking the Moon River, where it was not uncommon for babies to rock in bassinets made of crab baskets while their mothers shucked oysters. He sympathized with the Varns’ wishes and said he had a friend who could help, Mr. Varn said.

The Varns eventually sold their property in April 2008. During a recent interview at their home near the cannery, they made it clear that they were “not supposed to say” who the buyer was, and a news release issued last November by a Savannah public relations firm said the museum was being “privately funded by an anonymous donor.”

But the paper trail leads back to Mr. Crow, and in interviews at the project site, people working on it acknowledged that he was financing it. Property records show a company called HKJRS/Pinpoint bought the land for $1.5 million, and incorporation records say the company is controlled by a Dallas-based partnership run by Mr. Crow.

Project documents reviewed by The Times show a preliminary construction budget of $1.3 million, but it is unclear if that includes expenses related to the content and design of the museum.

Justice Thomas remains closely involved with the project. Emily Owens, a museum spokeswoman who works for Mr. Crow’s company, said the justice “played a big part” in creating a video documentary that will be part of the museum experience. He hosted a design team from Dallas for a four-hour meeting at his Supreme Court offices in February.

And he has had a role in picking people to help with the museum. Barbara Fertig, a history professor at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, said that she was asked to meet with Justice Thomas last spring and that “by the end of the meeting, he said he would like me to work on this project.”

She said she had “never been particularly curious” about why Mr. Crow is financing it, adding that costly preservation projects are often possible only because of philanthropy motivated by friendships. Justice Thomas and Mr. Crow would seem to fall into that category, Ms. Fertig said.

“I’ve been in the company of the two of them together,” she said, “and they certainly really are friends.”

The Code of Conduct

That friendship is important to determining whether Justice Thomas’s interactions with Mr. Crow conflict with the code, said Raymond J. McKoski, a retired state judge in Illinois who wrote a law review article on charitable fund-raising by judges. If Justice Thomas did not “misuse the prestige of office” in getting Mr. Crow to take on the project, it should not be a concern, he said.

“Some of it depends on the conversations that took place,” Mr. McKoski said. “Who brought up the idea? How willing was Mr. Crow to do it? What exact questions were asked by Justice Thomas?”

Beyond the admonition against fund-raising, the code generally discourages judges from partaking in any off-the-bench behavior that could create even the perception of partiality. It acknowledges the value in judges’ being engaged with their communities, lecturing on the law and doing charitable work, but draws a line where those activities might cause a reasonable person to worry that a judge is indebted to or influenced by someone.

“The code of conduct is quite clear that judges are not supposed to be soliciting money for their pet projects or charities, period,” said Arn Pearson, a lawyer with Common Cause. “If any other federal judge was doing it, he could face disciplinary action.”

The justices are not bound by the federal judiciary’s conduct code, because it is enforced by a committee of judges who rank below the justices. Even so, Justices Breyer and Anthony M. Kennedy said in testimony before Congress in April that the justices followed the code.

Beyond the code, the justices must comply with laws applying to all federal officials that prohibit conflicts of interest and require disclosure of gifts. Justice Thomas’s gift acceptances drew attention in 2004, when The Los Angeles Times reported that he had accumulated gifts totaling $42,200 in the previous six years — far more than any of the other justices.

Since 2004, Justice Thomas has never reported another gift. He has continued to disclose travel costs paid by schools and organizations he has visited for speeches and teaching, but he has not reported that any travel was provided by Mr. Crow.

Travel records for Mr. Crow’s planes and yacht, however, suggest that Justice Thomas may have used them in recent years.

In April 2008, not long after Mr. Crow bought the Pin Point property, one of his private planes flew from Washington to Savannah, where his yacht, the Michaela Rose, was docked.

That same week, an item appeared in a South Carolina lawyers’ publication noting that Justice Thomas was arriving aboard the Michaela Rose in Charleston, a couple of hours north of Savannah, where the Crow family owns luxury vacation properties. The author was a prominent lawyer who said she knew of the visit because of a family connection to Mr. Crow.

Justice Thomas reported no gifts of travel that month in his 2008 disclosure. And there are other instances in which Justice Thomas’s travels correspond to flights taken by Mr. Crow’s planes.

On Jan. 4, 2010, when Justice Thomas was in Savannah for the dedication of a building in his honor, Mr. Crow’s plane flew from Washington to Savannah and returned to Washington the next day. Justice Thomas reported in his financial disclosure that his travel had been paid for by the Savannah College of Art and Design, which owned the building.

In his 2009 financial disclosure, Justice Thomas reported that Southern Methodist University in Dallas — Trammell Crow’s alma mater — had provided his travel for a speech there on Sept. 30. Flight records show that Mr. Crow’s plane flew from Washington to Dallas that day.

Among the questions The Times submitted to Justice Thomas was whether he was on any of those flights, and if so, whether the colleges reimbursed him or Mr. Crow. The colleges declined to comment.

One item not required to be reported in Justice Thomas’s financial disclosures is the millions of dollars Mr. Crow is spending on the museum. That is because the money is not being given to the justice as a gift.

For Algernon and Sharon Varn, who said they were thrilled to see a cherished piece of local history being restored, the museum is a gift to the community. While it is about more than Justice Thomas, they said, he deserves credit for putting them together with someone who had the money and the interest to make the project a reality.

“He was instrumental in getting the process started, because he wanted it preserved to show that no matter where you came from, you can go where you want,” Mr. Varn said. “He had a meager existence, and yet look where he is today. It’s a great American story.”

https://www.salon.com/2017/02/16/gini-thomas-wife-of-supreme-court-justice-clarence-thomas-wants-to-lead-a-pro-trump-grassroots-organization/

Gini Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, wants to lead a pro-Trump grassroots organization

In an email chain, Ginni Thomas said she wanted to start a group that would counter the resistance from the left

By TAYLOR LINK

PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 16, 2017

In an email chain, Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, asked how she could start a grassroots organization that would support President Donald Trump and combat the resistance coalescing against him.

The emails, uncovered by The Daily Beast, were posted to a conservative listerv this month. They revealed an eager Ginni Thomas determined to make sure Trump's policies were enacted.

"What is the best way to, with minimal costs, set up a daily text capacity for a ground-up grassroots army for pro-Trump daily action items to push back agains the left's resistance efforts who are trying to maker America ungovernable?" she wrote.

"There are some grassroots activists, who seem beyond the Republican party or the conservative movement, who wish to join the fray on social media for Trump and link shields and build momentum," she added. "I met with a house load of them yesterday and we want a daily textable tool to start."

Even though judges are not allowed to "personally participate" in raising money for charitable endeavors, Thomas has maintained a friendship with Dallas-based multimillionaire Harlan Crow, who helped finance a museum dedicated to the justice in Pin Point, Georgia. Crow even provided Ginni Thomas $500,000 so that she could start a Tea Party-related group.

Before the Supreme Court heard arguments about the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act in 2011, Ginni Thomas "specifically agitated for the repeal of Obamacare," according to The Nation. Democrats, led by then-Rep. Anthony Weiner, said that Justice Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from the case. He didn't, but it turned out to be a moot point, as the Affordable Care Act's constitutionality was upheld.

For Clarence Thomas, his wife's current activism could pose a problem.

Heidi Li Feldman, a professor at Georgetown Law School, told The Daily Beast that the email campaign could force Justice Thomas to recuse himself from a case dealing with Trump's executive order on immigration.

"It's pretty egregious," Feldman said of the emails." It's pretty clear that it's quite partisan."

For a Supreme Court justice, it's a personal judgment call whether to opt for recusal because of possible partiality.

Justice Thomas and his wife did not return The Daily Beast's requests for comment.

By TAYLOR LINK

https://www.politico.com/story/2011/02/justice-thomass-wife-now-lobbyist-048812

...now, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, has recast herself yet again, this time as the head of a firm,

Liberty Consulting, which boasts on its website using her “experience and connections” to help clients “with “governmental affairs efforts” and political donation strategies.

Thomas already has met with nearly half of the 99 GOP freshmen in the House and Senate, according to an e-mail she sent last week to congressional chiefs of staff, in which she branded herself “a self-appointed, ambassador to the freshmen class and an ambassador to the tea party movement.”

But her latest career incarnation is sparking controversy again.

Thomas’s role as a de facto tea party lobbyist and — until recently — as head of a tea

no lnx party group that worked to defeat Democrats last November “show a new level of arrogance of just not caring that the court is being politicized and how that undermines the historic image of the Supreme Court as being above the political fray,” said Arn Pearson, a lawyer for Common Cause, the left-leaning government watchdog group.

“It raises additional questions about whether Justice Thomas can be unbiased and appear to be unbiased in cases dealing with the repeal of the health care reform law or corporate political spending when his wife is working to elect members of the tea party and also advocating for their policies.”

Even among congressional Republicans, with whom Thomas boasts she has close ties, the reaction to the entreaties from her new firm, Liberty Consulting ranged from puzzlement to annoyance, with a senior House Republican aide who provided Thomas’s e-mail to POLITICO, blasting her for trying to “cash in” on her ties to the tea party movement.]]

Freshman Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) — who courted tea party activists and who was endorsed by Liberty Central, the tea party nonprofit group she headed until December — was unaware of Thomas’s new effort.

“This is the spouse of Justice Thomas?” he said, when asked by POLITICO on Tuesday about her outreach. “No, I’ve never met her. It’s not something I’ve heard about. And I hang out with a lot of freshman,” he said.

While Thomas was well-known in conservative circles as an aide to former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, as a midlevel staffer at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and at The Heritage Foundation and as the spouse of one of the court’s most conservative justices, she did not draw much attention until 2009, when she started speaking at tea party rallies.

Late that year, she establishedLiberty Central, a group she envisioned as forming a bridge between the conservative establishment and the anti-establishment tea party movement. It was a new role and a new measure of prominence for Thomas, and it marked the beginning of a string of headaches for her and her husband.

Legal ethicists asserted that Thomas’s role could compromise her husband’s impartiality, especially since the group is not required to report its donors and could have benefitted from the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling last year in which Justice Thomas sided with the majority in a decision that allowed corporations to fund campaign ads, often without disclosing their contributions.

To be sure, other federal judges have politically active spouses, including federal appeals court Judge Marjorie Rendell, whose husband is former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, and 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt, whose wife, Ramona Ripston, will step down this month after decades running the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Rendell’s political committees were required to reveal all donations. But the ACLU is registered under sections of the tax code that do not require public disclosure of donors, as is Liberty Central — and Common Cause, for that matter.

But the Thomases came under particular scrutiny after POLITICO revealed that, while the Supreme Court was deliberating over the Citizens United case, Liberty Central had received a $550,000 anonymous contribution.

Common Cause, in a letter to the Justice Department, suggested that Thomas should have recused himself from the case and charged that “the complete lack of transparency of Liberty Central’s finances makes it difficult to assess the full scope of the ethics issues raised by Ms. Thomas’s role in founding and leading the group.”

In addition, in a letterto the Judicial Conference, Common Cause pointed out that Justice Thomas had failed to report on his disclosure filings his wife’s income over the past decade, prompting the judge to amend13 years of reports to indicate sources — though not amounts — of his wife’s income.

At first, it didn’t seem that the attention affected Thomas’s efforts to build Liberty Central. She assembled an impressive staff and board, while circulating among major conservative establishment donors with whom she and her husband had long, close relationships.

POLITICO has learned, for instance, that the initial $500,000 contribution came from Dallas real estate investor Harlan Crow, a major GOP donor who held an event for Liberty Central at his home a few months after the group launched. He also once gave Justice Thomas a $19,000 “Frederick Douglass Bible” as a gift and donated $150,000 to build a new wing named for Thomas on a Savannah, Ga., library that Clarence Thomas visited frequently in his youth.

But Thomas and Liberty Central ran into problems after it was revealed in October that she had left a voice mail, requesting an apology from Anita Hill, the woman who accused her husband of sexual harassment during his confirmation hearings for the high court in 1991. That prompted another surge of attention and — according to a conservative who knows Ginni Thomas and is familiar with her work at Liberty Central — it “spooked” at least one donor.

About a month later, Thomas stepped down from her leadership post at Liberty Central, and it was announced that the group was merging with another conservative nonprofit group called the Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty. Sources told POLITICO that Thomas essentially put Liberty Central on the block because it was struggling to raise enough money to support its big staff and high overhead.

Liberty Consulting filed incorporation papers in Virginia only a day after news broke of the changes at Liberty Central.

reached by phone on Wednesday, Thomas said she was having trouble with the signal, telling a POLITICO reporter: “I would be happy to talk with you, but I really can’t understand clearly what you’re asking, so maybe this is not a good time to talk.”

She did not respond to subsequent voice mail or e-mail messages.

In a December interview with the conservative Daily Caller, though, Thomas said she planned to spend the bulk of her time working as a consultant for Liberty Central and the Patrick Henry Center, and would “help them in any way I can think of, whether it’s lobbying on the Hill or connecting with the grass roots, or helping speak or write or fundraise.”

But lobbying records show no registrations for Thomas, Liberty Consulting, Liberty Central or the Patrick Henry Center.

When asked whether Thomas was being paid through Liberty Consulting as a consultant, Liberty Central general counsel Sarah Field did not answer directly. “She was and continues to be the founder of Liberty Central, and we look forward to working with her and with other passionate conservative activists, and that’s all there is to it,” Field said.

Thomas and her friends reject the suggestion that the call to Anita Hill precipitated Ginni Thomas’s stepping down from Liberty Central — Thomas told The Daily Caller that the story line was “laughable.” She did, however, concede that the call was “probably a mistake on my part,” adding that, if her move to an outside consulting role “has the extra benefit of helping reduce distractions, that’s fine with me.”

And Leonard Leo, an executive at the conservative Federalist Society who is a longtime friend of the Thomases and sits on Liberty Central’s board, told POLITICO in November that the call had no impact on Liberty Central’s fundraising or on Thomas.

“The people that were supportive of Liberty Central were supportive of her,” he said, adding, “I don’t think that they were going to pull back from her at a time when she needed support more than anything else.”

He called the controversy over the Hill call “a nothing burger” for Thomas. “This is a woman who has been through it all. There are few women in Washington who have had to put up with what she has.”

but the source who knows Thomas and is familiar with her work at Liberty Central said her continuing reinvention of herself

— especially so soon after raising big money and assembling a staff for a new nonprofit — has hurt her standing in conservative circles.

“Ginni’s reputation around town is now even more of a fake entitled woman who is only here because of her husband,” the source said. “Now she has opened her own lobbying shop ... not sure how (the) conservative circle will feel when they find that out, or if they’ll care or not.”

So far, they don’t.

Roughly half a dozen aides for new members told POLITICO that their offices received handwritten meeting requests from Thomas the day after they were sworn in, as well as follow-up e-mails requesting a meeting with her — but only one of them had met with her. The rest had no plans to do so.

ref doc 550K$

https://www.politico.com/static/PPM156_liberty_central.html

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https://religionnews.com/2020/01/29/often-reticent-justice-clarence-thomas-speaks-about-his-faith-in-new-documentary/

odd no cut paste

trailer manifold pack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOzi1RSi-0M&t=2s

ask god to take anger out of my ht; [watts riots]

2x? apr 2022

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/05/inside-the-consulting-firm-run-by-ginni-thomas-wife-of-supreme-court-justice-clarence-thomas.html

virginia “Ginni” Thomas runs a little-known consulting company that some campaign watchdog groups say could create yet another conflict of interest for her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Ginni Thomas shot to national notoriety after text messages surfaced last month showing that she prodded former President Donald Trump’s then chief of staff, Mark Meadows, in late 2020 to try to overturn the presidential election results. The messages prompted calls from top Democrats for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from cases reviewing the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on Capitol Hill. It’s also led to calls by lawmakers on Capitol hill to create a formal Supreme Court code of ethics. The House select committee investigating what took place on Jan. 6 is reportedly seeking an interview with Ginni Thomas.

[vid]

a spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not return requests for comment. Attempts to reach Ginni Thomas through an email listed on her website were not returned. The website appears to have been wiped since the recent reports on her texts with Meadows.

Very little is known about her company, Liberty Consulting, which is listed as an asset on her husband’s Supreme Court disclosures. CNBC was able to find some of her conservative-leaning clients by cross-checking Virginia business records, tax forms, Federal Election Commission filings, personal financial disclosure documents and through interviews with people familiar with her work. Even so, watchdogs say such documents may not entirely reveal who she’s represented and whether those groups have ties to any cases before the court, raising increasing calls for more transparency.

‘Very problematic’

“It’s very problematic,” Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, said in a recent phone interview of Ginni Thomas’ work. The Supreme Court rules don’t require spouses to publicly disclose how much they earn or if they are working with anyone that could have a stake in a Supreme Court case — which could create a conflict for her husband and force him to recuse himself from certain cases, Painter said.

Kedric Payne, general counsel of the watchdog Campaign Legal Center, similarly said any financial interest tied to a justice’s spouse that could make it’s way to the court might lead to the recusal by the judge.

“The law is clear that a justice with questionable impartiality shall recuse from a case. Cases tied to the financial or other significant interests of a justice’s spouse always raise red flags that may trigger the recusal requirement,” Payne told CNBC. Clarence Thomas has recused himself 54 times since the 1990s, including 17 times to avoid a potential perception of a conflict of interest created by his son, according to the Huffington Post.

Separate careers

Ginni Thomas, in a recent interview with the Washington Free Beacon, pushed back on any potential conflicts of interest from her work. “We have our own separate careers, and our own ideas and opinions too. Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work,” she recently told the publication. She noted her work for Liberty Consulting in that interview but didn’t divulge her clients.

Still, Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, have said they want to move forward with creating an ethics code for Supreme Court justices that could include more specific disclosure requirements.

In the case of Ginni Thomas, the court’s financial disclosure forms only show that she gets a salary and benefits from her firm, without disclosing the specifics, and it notes the book value of the business.

Located in a nondescript strip mall in suburban Virginia, Liberty Consulting’s few known clients range from the Center for Security Policy, a nonprofit founded by a conservative activist accused of anti-Muslim rhetoric, to a political action committee titled FedUp PAC, according to a review of public filings by CNBC and researchers at watchdog Documented. The political action committee backed failed Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, according to Center for Responsive Politics’ data. Moore was accused of sexual misconduct and has denied wrongdoing.

The Center for Security Policy was founded by Frank Gaffney Jr., a former Reagan administration Defense official who has since been flagged by the Anti-Defamation League for pushing “a number of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories.” Both Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy were among a group of advocates who filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court backing Trump’s travel ban. The center paid Liberty Consulting more than $200,000 over the course of two years, from 2017 and through 2018, according to 990 tax disclosure reports from those years. The work by the firm for the Center for Security Policy was first reported by The New Yorker.

Liberty Central

Thomas is also said to have done past work for companies tied to conservative judicial advisor Leonard Leo, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named to speak freely on the matter. Ginni Thomas counts Leo as a mentor, according to The Washington Post. Leo previously served as a director for a Ginni Thomas-led a conservative nonprofit namedLiberty Central during former President Barack Obama’s administration, according to 990 tax disclosures. Ginni Thomas once boasted that she wanted the organization to be “bigger than the tea party,” and was taking aim at Obama’s agenda, including the Affordable Care Act, the Post reported.

In 2010, Ginni Thomas made more than $120,000 as president and CEO of Liberty Central that year, according to a 990 tax filing. The nonprofit has since been closed. Clarence Thomas was among the group of Supreme Court justices who dissented in 2012 from the majority opinion, which upheld Obama’s signature health insurance law, the Affordable Care Act, as constitutional. He later sided with the majority to uphold the law against a Republican challenge in 2021.

Leo has been involved with helping shape the Supreme Court to what it is today, including Trump on who best to select for the high court.Trump’s court picks of Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett saw support from groups backed by Leo and his allies when they were in the midst of Senate battles over their nominations. The Daily Beast reported that CRC Advisors, Leo’s firm, has been tasked at promoting a documentary on Clarence Thomas.

Supporting Trump

Outside groups run by Leo’s allies advocated in support of Trump’s nominees and have since taken aim at President Joe Biden’s court picks, including Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Like their opposing progressive groups, the Leo-tied organizations are known as “dark money” nonprofits who don’t reveal their donors to the public. Leo’s recently [created](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/18/trump-ally-leonard-leo-85-fund-received-20-million-in-2020.html?__source=sharebar|twitter&par=sharebar) 85 Fund is part of his extensive network of organizations that seek to influence policy, judicial nominations and the larger conservative movement.

The FedUp PAC, which is chaired by conservative political ad veteran Richard Viguerie, paid Liberty Consulting $5,000 during the 2018 election cycle for what it describes on the PAC’s filing as video production. The name Liberty Consulting and the address listed on the Federal Election Commission disclosure matches that of the firm run by Ginni Thomas. The PAC later backed Trump during the 2020 election cycle, spending more than $100,000 supporting the then commander in chief. Liberty Consulting was not paid for any work by the PAC that cycle, federal campaign disclosure data shows.

Bob Mills, who is listed as director for the super PAC on its website, did not recall what specific work Liberty Consulting conducted for the organization when initially reached by CNBC and didn’t respond to follow up emails requesting further details.

Ginni Thomas’ LinkedIn profile says she’s worked since 2010 as the founder and president of Liberty Consulting with “citizen activists, leaders and nonprofits to succeed and have impact in defending the principles that have made America an exceptional nation. — offer strategic advice, build coalitions, connect people and projects (this is my passion and joy!).” Thomas notes on her page that she’s not a lobbyist, even though a Virginia state record shows that the firm was once called Liberty Lobby.

Beth Rotman, national director of money in politics and ethics at watchdog Common Cause, told CNBC that new ethics laws governing Supreme Court justices should require them to disclose more details of their spouses’ consulting contracts.

“Disclosure must be robust for it to be truly meaningful in this context so financial disclosures should include consulting contracts. As you have seen already, when justices complete their annual reports, they list information that does not give a complete view of their spouse’s financial ties,” Rotman said in an email. “It is key to meaningful disclosure that the rules be updated to include the source and amount of any spouse’s consulting contracts over a reasonable minimum threshold.”

Leo and representatives for most of the group’s mentioned in this story also did not return requests for comment. A spokesman for the Jan. 6 House Select Committee declined to comment.

Business boom

Though it’s unclear how much Ginni Thomas has made from the consulting firm, Liberty Consulting appeared to see a boom in business in the run-up to Trump’s 2016 win.

Clarence Thomas’ financial disclosure reports show that in 2014, the firm’s cash market value was listed as being worth up to $15,000.

===

an 6 22

**Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas** on Monday appeared to agree it is a “blatant falsehood” that a far-right Christian ministry that has claimed “homosexuals say yes” to pedophilia and promotes anti-LGBTQ lies is a “hate group” that deserves to be placed on the same map and the KKK and neo-Nazis.

Justice Thomas’ rant appears asthe only opposition to the Court’s decision Monday to not take up a case that would effectively revisit the landmark First Amendment case New York Times v. Sullivan, which requires a plaintiff suing for defamation to prove “actual malice.”

Coral Ridge Ministries asked the Supreme Court to review its case, which it lost, against the Southern Poverty Law Center for designating it an anti-LGBTQ hate group. The case is not about whether or not the church is a hate group, but whether or not the Southern Poverty Law Center has the First Amendment right to say so. The court refused, but Thomas in an angry dissent wrote:

“SPLC’s ‘hate group’ designation lumped Coral Ridge’s Christian ministry with groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis. It placed Coral Ridge on an interactive, online ‘Hate Map’ and caused Coral Ridge concrete financial injury by excluding it from the AmazonSmile donation program. Nonetheless, unable to satisfy the ‘almost impossible’ actual-malice standard this Court has imposed, Coral Ridge could not hold SPLC to account for what it maintains is a blatant falsehood.”

Thomas also writes:

"Coral Ridge maintained that although it 'opposes homosexual conduct' based on its religious beliefs, it is in no sense a 'hate group.' … To the contrary, it 'has nothing but love for people who engage in homosexual conduct' and 'has never attacked or maligned anyone on the basis of engaging in homosexual conduct.'"

That’s false.

In its iconic 2010 report, “18 Anti-Gay Groups and Their Propaganda,” the Southern Poverty Law Center explained that the “late Rev. D. James Kennedy started turning fundamentalist Coral Ridge Presbyterian into a mega-church in the 1960s.”

In an especially nasty 1989 edition of a CRM newsletter, Kennedy ran photographs of children along with the tagline, “Sex With Children? Homosexuals Say Yes!”

“Over the years,” the SPLC report adds, Rev. Kennedy “emphasized anti-gay rhetoric, particularly in his TV ministry. He recommended as ‘essential’ the virulent work of R.J. Rushdoony … who believed practicing gays should be executed.”

no lnx

Clarence Thomas has 'implicated himself in the insurrection': historian

Tom Boggioni and Raw Story March 27, 2022

In an interview with Rolling Stone's Andrew Cohen, historian Jeff Shesol said he has no doubt that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni Thomas are in "lockstep" when it comes to believing Donald Trump should still be in the White House and claimed they see what they are doing as a "holy war."

With Cohen writing, "You don’t need to be a legal expert to know that one spouse shouldn’t sit in judgment in a case in which the other spouse is a witness — or a suspect. That’s as classic a conflict of interest as one can imagine and by refusing to acknowledge it Justice Thomas has brought great discredit on himself and his colleagues on the Court," he asked the author of “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs The Supreme Court,” what he thinks is going on after revelations about Ginni Thomas' texts urging overturning the 2020 presidential election results.

According to Shesol, the biggest immediate problem is the fact that there is no mechanism in place to force Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves in cases where they have a personal stake as well as their freedom to take public political stances without consequences.

"I wrote for the NYT back in 2011 on the 'extrajudicial' activities of Thomas, [Samuel] Alito, and others," he explained. "They’re even more brazen today, if only because they have never faced any consequences (other than the opprobrium of the left and the mainstream media, opprobrium they welcome) for making political statements to politically minded crowds. You and I can write as many mean articles about them as we’d like, but short of impeachment, they’re untouchable and they revel in it."

According to the historian, he can't be sure Ginni Thomas was talking about her husband when she referenced support for election interference from her "best friend" -- but he has his suspicions.

After stating, "In a very real sense, Clarence and Ginni Thomas are answerable only to Clarence and Ginni Thomas. The Trump Administration gave us all a hard lesson in how few actual rules bind the behavior of our national leaders, and how much depends on their good judgment and self-restraint," he added. "Even if she’s not referring to Justice Thomas, the recent New Yorker story, among others, underscores the absurdity of the notion that (as they’ve claimed) Ginni does her thing and Clarence does his, and that they don’t discuss their work. This is a holy war, and, again, they are waging it in lockstep."

According to Shesol, Ginni Thomas is up to her neck in involvement t in the Jan 6th insurrection and there is little reason to believe that her husband didn't know it.

Explaining, "Ginni played an active role (which seems, with every passing revelation, to have been a greater role than previously disclosed or imagined) in trying to subvert the Constitution by overthrowing the results of a presidential election," he maintained that her husband's decision to side with Donald Trump on hiding White House documents, and his current silence, makes him suspect.

"Her husband’s role, apart from his dissent from that unsigned order, is less clear—though it is clear enough that he acted (or would have acted, if the other conservatives had joined him) in shielding his wife’s role in the plot from scrutiny," he stated. "Though his dissent is silent to his true motivations he has thus involved and implicated himself in the insurrection."

You can read more here.

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tom b

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/magazine/clarence-thomas-ginni-thomas.html

2x? no lnx cf WFB BS ~

[pix Clarence and Ginni Thomas at a Heritage Foundation event to celebrate his 30 years on the Supreme Court last October.

The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas

The Supreme Court justice and his wife battled for years for a more conservative America. New reporting shows how far she was willing to go after Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.

By Danny Hakim and Jo Becker

Published Feb. 22, 2022

UpdatedFeb. 23, 2022

The call to action was titled “Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?” Shared in the days after the 2020 presidential election, it urged the members of an influential if secretive right-wing group to contact legislators in three of the swing states that tipped the balance for Joe Biden — Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. The aim was audacious: Keep President Donald J. Trump in power.

The group, theCouncil for National Policy, brings together old-school Republican luminaries, Christian conservatives, Tea Party activists and MAGA operatives, with more than 400 members who include leaders of organizations like the Federalist Society, the National Rifle Association and the Family Research Council. Founded in 1981 as a counterweight to liberalism, the group was hailed by President Ronald Reagan as seeking the “return of righteousness, justice and truth” to America.

As Trump insisted, without evidence, that fraud had cheated him of victory, conservative groups rushed to rally behind him.

The council stood out, however, not only because of its pedigree but also because one of its newest leaders was Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas and a longtime activist in right-wing circles. She had taken on a prominent role at the council during the Trump years andby 2019 had joined the nine-member board of C.N.P. Action, an arm of the council organized as a 501(c)4 under a provision of the tax code thatallows for direct political advocacy. It was C.N.P. Action that circulated the November “action steps” document, the existence of which has not been widely known. It instructed members to pressure Republican lawmakers into challenging the election results and appointing alternate slates of electors:“Demand that they not abandon their Constitutional responsibilities during a time such as this.”

Such a plan, if carried out successfully, would have almost certainly landed before the Supreme Court — and Ginni Thomas’s husband. In fact, Trump was already calling for that to happen. In a Dec. 2 speech at the White House, the president falsely claimed that “millions of votes were cast illegally in swing states alone” and said he hoped “the Supreme Court of the United States will see it” and “will do what’s right for our country, because our country cannot live with this kind of an election.”

The Thomases have long posed a unique quandary in Washington. Because Supreme Court justices do not want to be perceived as partisan, they tend to avoid political events and entanglements, and their spouses often keep low profiles. But the Thomases have defied such norms. Since the founding of the nation, no spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice has been as overt a political activist as Ginni Thomas.In addition to her perch at the Council for National Policy, she founded a group called Groundswell with the support of Stephen K. Bannon, the hard-line nationalist and former Trump adviser. It holds a weekly meeting of influential conservatives, many of whom work directly on issues that have come before the court.

Ginni Thomas insists, in her council biography, that she and her husband operate in “separate professional lanes,” but those lanes in fact merge with notable frequency. For the three decades he has sat on the Supreme Court, they have worked in tandem from the bench and the political trenches to take aim at targets like Roe v. Wade and affirmative action.Together they believe that “America is in a vicious battle for its founding principles,” as Ginni Thomas has put it. Her views, once seen as on the fringe, have come to dominate the Republican Party. And with Trump’s three appointments reshaping the Supreme Court, her husband finds himself at the center of a new conservative majority poised to shake the foundations of settled law. In a nation freighted with division and upheaval, the Thomases have found their moment.

This article draws on hours of recordings and internal documents from groups affiliated with the Thomases; dozens of interviews with the Thomases’ classmates, friends, colleagues and critics, as well as more than a dozen Trump White House aides and supporters and some of Justice Thomas’s former clerks; and an archive of Council for National Policy videos and internal documents provided by an academic researcher in Australia, Brent Allpress.

The reporting uncovered new details on the Thomases’ ascent: how Trump courted Justice Thomas; how Ginni Thomas used that courtship to gain access to the Oval Office, where her insistent policy and personnel suggestions so aggravated aides that one called her a “wrecking ball” while others put together an opposition-research-style report on her that was obtained by The Times; and the extent to which Justice Thomas flouted judicial-ethics guidance by participating in events hosted by conservative organizations with matters before the court. Those organizations showered the couple with accolades and, in at least one case, used their appearances to attract event fees, donations and new members.

New reporting also shows just how blurred the lines between the couple’s interests became during the effort to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in the rally held at the Ellipse, just outside the White House grounds, aimed at stopping Congress from certifying the state votes that gave Joe Biden his victory. Many of the rally organizers and those advising Trump had connections to the Thomases, but little has been known about what role, if any, Ginni Thomas played, beyond the fact that on the morning of the March to Save America, as the rally was called, she urged her Facebook followers to watch how the day unfolded. “LOVE MAGA people!!!!” she posted before the march turned violent. “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING!”

[ImagePresident Donald J. Trump greeting Justice Thomas during Trump’s inauguration ceremony in 2017.

President Donald J. Trump greeting Justice Thomas during Trump’s inauguration ceremony in 2017. Credit...Alex Wong/Getty Images]

But her role went deeper, and beyond C.N.P. Action. Dustin Stockton, an organizer who worked with Women for America First, which held the permit for the Ellipse rally, said he was told that Ginni Thomas played a peacemaking role between feuding factions of rally organizers “so that there wouldn’t be any division around January 6.”

“The way it was presented to me was that Ginni was uniting these different factions around a singular mission on January 6,” said Stockton, who previously worked for Bannon. “That Ginni was involved made sense — she’s pretty neutral, and she doesn’t have a lot of enemies in the movement.”

Ginni Thomas, who turns 65 on April 25, did not respond to requests for comment, and Justice Thomas, who is 73, declined to comment through a court spokesperson. In a posting on a private Facebook group for her high school classmates, Ginni Thomas wrote that “a NYT reporter” might have “contacted you looking for stories, etc on me. This reporter seems to have been told to write a hit piece” and “has knocked on many doors and written many emails. They all contact me and are not responding. ” she wrote. “Whatever. ‍♀️” (The message was forwarded by one of those classmates to the reporter in question.)

In the weeks that followed Jan. 6, as public condemnation of the insurrection grew to include some Republican leaders like Senator Mitch McConnell, the Council for National Policy circulated in its newsletter another previously unreported memo, written by one of its members, that outlined strategies to make the Capitol riot seem more palatable. “Drive the narrative that it was mostly peaceful protests,”a leading member of the group advised, according to a copy reviewed by The Times. “Amplify the concerns of the protestors and give them legitimacy.”

In the year since the insurrection, a number of friends and allies of the Thomases, and even a former Thomas clerk, have received subpoenas from the congressional committee investigating the events of Jan. 6. Ginni Thomas co-signed a letter in December calling for House Republicans to expel Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from their conference for joining the Jan. 6 committee. Thomas and her co-authors said the investigation “brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law” and “legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong,” adding that they would begin “a nationwide movement to add citizens’ voices to this effort.”

A few weeks later, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 to allow the release of records from the Trump White House related to the Jan. 6 attack. Justice Thomas was the sole dissenter.

Nearly 10 months after the dramatic events at the Capitol, Ginni Thomas ventured out onto a small balcony inside the Heritage Foundation, the conservative redoubt that stands on Massachusetts Avenue a few blocks from the Capitol. In a bright red dress, she beamed and waved to friends in the crowd who gathered last October to celebrate her husband’s three decades on the Supreme Court. Beyond a sweeping bank of windows, the sun had sunk to just above the horizon, next to the Washington Monument.

The attendees represented the cream of Washington’s Republican legal establishment, “really a who’s who of all-stars,” as one of them, Donald F. McGahn II, the first White House counsel under Trump, would say when the speeches started. Many had clerked for Justice Thomas, including a number of Trump-appointed judges who are themselves touchstones on the right, like Neomi Rao and James Ho. Others were activists who had worked alongside Ginni Thomas, a Tea Party veteran.

Though efforts to overturn the election had failed and Joe Biden was deep into his first year as president, the mood in the room was buoyant, even triumphal. Justice Thomas, who for years labored at the margins of the court, now found himself with a new 6-to-3 conservative majority.At the Heritage tribute, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, called Thomas “a legal titan” and “the brightest possible north star.” Playing to the crowd of nearly 250 of his party’s elite, he dryly asked: “What could I, Mitch McConnell, possibly know about a notable leader who is parsimonious with his public statements? Who shuns the performative aspect of public life? And who is viewed as a boogeyman by the radical left? What would I know about that?” Among the crowd’s laughter, Thomas’s deep baritone was most audible.

‘He has charted a very radical approach to judging — it’s surprising, actually, how far the court has moved in his direction.’

Much has changed since Thomas joined the court in 1991, when the judicial orthodoxy of the right had little traction — including the belief that Roe v. Wade, which established a right to abortion, relied on a phantom “right to privacy” that isn’t explicit in the Constitution, or that there was “no device more destructive to the notion of equality” than affirmative action and racial quotas, as former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist once wrote in a dissenting opinion. During his first decade on the court, Thomas was often characterized by his critics as a cipher who almost never asked questions from the bench and was anunderwhelming understudy to Justice Antonin Scalia.

But on the right, Thomas has come to be regarded as an epochal justice. The man who succeeded Thurgood Marshall, becoming the second Black justice, may end up with a legacy just as consequential. Trump’s conservative appointments have tipped the balance of the Supreme Court toward Thomas and his originalist philosophy, which purports to interpret the Constitution as it would have been in the era in which it was written, transforming him into a shadow chief justice. When the consensus-seeking justice who formally holds that title, John G. Roberts Jr., sides with the court’s shrunken liberal wing, as is increasingly the case, it falls to Thomas, who has served the longest on the court, to assign who will write the majority opinion.

Three decades into his lifetime term, Thomas has not built his reputation by writing landmark majority rulings. Instead, he has been setting the stage for a shift in influence, writing solo opinions on issues like free speech, guns and abortion that are now poised to become majority opinions. “Take his jurisprudence on unborn life,” McConnell told the Heritage Foundation crowd. “Every time, without fail, Justice Thomas writes a separate, concise opinion to cut through the 50-year tangle of made-up tests and shifting standards and calmly reminds everybody that the whole house of cards lacks a constitutional foundation.”

“Justice Thomas does not break, or bend, or bow,” he said. “We need a federal judiciary full of men and women who are as bright as Justice Thomas, as expertly trained as Justice Thomas, but most importantly, most importantly, as committed to total unflinching judicial independence.” But in Thomas’s own remarks, he alluded to the shared purpose of those gathered. “It is a joy, an absolute joy, to be able to stand here and celebrate this moment,” he said, “not because of me but because of you all and what we’re trying to defend in this great country.”

If Thomas has been laying the groundwork for a conservative revolution, so has his wife, who once worked at Heritage herself. Groundswell, the group she founded, plotted what it called a “30-front war” on hot-button issues and seeded talking points throughout the right-wing media, including with Bannon’s own publication at the time, Breitbart News. “She’s an operator; she stays behind the scenes,” Bannon said in an interview. “Unlike a lot of people who just talk, she gets shit done.”

The Thomases have long emphasized how little distance there is between them. As Justice Thomas once wrote, his searing 1991 confirmation, buffeted by sexual-harassment allegations, brought them closer together: “The fiery trial through which we passed had the effect of melding us into one being — an amalgam, as we like to say.” At the Heritage Foundation celebration, he made it clear that bruised feelings about the “very, very dark time” of his confirmation have lingered, thanking “the senators who voted for me, all 52 of them.” He named supporters who had stuck by him, including Heritage’s president at the time, Kay Coles James, who he said was “among my prayer partners 30 years ago.” And he called his wife “the rock of my life.”

[The Thomases during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991.Credit...Doug Mills/AP Photo

While no one suggests that Thomas is writing his opinions to please his wife, he does speak of a shared Thomas philosophy. And his wife has advocated hard-line positions on many of the cultural and political issues that come before the justices, presenting an unprecedented conundrum for the Supreme Court. Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said that while there are no clear-cut rules outlining when justices need to recuse themselves, there are appearance concerns. “I’m sure there are justices’ spouses who have had strong opinions about politics,” Kerr said. “What’s unusual here is that Justice Thomas’s wife is an activist in politics. Historically, this is the first example of something like this that I can think of at the Supreme Court.”

Justice Thomas has flipped such criticisms on their head, saying that those who raise such issues were “bent on undermining” the court. And he defended “my bride” in a 2011 speech at an event sponsored by the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, as reported by Politico at the time. He said she worked “24/7 every day in defense of liberty,” adding, “We are equally yoked, and we love being with each other because we love the same things.” If the Thomases are at the height of their powers, the question, now, is how they will use that power in the years to come.

“He has charted a very radical approach to judging — it’s surprising, actually, how far the court has moved in his direction,” John Yoo,a law professor at U.C.-Berkeley and former Thomas clerk known for drafting some of the “torture memos” under President George W. Bush, said during a discussion at the Heritage event. (Yoo also advised former Vice President Mike Pence that he did not have the authority to reject electoral votes on Jan. 6.) “What do you think is going to happen in the next 10 years when he might have a workable majority of originalists? I think we’re going to see the fruition of the last 30 years in the next 10.”

The founders saw the courts as the guardians of the Constitution. In Federalist No. 78, which laid out the role of American courts, Alexander Hamilton wrote that they “were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature” and “keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority.” But at the same time, he wrote, the judiciary would be the weakest of the new government’s three branches. While the executive “holds the sword” and the legislature “commands the purse,” the judiciary “will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them.”

The Supreme Court must rely on public acceptance of its decisions. For decades, the desire to shield the court from charges of partisanship has given rise to institutionalist justices who uphold certain norms. They avoid opinions that get too far out ahead of public opinion or too blithely overturn precedents. Instead they adhere to the doctrine of stare decisis, for the most part treating prior decisions as settled law, and prefer to rule in ways that win broad support. They also steer clear of attending openly partisan events.

But as the court has taken a hard right turn with Trump’s appointments, it is also increasingly seen as composed of clashing ideologues, both liberal and conservative, rather than independent jurists. Even the court’s newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, is sensitive to the charge. “My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” she said during a speech last year, accompanying Mitch McConnell at a center named for him at the University of Louisville. And as the court signals an appetite to take up cases that may well overturn settled law, including Roe v. Wade, more Americans view it as increasingly politicized, with a steep decline over the past year to a 40 percent approval rating, a new low in Gallup polling.

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Justice Thomas administering the Constitutional Oath to the newest Supreme Court justice, Amy Coney Barrett, on Oct. 26, 2020, as her husband, Jesse Barrett, and President Trump looked on.

This dynamic has left Chief Justice John Roberts in an increasingly isolated position as the Supreme Court’s leading institutionalist. He refrains from attending partisan legal forums, like those at the Federalist Society. And his wife, Jane, stepped down as a litigator at her law firm after his appointment. Justice Thomas, however, “believes that human beings have free will to chart our own course,” said Helgi Walker, a former Thomas clerk and a partner at Gibson Dunn. “And I have no doubt that applies, perhaps especially so, to his wife.” That said, she added, he “takes direction from no one but the law.”

Thomas has also rejected the institutionalist approach when it comes to the doctrine of stare decisis. “When faced with a demonstrably erroneous precedent, my rule is simple,” he wrote in a 2019 opinion. “We should not follow it.” When he has cited Federalist No. 78, he has underscored Hamilton’s comment that judges “would require an uncommon portion of fortitude” to defend constitutional principles when they are unpopular. “The trait that Hamilton singles out — fortitude — is fundamental to my philosophy of life,” Thomas said in a 2001 speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

He has said the route to safeguarding the Supreme Court is simply through stricter adherence to the Constitution, and he warned at a recent speech at the University of Notre Dame that judges have been exceeding their authority.“There’s always a temptation, I think, to go beyond,” he said, adding that when judges “begin to venture into political, legislative or executive-branch lanes,” they “are asking for trouble.” He laid out the consequences: “I think the court was thought to be the least dangerous branch, and we may have become the most dangerous.”

But more than any other sitting justice, Thomas has stoked concerns of a hyperpartisan court. He has frequently appeared at highly political events hosted by advocates hoping to sway the court. He and his wife sometimes appear together at such events, and their appeal is apparent: He fulfills the hard right’s longing for a judge — and especially a Black judge — oblivious to the howls of the left, while she serves up the red meat the base wants to hear in her speeches. They often portray themselves as standing in the breach amid a crumbling society. “It’s very exciting,” Ginni Thomas said during a 2018 Council for National Policy meeting, “the fact that there’s a resistance on our side to their side.”

Her role became increasingly public in the Trump era, when she started emceeing an annual awards ceremony celebrating some of the best-known Trump allies. The awards are handed out in conjunction with United in Purpose, a group created by Bill Dallas, an evangelical political activist. Some recipients lead organizations that have business before the Supreme Court.

“When the Batphone rings and it’s Commissioner Ginni Gordon, otherwise known as Ginni Thomas, of course you have to show up,” said Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent turned popular pro-Trump radio host, after receiving one of Thomas’s Impact Awards in 2017. “I can’t say enough about Ginni,” Bongino told the audience at the event, which included the Fox News pundit Sean Hannity and Ed Meese, a Reagan administration attorney general. “I idolize her husband — he’s an icon to me,” Bongino said, but added that it was Ginni Thomas who connected him with right-wing leaders when he was making several unsuccessful congressional bids. “I think in the long run, when you look at the impact on the conservative movement and the principles we hold dear, I think her and her husband stand toe to toe.”

The federal judicial code of conduct, adopted in 1973, restricts judges from being “a speaker, a guest of honor or featured on the program” at fund-raising events. While the code doesn’t officially apply to the nine justices, Roberts said in a 2011 report that the justices “do in fact consult” it when “assessing their ethical obligations” — a statement reiterated by a spokeswoman for the court when we asked for comment. But according to documents and recordings of such events reviewed by The Times, Justice Thomas has at least twice headlined annual conferences at the Eagle Forum, a conservative grass-roots group opposed to abortion and modern feminism.

The first was in 1996 when he received an Eagle award. “He’s better than Rehnquist, he’s better than Scalia, he’s just wonderful,” Phyllis Schlafly, the founder of the Eagle Forum and one of the most influential conservative activists of her generation, told the audience, according to a cassette recording of the speech. She even recited a poem in his honor, which began: “No high court justice shows such promise/As our favorite, Clarence Thomas/You’re a jurist for the ages/Who sends liberals into rages.”

The couple returned to the Eagle Forum years later, in 2017; this time his wife received the Eagle award.It was the year after Schlafly died, and the organization, which is dependent on member and conference fees, was struggling. They were featured on the event program, and documents show that Ginni Thomas urged attendees to come hear her and “my amazing husband” in a personal letter that was part of the event’s promotional materials, adding, “God can use such an occasion for encouragement and insights!” (Full registration for the group’s annual conference cost $350 as of 2019.) Afterward, the organization tweeted a promotional video aimed at prospective members that included footage of the couple’s appearance.

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The Thomases at an Eagle Forum event in 2017.

In 2008, Justice Thomas delivered a keynote speech to donors to the Manhattan Institute and spoke at a secretive political retreat hosted by the billionaire Charles Koch. And he has had a long relationship with the Heritage Foundation, which employed his wife as a liaison to the George W. Bush White House. The group once invoked Justice Thomas’s speech at one of its Leadership for America fund-raisers in a direct appeal that it sent to Philip Morris seeking a $50,000 contribution.And in 2020, he objected to an ethics proposal circulated by the policymaking body of the federal court system that would have barred judges from membership in ideological legal groups like the Federalist Society, while he was speaking at the group’s convention.“I think they’re about to silencethe Federalist Society,” he said. “So I guess I can’t come back.”

Perhaps most important in understanding the couple’s far-reaching philosophy and project is their long relationship with the Council for National Policy,aspects of which have not been previously reported. Justice Thomas headlined an event for the group in 2002, and in 2008 he attended one of its meetings and was photographed with a gavel behind a lectern bearing the group’s name.

Justice Thomas at a Council for National Policy meeting in 2008.

Just over a decade later, Ginni Thomas would join the board of the council’s action arm. During a presentation in 2019, she warned that “conservatives and Republicans are tired of being the oppressed minority,” adding that they were being “falsely vilified, slandered and defamed as extremists and bigots and haters.” The left, she said, was “making it justifiable and normalized to fight us, to hurt us, to kill us even.” For her, this was a fight decades in the making.

Before introducing Justice Thomas at the Eagle Forum in 1996, Schlafly spoke about his mother-in-law. “Now, first I want to present the wife of our distinguished speaker, Ginni Thomas, and I want to tell you that she is, I’m very proud to say, a second-generation Eagle,” she said. “It was back in 1973 that a little group in Omaha, Nebraska, decided that they wouldrescind Nebraska’s ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, and it was just about half a dozen of them, but Ginni’s mother was in that group,” she added, calling it “a real turning point in our long battle” against the amendment, which the forum said would not “celebrate womanhood” but “erase it.”

“And then later on,” Schlafly continued, “after the feminists moved on to another goal, after we beat them on E.R.A., they took up the goal of comparable worth” — a reference to a largely unsuccessful movement in the 1980s to require equal pay for men and women, which Schlafly called “an effort to give us wage and price control.”

“Ginni was then with the Chamber of Commerce, and she was a great help in that, and now she is a major assistant for our good friend Dick Armey,” Schlafly said, referring to the Republican congressman from Texas who was then the House majority leader. “So, Ginni, stand up. We appreciate your being with us tonight.”

Virginia Thomas is the daughter of a president of a Nebraska architecture firm; the well-to-do family had two houses, one in Omaha and one in a nearby lakeside development called Ginger Cove that her father built. Ginni Lamp, as she was known then, was on a cheer squad for taller girls known as the Squires, brandishing a sword and a shield before football games. “She would march in front with that; she loved doing that,” said Sue Norby, a classmate. “My other friends were on the pompom squad because they were so short, but Ginni was on a different squad because she was tall, with other tall girls. She was the warrior woman.”

Ginni’s mother, Marjorie Lamp, was an outspoken Republican activist and became a towering figure in her daughter’s life. When Schlafly lost a bid to become president of the National Federation of Republican Women in 1967, Marjorie Lamp withdrew from the organization and called the voting “rigged.” She ran unsuccessfully for the Nebraska Legislature in 1972 and was a 1976 Reagan delegate, railing against Gerald Ford’s lack of leadership; “Reagan people are more hard-core,” she once said. She warned in a local paper thatif Jimmy Carter was elected, “we’d be heading toward socialism.” Democrats, she wrote in a 1983 letter to The Lincoln Journal Star, “almost brought our great country to its knees with their wild spending policies.”

Ginni Thomas has underscored her parents’ resolve in her own remarks. “Our family didn’t believe Nixon did anything wrong in Watergate until way after he admitted guilt,” she once said. “We believed any Republican until all the evidence was in, and then a little more.” She joined her high school’s Republican club in 1974, the year it started, and she and her mother attended the 1976 Republican National Convention together. It was her mother, she would later say, who “modeled conservative political feminism for her daughters.” She attended Creighton University in Omaha and earned her law degree there while working for a Nebraska congressman, Hal Daub, the first of a string of political jobs that took her far from Omaha.

Clarence Thomas’s journey to Washington was far different. He grew up in poverty, first in Pin Point, Ga., a tiny enclave, now part of Savannah, that was established by formerly enslaved Black people after the Civil War. He and his mother and brother then moved to Savannah itself — his father left the family when he was 2 — and he was largely raised by an exceedingly strict and temperamental grandfather.

For the future justice, conservatism was part of an ideological journey, much of it forged at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., where he was among a small group of Black men that did the difficult work of integrating the institution in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He and other students, including the prominent defense attorney Ted Wells, started a Black Student Union, and for a time Thomas protested the Vietnam War. A pivotal moment came after a demonstration in Cambridge, Mass., turned into “a full-scale riot,” he wrote in his memoir. “Horrified,” he rejected what he saw as a posture of anger and resentment and threw himself into his studies.

“Just about every evening, a few minutes after 11, there Clarence would be coming through the door from the library, every single evening,” recalled Edward P. Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer known for his work chronicling Black lives in Washington, who lived down the hall from Thomas as a sophomore. “There was a fierce determination I sensed from him, that he was going to get as much as he could and get as far, ultimately, as he could.”

Thomas got his law degree from Yale but stuck a 15-cent cigar sticker to the frame of his diploma after failing to get a big law job — such firms, he would write, attributed his academic pedigree to preferential treatment. Instead, he took the only job offer he received and went to work for Missouri’s Republican attorney general, John Danforth, and discovered the writings of the Black conservative Thomas Sowell, who assailed affirmative action as undercutting self-reliance; Thomas wrote that he “felt like a thirsty man gulping down a glass of cool water” to see his own beliefs articulated. A few years later, after he was appointed by Reagan to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he would complain that Black civil rights leaders “bitch, bitch, bitch, moan and moan, whine and whine.”

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President Ronald Reagan and Clarence Thomas in the Oval Office in 1986.

Thomas venerated his grandfather, Myers Anderson, who was as influential in his life as his wife’s mother was in hers, and titled his memoir “My Grandfather’s Son.” But the relationship was often fractious. Anderson, who donated to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, “wasn’t happy with his grandson’s choices,” Kevin Merida, now the executive editor of The Los Angeles Times, and Michael A. Fletcher wrote in a 2007 biography, “Supreme Discomfort.” The authors quoted Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Black former clerk for Justice Stephen Breyer whom Biden is now considering for the vacancy being created by Breyer’s retirement. She remembered sitting across from Thomas at lunch and thinking: “ ‘I don’t understand you. You sound like my parents. You sound like people I grew up with.’ But the lessons he tended to draw from the experiences of the segregated South seemed to be different than those of everybody I know.”

Clarence and Ginni met in 1986 at a conference on affirmative action, which they both opposed. After a stint at the civil rights office of the Education Department, he was running the E.E.O.C.; she was an attorney at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and mused that year to Good Housekeeping about someday running for Congress. She had extracted herself from a New Age-y self-help group called Lifespring, which she would denounce as a cult,but was still attending meetings held by a cult-deprogramming organization, and she took him along to one. He would describe her as a “gift from God,” and they married in 1987 at a Methodist church in Omaha; it was her first marriage, his second. “There’s no other way to politely say this, but the fact she married a Black man must’ve caused an uproar in that family, I can’t even imagine,” said Scott Bange, who dated Ginni in high school. In 1991, one of Ginni Thomas’s aunts told The Washington Post that the future justice “was so nice, we forgot he was Black,” adding, “He treated her so well, all of his other qualities made up for his being Black.”

Thomas had custody of a teenage son, Jamal, from his previous marriage to Kathy Ambush, his college girlfriend. For several years, the couple also raised his great-nephew, Mark Martin. Jamal Thomas, who did not return requests for comment, has spoken warmly, if rarely, of his father on Facebook, writing in a 2015 Father’s Day post: “Dad showed me that you can enjoy all sorts of music. His album collection is legendary. Country, R&B, Classical, Blues, Gospel, Jazz, and yes, even Culture Club. But I kind of compare that to his ability to relate and connect with anyone.”

Together, the Thomases considered themselves happy warriors. If he was estranged in some ways from his own upbringing, he embraced her world, and even became an ardent fan of the Nebraska Cornhuskers. “They have this happy-kindness, Nebraska thing going on,” one longtime friend of the couple’s said. “Ginni can be annoying and obnoxious with the happy talk, but when you’re with her one on one, she can be very kind. And with Clarence too, there’s a kindness too; it’s not just the manipulative happy talk. But there’s an underbelly of pain, and they turn it against other people.”

Clarence Thomas has always maintained that he had to be talked into accepting an appointment to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit when he was nominated as a federal judge in 1989. “I was minding my business,” he said, recounting the story in his remarks at the Heritage celebration. He was championed by Danforth, by then a senator, who said on the Senate floor: “I hope that people would not attack Clarence Thomas because of some stereotype of what they think a Black lawyer should believe.”

Thurgood Marshall announced his retirement from the Supreme Court in 1991, and President George H.W. Bush turned to Thomas.His confirmation hearings, presided over by Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, began with an attempt to determine his views on Roe v. Wade. Then, after an F.B.I. report was leaked, Anita Hill, a law professor who worked under Thomas at the Department of Education and the E.E.O.C., testified that he made numerous unwelcome advances, persisted in workplace conversations about his “sexual prowess,” described graphic pornography and said he found a pubic hair on a cola can and asked who had put it there. The future justice flatly rejected the allegations, calling the public inquiry “a high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas.”

Asked during the hearing whether he wanted to withdraw, he said, “I’d rather die.” He did not watch Hill’s testimony. “I was the one that tried to watch what was going on for as long as I could,” Ginni Thomas said in a 2020 documentary on Justice Thomas’s life and legal philosophy, “Created Equal,” made with the Thomases’ participation and funded by the far-right Charles Koch and Bradley Foundations. “It was all so wrong,” she continued. “It was so untrue.” When Biden informed Thomas in a phone call that he would vote against him, he tried to reassure him about the process. As she listened in, Ginni Thomas took a spoon from a kitchen drawer and pretended to gag herself, her husband later recounted. (Biden was also criticized for excluding testimony favorable to Hill and, much later, expressed regret.) Friends and associates said that the couple’s rage over the confirmation battle came to both define and unify them.

“He was in a state of shock,” said Armstrong Williams, a Black conservative pundit and longtime friend of Justice Thomas’s, who worked for him at the E.E.O.C. and served as an adviser during the hearings. “Everything that he ever worked so hard for, everything that his grandparents and his mother were proud of him for, was reduced to sexual innuendos. And no one knew anything about his career except for those innuendos. The first time people were hearing about him were these salacious allegations.” And so, Williams said, “he threw himself into the court and becoming the best justice he could be, and that still remains his refuge.”

Thomas’s early years on the court were distinguished by vigorous dissents and iconoclastic opinions. While some justices seek a narrow enough argument to garner five votes, he often staked out a lonelier, more oppositional role as a dissenter. In a 1997 Second Amendment case, he opened the door for future challenges to local gun laws. In a 2000 Nebraska abortion case, he assailed Roe v. Wade, which he called “grievously wrong.”

“He was tilling the ground,” said Leonard Leo,a former executive vice president of the Federalist Society, a Council for National Policy member and a close family friend of the couple’s. “In other words, the field’s not ready for things to blossom or flourish, but he’s doing what he can to prepare it. And that’s what he’s been doing.”

Leo, a Catholic like the justice, first met him when he was clerking on the District of Columbia Circuit. Thomas, then a judge on that court, became a mentor. The justice has spent time at Leo’s New England vacation home, is godfather to one of his children and has supported him through hardships, including the death of his 14-year-old daughter from spina bifida. The two men often discussed religion — Thomas once recommended he read “A History of Christianity” by Paul Johnson — and Leo says Justice Thomas saw parallels between how the church grew and how to build a body of conservative jurisprudence.

“It’s very similar to what happened with the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages,” he said of the justice’s approach, adding that the church and its institutions “did their work during that time, laying the foundations for future Catholic thinking and Catholic thought to sort of grow the church and preserve its traditions. It happened quietly; it did not happen in the grand chambers of the Vatican, but it happened.”

Thomas has described his judicial philosophy as one of natural law, in which liberty and equality are endowed by God. In the Thomas view, slavery and Jim Crow segregation were betrayals of the ideals enshrined in the nation’s founding documents — and so are progressive programs like affirmative action: He is equally opposed to government imposing obstacles or providing special protections. “Whether deemed inferior by the crudest bigots or considered a victim by the most educated elites, being dismissed as anything other than inherently equal is still, at bottom, a reduction of our human worth,” he said in a recent speech. In an essay called “Clarence X?” Stephen F. Smith, a Notre Dame professor and former Thomas clerk who is also Black, argues that his former boss “frequently (if not invariably) seeks to demonstrate that his conservative positions on matters of race are beneficial for Black Americans, as well as legally required.”

But those positions are often out of step with a majority of Black Americans, and in his autobiography, Thomas laments being “branded a traitor to my race” for “daring to reject the ideological orthodoxy that was prescribed for blacks by liberal whites.” Such rejection of orthodoxy was evident in a 1995 concurring opinion on desegregation, when he questioned why majority-Black schools were necessarily a problem: “It never ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior,” he wrote.

During these years, the couple were embraced on the right; they even hosted Rush Limbaugh’s third wedding at their Virginia home in 1994, with Justice Thomas officiating. Ginni Thomas was laboring in establishment Republican circles, but an ideological ferocity akin to her mother’s simmered. “I’ve been on a mission for a long time,” she told U.S. News & World Report in 1995. “I wouldn’t be in this town if I wasn’t on a mission.” By the time the Tea Party movement arose in opposition to the Obama presidency, her sense of mission was redoubled. “Over the last 30 years, I have worked and struggled inside this Beltway, waiting for you people to show up,” she told Tea Party activists in a 2010 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “I adore all of the new citizen patriots who are rising up across this country, and I am happy to help show you the ropes in the Washington area, ’cause we need help.”

Newly emboldened, that same year Ginni Thomas called Anita Hill, leaving a voice mail message on a Saturday morning. “I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something.I would love you to consider an apologysometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband,” she said. “So give it some thought. And certainly pray about this and hope that one day you will help us understand why you did what you did. OK, have a good day.” (Ginni Thomas characterized the call by saying she was “extending an olive branch.”)

When asked if Justice Thomas agreed with making the call, Armstrong Williams was quick to answer. “Of course not! But he had to deal with it,” he said. “It’s his wife, it’s his best friend, his most trusted confidante, and he loves her unconditionally. He doesn’t agree with everything, but they work it out privately.”

Hill was taken aback and made the call public: “She can’t ask for an apology without suggesting that I did something wrong, and that is offensive.” Hill had not been the only woman to level accusations against Clarence Thomas: At the time of his confirmation hearing, another former E.E.O.C. employee, Angela Wright, who was fired by him, detailed inappropriate sexual comments she said he made, including remarking on her bra size. A third former agency employee said, “If you were young, Black, female and reasonably attractive, you knew full well you were being inspected and auditioned as a female.” Neither was called to testify.

In 2010, shortly after news broke of Ginni Thomas’s call to Hill, Lillian McEwen, a former assistant U.S. attorney who dated Clarence Thomas for several years after his separation from his first wife, spoke out: “He was always actively watching the women he worked with to see if they could be potential partners,” she told The Washington Post in support of Hill’s account. “I have no hostility toward him,” she said. “It is just that he has manufactured a different reality over time.” In 2016, Moira Smith, the general counsel at an Alaska natural-gas company, said she was groped in 1999 by Justice Thomas while she was a 23-year-old Truman Foundation scholar, eight years after he joined the court.

The Thomases have rejected all such allegations. “I think, and I’ve said this only a few times publicly, one of the best things that could have happened to me was to have gone through the kind of confirmation I went through,” he told the conservative activists at the Eagle Forum in 1996. “I am the freest person on the court. I have no illusions, no desires for accolades, no desires for praise. I’m there to do a job. I will do it, and I will go home.”

A few weeks after Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, Ginni Thomas called Steve Bannon, then the chairman of Breitbart, and they had lunch at the Washington townhouse that was both Bannon’s residence and Breitbart’s headquarters. Romney’s loss presaged a battle for the Republican Party’s direction, and Thomas wanted to start a hard-right round table to serve as an alternative to an establishment meeting run on Wednesdays by Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader. “She had the idea, ‘I think we need something to counter Grover’s Wednesday meeting,’” recalled Bannon, who didn’t know her well at the time. “And I said, ‘That’s a brilliant idea.’”

The previous year, Thomas’s activism drew scrutiny of her and her husband, when Common Cause, an advocacy group, reviewed I.R.S. filings and criticized Justice Thomas for failing to disclose his wife’s income — nearly $700,000 over five years from the Heritage Foundation — as required by federal law. He subsequently amended 20 years of filings.

After her stint at Heritage, Ginni Thomas ran a Washington-based constitutional studies center for Michigan’s Hillsdale College,a conservative bastion that her husband has called “a shining city on a hill.” She also briefly ran her own advocacy group called Liberty Central, which campaigned against a planned Islamic community center and mosque in Lower Manhattan near ground zero; that group was funded in large measure by Harlan Crow, a friend of the Thomases’ and board member of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank whose work Justice Thomas has cited. Crow, a major Republican donor, gave $500,000 to Liberty Central. (Ginni Thomas’s 2010 pay of $120,511 was nearly 13 percent of the organization’s revenue that year, tax records show.) In the wake of the financial disclosures, more than 70 House Democrats asked the justice to recuse himself from deliberations about President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which Ginni Thomas lobbied against. He declined.

‘When you look at the impact on the conservative movement and the principles we hold dear, I think her and her husband stand toe to toe.’

Now her new group, Groundswell, took shape, coupling a theatrical cloak-and-dagger sensibility with an inability to keep secrets. Early participants drew from a number of hard-line interest groups, including Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch and Ken Blackwell of the Family Research Council, as well as Leonard Leo and Allen West, an outspoken former Florida congressman, and a number of right-wing journalists, including Mark Tapscott, then the executive editor of The Washington Examiner. A trove of internal emails was promptly leaked to Mother Jones magazine, highlighting the group’s use of tactical terms like “OpSec” (“operations security”) and its hatred of establishment Republican figures, in particular Karl Rove, whom they reviled as a moderating influence on the party.

Ginni Thomas oversaw the group’s plan for its “30-front war” as Groundswell became a platform for far-right leaders, donors and media figures — the people Bannon called the “honey badgers” of the movement — to exchange and amplify hard-line positions on immigration, abortion and gun control. It was, as Bannon put it, “all the stuff that became the foundational stuff of the Trump movement.”

Voting was an early focus. Among the early Groundswell participants was Russell J.Ramsland Jr., an influential Texas-based backer of evidence-free voting-fraud claims who would make a failed congressional run. So was James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, a right-wing group that has used deception and hidden cameras to try to buttress claims of voter fraud. Another participant was Catherine Englebrecht, a Texas activist who in 2009 founded True the Vote, a group that says it is battling “groups who subvert our elections to serve their own purposes” and has pushed for voting restrictions.

The activists were particularly inflamed after Obama signed an executive order on March 28, 2013, that created a commission to study elections. “OBAMA TAKES TOTAL CONTROL OF ELECTIONS,” one Groundswell member wrote in an email to the group. Englebrecht warned in response that the commission, which had no authority beyond writing a report and making recommendations, “has the capacity to wipe out fair elections.”

Bongino,another Groundswell member, wrote: “We need to reframe this. The narrative of the Left has already taken hold.” He added, “The words ‘Voter ID’ are already lost & equated with racism.” Thomas weighed in, listing key House staff members working on elections matters, and asked, “Who else are key working group members on ELECTION LAW, ELECTION REFORM and THE LEFT’S NARRATIVES, Groundswell???”

Three months after the email exchange, Justice Thomas provided a critical vote in the court’s 5-to-4 Shelby County v. Holder decision, which effectively stripped the Voting Rights Act of language that protected voters in places that had historically disenfranchised them on the basis of race. The act had required states and counties with a history of discriminatory practices, mostly in the South, to get federal preclearance of such measures. The case was led in part by one of Thomas’s own former clerks, William Consovoy, whose arguments echoed the justice’s views. In fact, Thomas had advanced the argument for Shelby four years earlier, when he raised concerns about the constitutionality of preclearance in a case from Texas, arguing that there was no longer “a systematic campaign to deny black citizens access to the ballot through intimidation and violence.” Four years later, in his concurring opinion in Shelby, he wrote, “Our Nation has changed.”

The ruling was cheered on the right, with The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board calling it “a triumph of racial progress.” Civil rights groups were dismayed. “The Shelby decision is one of the biggest affronts to our democracy in modern history,” said Janai Nelson, associate director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, arguing that it “unleashed a wave of voter suppression that is like what we witnessed in the Jim Crow era.” The decision freed states to enact restrictive laws, she added, that were “often based on mythical justifications” of supposed voter fraud and “by no coincidence disenfranchise minority voters at alarmingly disproportionate rates.”

That same year, Ginni Thomas turned her attention to internal battles on the right. In 2013, the Republican National Committee came out with areport after Romney’s loss that was known as the “autopsy” of the party’s failures. But its prescriptions — to broaden the base and appeal to minorities and gay people — were roundly rejected by Ginni Thomas and Bannon.“It’s a joke, and it has nothing to do with what happened,” Bannon said in an interview, recalling how he reacted to the report. “We have to have something to counter it.”

Groundswell, in a message circulated among its members after the autopsy, said that “Priebus is sending messages to the party,” referring to Reince Priebus, the R.N.C. chairman at the time. It continued: “If we were all gay illegal aliens, the party likes us. He is preparing the way for a change on social issues by giving a warning, ‘don’t go Old Testament.’”

The Thomases faced other headwinds. In addition to Groundswell, Ginni Thomas had started her own small firm, Liberty Consulting, but was often relegated to symbolic gestures, as when she wrote to the I.R.S. in 2014 protesting that the Obama administration was “attempting to force the disclosure of donors to conservative organizations,” amid criticism from the right that the agency was singling out conservative groups for scrutiny. Justice Thomas, meanwhile, wrote vigorous dissents from what seemed to be a narrowing conservative position; in 2015, he was the only justice to back Abercrombie & Fitch’s dress code, which prevented the hiring of a woman who wore a head scarf. (He said the store was not intentionally discriminating but simply refusing “to create an exception.”)

For their 28th wedding anniversary in May 2015, Justice Thomas bought his wife a charm bracelet. It had knots and ropes and a pixie, because, as she later recounted, he thinks of her as a pixieish troublemaker. But there was another charm too. “I said: ‘Wait, there’s a windmill here. What’s that mean?’” She was, after all, a former attorney for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a bastion of Big Oil, and has fumed aloud that kids are being turned into “robots for climate change.” But her husband had an explanation, she said: “He goes, ‘We both tilt at windmills.’”

The death of Antonin Scalia in February 2016 left a void on the court and for Justice Thomas. He delivered an emotional eulogy for his friend, a longtime ideological ally, even if Scalia had once referred to his own brand of originalism as “fainthearted.” “For this, I feel quite inadequate to the task,” Thomas said, adding that the two had “many buck-each-other-up visits, too many to count.” He recounted gleefully chiding Scalia for excoriating an opinion he came across: “Nino, you wrote it.” For years, Thomas was overshadowed by his more voluble colleague, but a reconsideration followed. “For the first year or two, Justice Thomas was seen as Justice Scalia’s lap dog by some, which was wildly denigrating,” said John Malcolm, vice president of the Heritage Foundation’s Institute for Constitutional Government. “Now, in books and notes that have been released, it seems that Justice Scalia was just as influenced by Justice Thomas as Justice Thomas was by Justice Scalia.”

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Justice Thomas meeting with his clerks at the Supreme Court in 2002.

Thomas has warm relationships with many of his court colleagues; he called Ruth Bader Ginsburg “simply a joy to work with” and was often seen helping her navigate the courtroom’s steps. But after Scalia’s death, it seemed as if he might become even more ideologically isolated. Mitch McConnell made it clear that Scalia’s successor would be left to the next president, even though nearly a year remained in the Obama administration. But with Hillary Clinton leading in the polls, it seemed that the court could soon see its “first liberal majority in nearly 50 years,” USA Today wrote in October 2016.

Ginni Thomas attended the Republican National Convention as a Virginia delegate, this time on behalf of Senator Ted Cruz. There, she backed a convention-floor effort to overturn the will of Republican primary voters by awarding Trump’s delegates to Cruz. After the plot failed,Thomas expressed her disapproval of the party’s nominee in Facebook posts later compiled by Trump aides. “Donald Trump will have to WIN my vote, along with many others in the Cruz movement,” she wrote. “We were devastated at how he treated Ted” (Trump had lobbed insults and insinuations at Cruz’s wife and father), adding that it “does not bode well for a President worthy to lead this nation.”

But like many others on the right who opposed Trump’s candidacy, she would become a believer.Thomas and her colleagues at the Council for National Policy had for years pushed for the appointment of “constitutionalist” judges in her husband’s image, with some even advocating the impeachment of judges who did not meet that definition. Few things were more important to the conservative base than reshaping the closely divided Supreme Court, and Trump did not disappoint. First he replaced Scalia with another conservative, Neil Gorsuch. Then, in July 2018, Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to succeed Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the court’s swing vote, who was retiring. The court’s balance of power was poised to shift. It was the moment both Thomases had awaited.

The Kavanaugh nomination, however, was soon imperiled amid unexpected sexual assault and harassment allegations reminiscent of Thomas’s own confirmation hearings.With the nomination in the balance, Ginni Thomas addressed the Council for National Policy’s membership, mentioning her husband no less than four times. Before introducing an off-the-record session at a council conference in October 2018, Jerry Johnson, a member of the executive committee, reminded attendees to turn their cellphones off and “do not record.” (A video of the event later surfaced.)

Ginni Thomas invoked the shooting of Representative Steve Scalise at a charity baseball practice and the Kavanaugh nomination fight to make a larger claim that conservatives were under attack. “May we all have guns and concealed carry to handle what’s coming,” she said. “And what they’ve done to Brett Kavanaugh,” she continued, “I’m feeling the pain, Clarence is feeling the pain of going through false charges against a good man, and what they’re doing is unbelievable. I thought it couldn’t get worse than Clarence’s, but it did.”

Her anger building, she told the audience that there were signs all around them of existential threats.“You see rainbow flags throughout businesses, sending powerful, subtle messages to all the customers that ‘We’re the kind, decent, compassionate, tolerant people, until the Republican evil conservatives show up, and those are all automatically hateful people,’” she said. “I see things in my veterinarian: ‘Spread Kindness,’ ‘Build Community,’ ‘Hate Is Not Welcome Here,’” she continued. “Look how defensive we are, because they have these cultural foundations.” Returning to the battle at hand, the Kavanaugh fight, she said, “Even if he gets in — I believe he’ll get in, I’m hoping he gets in, but they’re not going to leave him alone.” It was clear it was personal: “They’re trying to impeach him. They’re coming for my husband. They’re coming for President Trump!”

The invitation went out in the weeks following Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Would Justice Thomas care to join the president for what one former Trump aide described as a “working lunch”? Kavanaugh’s elevation had created an opening on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, considered a prime steppingstone to the Supreme Court. The top contender for the post, Neomi Rao, then serving as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, had been a Thomas clerk.

Trump had long been intrigued by Justice Thomas. During the transition, in a meeting to discuss the court with Leonard Leo, he expressed an interest in learning more about the justice. “At one point during the conversation, he said to me, ‘You know, when I was out on the campaign trail, you know, when I mentioned Clarence Thomas, his name, sometimes the guy would get more applause than I did,’” Leo recalled. “ ‘What was that all about?’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, he’s a hero to a lot of people.’”

A courting of Thomas followed, prompted as well by rumors that he might retire. His roster of former clerks became a go-to list for Trump judicial picks. (“You did appoint a lot of my kids,” the justice would later thank McGahn, Trump’s first White House counsel, in his Heritage speech.) Early on, there was also a photo-op with Thomas and his clerks, who went to the White House. And later, there was an invitation for the justice, along with his wife, to join the president and first lady for dinner.

The lunch following the Kavanaugh battle, however, was supposed to be a private affair between the justice and the president. But when Thomas arrived, Trump aides said, they were surprised to see that he had brought an uninvited guest — his wife. Trump world was learning, as others have, that the two are a package deal.

The accounts of the Thomases’ meetings and conversations with the White House are based on interviews with nine former Trump aides and advisers, most of whom requested anonymity in order to speak frankly about how the courtship of Thomas created an opening for his wife. (One said he didn’t want “the Ginni prayer warriors coming after me.”) Several said they were never clear as to whether she was there as an activist or a paid consultant. They recounted how she aggressively pushed far-right candidates for various administration jobs and positioned herself as a voice of Trump’s grass-roots base. “Here’s what the peeps think,” she would say, according to one of the aides. “We have to listen to the peeps.”

Shortly after the lunch meeting with her husband, she got a meeting of her own with the president, at her request, arriving in the Roosevelt Room on Jan. 25, 2019, with a delegation that included members of Groundswell in tow. “It was the craziest meeting I’ve ever been to,” said a Trump aide who attended. “She started by leading the prayer.” When others began speaking, the aide remembers talk of “the transsexual agenda” and parents “chopping off their children’s breasts.” He said the president “tried to rein it in — it was hard to hear though,” because throughout the meeting attendees were audibly praying.

It was an event with no precedent, and some of the details of what transpired soon leaked: the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice lobbying a president when several cases involving transgender rights were making their way through the federal courts. (The following year, Justice Thomas would join a dissent that asserted that the Civil Rights Act did not cover people on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.) The meeting grew chaotic. Ginni Thomas and other attendees complained to the president that their favored hard-line job candidates were being blocked and that his own personnel office should be purged, depicting some of his aides as closet liberals and Never Trumpers.

Before the meeting, Trump’s aides assembled the research document outlining concerns with Ginni Thomas and some of her preferred job candidates, the contents of which they shared with the president.

The document, obtained by The Times, detailed howCrystal Clanton, a friend of Ginni Thomas’s whose name had been advanced, had been forced out from Turning Point USA, a conservative student group on whose advisory board Ginni Thomas once served, after The New Yorker reported that she wrote in a text: “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like [expletive] them all. … I hate blacks. End of story.” (Ginni Thomas subsequently hired Clanton, and Justice Thomas, who has called the allegations against Clanton unfounded, helped her get a federal clerkship and wrote in a letter of support that he would consider her for a Supreme Court clerkship.) Other names advanced by Ginni Thomas included Bongino,whom she recommended for a counterterrorism position, and David A. Clarke,a Black former Milwaukee County sheriff whose oversight of a local jail was the subject of multiple investigations and lawsuits, whom she supported for a top post at the Department of Homeland Security.

The report reminded the president that Ginni Thomas had once called him “a nonconservative candidate” whose populism was “untethered and dangerous” and whose tactics did “not bode well for a President worthy to lead this nation.”It even included a photo of her at the 2016 Republican National Convention, where she supported the effort to strip Trump of his delegates, holding her delegate badge, which was decorated with a yellow ribbon emblazoned with the words “trouble maker.”

“In the White House, she was out of bounds many times,” one of Trump’s senior aides said. “It was always: ‘We need more MAGA people in government. We’re trying to get these résumés through, and we’re being blocked.’ I appreciated her energy,but a lot of these people couldn’t pass background checks.”Many of the people she pushed, another former Trump aide said, “had legitimate background issues, security-clearance issues or had done a lot of business overseas.”

The president continued to allow Ginni Thomas access, telling aides that if she were in the White House visiting with other officials, she was welcome to drop by to see him. And she did on several occasions, while also passing notes on her priorities through intermediaries, multiple aides said. With her husband, she also attended a state dinner for the Australian prime minister, and she went to the White House when her husband administered the Constitutional Oath to Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s third appointment to the Supreme Court, as guests including Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host and former Thomas clerk, celebrated.

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The Thomases at the White House in 2019 for a state dinner honoring Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia.

With her place in the presidential orbit secure, Thomas became even more outspoken. In posts on Facebook, she shared a George Soros conspiracy-theory meme and criticized the teenage survivors of the school massacre in Parkland, Fla., for supporting gun control. She complained when a town near her Virginia home put up a banner in support of Black Lives Matter, saying the group was filled with extremists “seeking to foment a cultural revolution,” and traded barbs on her public Facebook page. “Hey, are you aware you married a black man?” one commenter wrote, to which she replied: “news tip, whitey, all blacks don’t think alike!”

By 2019, her influence in Republican circles was growing. She took on a leadership role at the Council for National Policy, joining the board of C.N.P. Action, which had become a key cog in the Trump messaging machine. (The council declined to comment.) The board holds breakout sessions on “pressing issues,” then publishes “action steps” for members. That year, she and her friend Cleta Mitchell, a council member and Republican elections lawyer, conducted a joint session at which Mitchell discussed harnessing charitable dollars for political purposesand Thomas spoke on the culture war. Thomas told her listeners that societal forces were arrayed against them, while flashing a slide depicting the left as black snakes coiled around cultural institutions. “Our house is on fire,” she declared, “and we are stomping ants in the driveway.”

During Trump’s presidency, documents obtained by The Times show, the council and its affiliates routinely took on issues that were likely to go before the Supreme Court.Ginni Thomas personally co-moderated a panel called “The Pro-Life Movement on Offense” that laid out strategies to energize “low turnout pro-life voters” and “persuadable Democrats and Hispanics” by talking to them “about late-term abortion, taxpayer funding of abortion, and the Supreme Court,” one of the slides in the presentation read.Amid the pandemic and legal challenges to lockdown restrictions, the organization urged members to “pray for our churches to rise up.” The scope of potential conflicts has little precedent beyond narrower episodes on lower federal courts, as when the wife of Judge Stephen Reinhardt was an A.C.L.U. executive but he did not always recuse himself from cases in which the A.C.L.U. had an interest. But unlike the Supreme Court, litigants there had the right to appeal.

As the 2020 election neared, C.N.P. Action meetings and documents targeted Democratic strategies that make it easier to vote, including the practice of civic groups’ gathering ballot applications, derided by many on the right as “ballot harvesting.” Months later, the Supreme Court upheld an Arizona ban on the practice, with Thomas in the 6-to-3 majority. C.N.P. Action also pressed for mandatory voter-identification laws and even floated the idea of using former Navy SEALs to monitor polls.

Thomas was also busy with displays of devotion: She boasted in an online biography that she “set agendas with President Trump’s White House for quarterly conservative leader briefings” and started a group of Trump supporters called the Northern Virginia Deplorables. But it was after Trump’s November loss that she wouldprove her loyalty beyond doubt,when she and her group urged on efforts to overturn the election.

In the weeks after Trump’s loss, court challenges began to pile up from his team, his allies and even Republican lawmakers. They echoed the call put out by C.N.P. Action to challenge swing-state outcomes, with one Republican congressman, Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, filing a lawsuit against his own state to try to stop the certification of its votes. On Dec. 8, the Supreme Court refused a request to hear that case before the certification date in a one-sentence statement. It remains unknown whether the justices were unanimous in their decision.

By then, the network around the Thomases was lighting up. On Dec. 10, a former Thomas clerk and close friend of the couple’s, John C. Eastman, went on “War Room,” a podcast and radio show hosted by Bannon. Eastman argued that the country was already at the point of a constitutional crisis — and he urged the Supreme Court to intervene. Bannon eagerly agreed.Behind the scenes, Eastman was advising Trump and his campaign on a new proposal to change the outcome of the election: Vice President Mike Pence, he asserted, could refuse to accept swing-state votes and send them back to the state legislatures when he presided over the certification of the election in a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6.

As the Trump court challenges to the election multiplied, C.N.P. Action took up the charge once more, training its sights on the Jan. 6 certification. In December, it circulated a newsletter that included a report titled “Five States and the Election Irregularities and Issues,” targeting five swing states where Trump and his allies were already pressing litigation. But time was running out for the courts to “declare the elections null and void,” the report warned. The newsletter advised: “There is historical, legal precedent for Congress to count a slate of electors different from that certified by the Governor of the state.”One co-author of the “Five States” report was Cleta Mitchell, who by that time was among the lawyers advising Trump.

Soon a number of longtime friends and associates of the Thomases were involved in efforts to overturn the election results, or helping plan the Jan. 6 rallies. Besides Eastman and Bannon, there was Mitchell, who took part in Trump’s Jan. 2 call in which he exhorted Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” the votes he needed to claim a victory. Turning Point USA, on whose advisory board Ginni Thomas had served, was a sponsor of the Jan. 6 event and provided buses for attendees. (An early rumor suggesting that she paid for the buses was debunked.)

Other sponsors included two more groups with which Ginni Thomas had long ties. One was the Tea Party Patriots, headed by Jenny Beth Martin, a fellow Council for National Policy activist. The other was Women for America First, which held the permit for the rally at the Ellipse and was run by Amy Kremer. The two women, and Ginni Thomas, had all been early Tea Party activists, though Kremer and Martin had been engaged for years in a bitter legal dispute. “That’s why it was interesting when I learned that they’d been working together on the January 6 coordination,” Dustin Stockton said, adding thathe had been told by another organizer, Caroline Wren, on Jan. 5 that it was Ginni Thomas who worked to bring unity ahead of the rally. (Asked about Thomas’s mediating role, Kremer’s daughter Kylie Jane Kremer, the executive director of Women for America First, did not answer that question, instead painting Stockton as someone who makes “inaccurate and attention-seeking statements.” Martin similarly avoided the question, issuing a statement that condemned the violence at the Capitol. Wren disputed Stockton’s account but declined to elaborate.)

The spectacle of a Supreme Court justice’s spouse taking to Facebook to champion the attempt of a defeated president to stay in power, as Ginni Thomas did on the morning of Jan. 6, crossed a line for several people in the Thomases’ circle who talked to The Times. “That’s what she does — it has nothing to do with him,” said Armstrong Williams, Justice Thomas’s longtime friend. “Should she use better judgment? Yes. You can quote me on that.”

Ginni Thomas posted a disclaimer after the protests devolved into an insurrection — “[Note: written before violence in US Capitol]” — but she had also lamented Trump’s loss in a message to “Thomas Clerk World,” a private email group used by Ginni Thomas and former clerks and their spouses that is typically reserved for more anodyne pleasantries. Her use of the forum prompted a bitter debate among the former clerks that soon leaked. It started on Jan. 17, when Smith, the Notre Dame professor, shared an article from Christianity Today denouncing the Jan. 6 violence. Among those who weighed in was Eastman, who was a speaker at the rally. “Rest assured that those of us involved in this are working diligently to ascertain the truth,” he wrote.

Eastman then used the Thomas email group to invite “those of you interested in more information” to get in touch, prompting Smith to reply that he hoped everyone agreed “that the search for truth doesn’t in any way justify insurrection, trying to kidnap and assassinate elected officials, attacking police officers, or making common cause with racists and anti-Semites” because “such things are flatly contrary to authentic Christian faith.” (Details of Eastman’s role continue to emerge, including a message he sent to Pence’s top lawyer during the Capitol attack blaming the vice president for refusing to overturn the election; he repeatedly cited the Fifth Amendment in refusing to answer questions from the Jan. 6 committee.)

By Jan. 18, Ginni Thomas felt compelled to issue a semi-apology on the forum, which also leaked. “I have likely imposed on you my lifetime passions,” she wrote. “My passions and beliefs are likely shared with the bulk of you, but certainly not all. And sometimes the smallest matters can divide loved ones for too long. Let’s pledge to not let politics divide THIS family, and learn to speak more gently and knowingly across the divide,” adding, “I am certainly on the humble side of awareness here. ”

In the year that has passed, Ginni Thomas has deleted one of her two Facebook accounts and has taken a lower profile. But she remains active. Last year, she invited Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to join a Groundswell call, describing her group as a “cone-of-silence coalition” in an email to his staff that was obtained by American Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group. She invoked her husband, telling DeSantis’s aides that the justice had been in contact with the governor “on various things of late.” (DeSantis, who did not respond to requests for comment, was in the midst of a number of high-profile federal court battles at the time.)

The battle over the election did not land before the court as Bush v. Gore did in 2000. But in February 2021, as Trump and his associates continued pressing for state lawmakers to audit — and reverse — the 2020 election,Justice Thomas sharply dissented when a 6-to-3 majority rejected the case brought by Pennsylvania Republicans that the court had refused to take up in December. Echoing the arguments advanced by C.N.P. Action, he wrote that legislatures have the constitutional authority to determine how federal elections are held, yet in 2020, “nonlegislative officials in various States took it upon themselves to set the rules instead.”

He called the refusal by his colleagues to hear the case “inexplicable,” arguing that “allegations of systemic maladministration, voter suppression, or fraud” go “to the heart of public confidence in election results. That is obviously problematic for allegations backed by substantial evidence. But the same is true where allegations are incorrect.” In other words, election disputes and claims of fraud carried as much weight — and should lead to court hearings, just as Trump and his supporters had wished — whether they were true or not. “By doing nothing,” Thomas continued, “we invite further confusion and erosion of voter confidence.” He did concede in a footnote that the 2020 presidential election had been “free from strong evidence of systemic fraud.”

Though the battle for the presidency is over, the Thomases are winning in the war for the courts — and, some would argue, the country. Some of the most important issues Ginni Thomas has worked for are now barreling toward a Supreme Court redefined by Trump, where her husband is ascendant. Landmark cases loom.

One major test will be elections, particularly after Biden’s Justice Department sued Georgia over a new voting law that the department said discriminates against people of color. The Supreme Court has already agreed to review race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, setting the stage for a dramatic reversal on affirmative action, as Justice Thomas has long sought. And Roe v. Wade appears likely to be hollowed out, if not overturned:The court, with Thomas as the lone dissenter, recently allowed abortion providers the right to challenge a Texas anti-abortion law, though a conservative majority, joined by Thomas, declined to block the law’s enforcement in the meantime. And oral arguments in another recent case suggest that there may be enough votes to uphold a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks. Justice Thomas seemingly used his questions to press for a full reversal of Roe v. Wade, demanding: “If I were to ask you what constitutional right protects the right to abortion, is it privacy? Is it autonomy? What would it be?”

Such performances have made him a hero to many on the right. Brigitte Gabriel, a Council for National Policy stalwart who once said that “every practicing Muslim is a radical Muslim”— and whose activism Ginni Thomas once praised in a glowing Daily Caller column — called Justice Thomas “the real chief justice” during December oral arguments and tweeted a doctored photo in which every justice had his face with the caption: “This would be a Supreme Court with Courage.”

“I love calling it the Thomas court,” said Helgi Walker, the former Thomas clerk. “He didn’t change. That’s why it’s been wonderful to watch this arc. The influence he exerts comes from the power of his ideas,” she continued. “That’s what his legacy is built on.”

In September, Justice Thomas stood before the audience at the University of Notre Dame. Asked what he thought was the biggest misconception the public has about the Supreme Court, he said: “I think that they think that we make policy. I think the media makes it sounds as though you are just always going right to your personal preference. So if they think you’re anti-abortion or something personally, they think that that’s the way you always will come out. They think you’re for this or for that. They think you become like a politician. And I think that’s a problem.”

He told his audience that when he talked to his clerks about the real meaning of their work, “why we do what we do,” he insisted that “it’s not about us. It’s not about winning and losing at the court. It is about the entire country and the idea of this country.”

Last summer, the Thomases took a road trip in their 40-foot Prevost bus, repeating visits to R.V. parks and Walmart parking lots that they have made to 42 states over more than two decades. The couple find such journeys restorative, a way to travel semi-anonymously in places where they feel more politically at home. (“It’s the best of America,” Ginni Thomas once said.) Justice Thomas lamented at Notre Dame that “a notable pessimism about the state of our country” had taken hold, with some Americans believing that “America is a racist and irredeemable nation” and seeking to “cancel our founders.”

There are still people who have faith in the country and what it stands for, but it was on the road and beyond the East Coast elites that the couple found those Americans, at least in Justice Thomas’s telling. “My bride and I, Virginia, we were R.V.ing in the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. And we noticed something there,” he said. “The large number of flags of people who still believe in the ideal of this country, in an environment when there’s so much criticism, antagonism, and actually people with disdain for the very same. It was very interesting to be with regular people for three weeks.” Here, far from Washington, far from the news media, far from “the interest groups,” far from anyone who recognized him at all, was where he — where they — were at home.

“There are many more of us, I think,” he told his listeners, “who feel that America is not so broken as it is adrift at sea.”

FROM CLERKS:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/clarence-thomas-trump/593596/

no lnx

The Clarence Thomas Effect

The notoriously quiet Supreme Court justice has had a far-reaching influence on the personnel of the Trump administration, which may be his most lasting legacy.

By Emma Green

JULY 10, 2019

Clarence Thomas is the longest-serving justice currently sitting on the Supreme Court. For much of his tenure, court watchers and critics have dismissed his jurisprudence as largely irrelevant, demoting him to the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s judicial sidekick. In the public imagination, he is most remembered for his worst moment. Last fall’s confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh resurrected the debate over Anita Hill, the woman who famously accused Thomas of sexual harassment during his 1991 confirmation hearings.

And yet, during his time on the Court, Thomas has written prolifically and introduced ideas that have gradually gained influence among other justices. Of all the Supreme Court justices, Thomas takes an approach to the law that is arguably the purest embodiment of the conservative judicial philosophies known astextualism, which holds that the plain meaning of the text of a law is all that matters in judicial interpretation, and originalism, which holds that the Constitution should be interpreted only as its authors intended.

The most significant part of Thomas’s legacy, however, may take shape long after he has stopped writing opinions.Personnel is policy. Thomas’s vast network, more than that of any other justice, has defined President Donald Trump’s administration and the federal judiciary Trump has built. Through his clerks and mentees, the notoriously silent justice may end up with an outsize voice in the legal system for years to come.

Numbers are the first evidence of the sizable Thomas effect. He has had more of his former clerks nominated to federal judgeships under Trump than any other justice, past or present: 10, compared with Anthony Kennedy’s seven and Scalia’s five. Roughly one-fifth of Thomas’s former clerks either are in the Trump administration or have been nominated to the federal bench by the president. The clerks whom Thomas trained, has mentored, and actively stays in touch with are taking up lifetime appointments, and on the whole, they are quite young: Allison Jones Rushing, who now sits on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, is just in her mid-30s.

[Read: Conservative women are leading the defense of Kavanaugh]

These relatively small numbers offer insight into the broad influence Thomas has had on the Trump-era legal establishment. Even clerks who aren’t in formal positions of public service have gained prominence under Trump: Laura Ingraham, the conservative commentator who clerked for Thomas during his early years on the bench, has hosted one of the top-rated programs on Fox News since October 2017 and is an outspoken supporter of the president. Another former clerk, Carrie Severino, the chief counsel and policy director of the Judicial Crisis Network, has been one of the most vocal advocates for Trump’s judicial nominees, including Kavanaugh.

The Thomas effect started taking shape early on in the Trump administration. As Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern noted as early as mid-2017, when the pattern was still nascent, “Everywhere you turn in Trumpland, you’ll find a slew of Thomas’ former clerks in high places.” In part, this effect may have been driven by the people making the hires. Gregory Katsas, who clerked for Thomas on the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court, joined the Trump administration right after the inauguration as a deputy assistant to the president and deputy counsel. Later, when Katsas was nominated to his own judgeship on the D.C. Circuit Court, he told U.S. senators that he had been involved in “interviewing and recommending candidates for various executive and judicial appointments.”

At least three other people who have worked in Trump’s White House counsel’s office are also former Thomas clerks: John Eisenberg, David Morrell, and Kate Todd. When the Trump administration released its list of potential Supreme Court nominees in November 2017, four former Thomas clerks were included: Thomas Lee, Margaret Ryan, David Stras, and Allison Eid.

Any new administration has a huge number of positions to fill across the executive branch. When Trump took office, he also faced significant judicial vacancies—142 empty seats, according to data from the American Bar Association. By comparison, when Barack Obama took office in 2008, there were only 53 federal judicial vacancies. These jobs are filled like any other: through personal networks and recommendations. Under Trump, the most influential source of potential candidates for these vacancies has been the Federalist Society,a professional network for conservative and libertarian lawyers. “It happens that a lot of the people in the White House counsel’s office are Federalist Society members, and as a result of having been Federalist Society members, they have their own set of contacts,” said John Malcolm, who works on judicial issues at the Heritage Foundation and is chairman of the Federalist Society’s criminal-law practice group. The organization’s executive vice president, Leonard Leo, has had an influential role in advising the Trump administration on possible nominees.

Although stories about the Federalist Society often focus on the intellectual role and legacy of the late Justice Scalia, who was an early faculty adviser to the group at the University of Chicago, Thomas is a central figure in the Federalist Society universe.William Eskridge, a law professor at Yale known for his work on LGBTQ legal issues, told me the Federalist Society is “a social circle. It’s a professional circle. It’s a circle that gives [the justices] law clerks. It’s a circle that gives them positive publicity.” And, he added, “Thomas is at the center of that.”

[Read: The Supreme Court hands a victory to the pro-life movement]

Scalia famously described himself as a “fainthearted originalist,” although he later repudiated that label. By contrast, Thomas’s originalism has been “unflinching,” as one conservative law professor wrote in a recent column for The New York Times.Scalia himself told a Thomas biographer that Thomas does not believe in the legal principle of generally following settled precedent. “Among Federalist Society members, he probably would be their No. 1 favorite justice of anyone on the Court,” Severino told me. “As wonderful as Justice Scalia is, Thomas is someone who has inspired a lot of young lawyers.”

The Thomas effect may be due to more than just the power of networks, however. Thomas has been on the Supreme Court bench since 1991, and his clerks are entering their professional peaks during a Republican administration. Several former clerks told me Thomas goes out of his way to stay in touch with his clerks and cultivate their careers; they have monthly lunches and regularly get together for intergenerational reunions. Each year, Thomas takes his clerks on a field trip to the site of the deadliest battle in the Civil War. “I want them to go to Gettysburgand to think about … the price that was paid for this country to exist,” he said in an interview with the appeals-court judge Diane Sykes at a Federalist Society event in 2013. “I love my law clerks,” Thomas added. “These kids are my family.”

Thomas’s clerks tend to fit a particular profile. They come from all over the country, including law schools outside the Ivy League, which makes them particularly suitable candidates for federal judgeships. “Judges have to have ties to the local area typically,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a former Thomas clerk and professor of law at the University of Virginia. “The Thomas clerks, because they come from more regions in the country, and certainly go to law schools all over the country, are more apt to go outside of the I-95 corridor.” After their clerkships, these lawyers often go into public service, taking up positions in U.S. attorneys’ offices or as professors, which means they don’t mind the pay cut that often comes with a move to the federal bench. (A federal district-court judge can expect to make slightly more than $200,000 a year; by comparison, partners at top-tier law firms can earn multimillion-dollar salaries.)And, like Thomas, they tend to be very conservative, committed originalists and textualists. As Eskridge put it, they are true believers.

The Trump administration’s most marked achievement in terms of shifting the federal judiciary has come through Circuit Courts of Appeals.Trump has far outpaced his recent predecessors, with 42 confirmed appointments to these courts over the past two and a half years; by comparison, Obama had gotten less than half as many appeals-court judges confirmed by this point in his first term. These seats are where Thomas clerks will have the most influence—and are outpacing the former clerks for conservative justices. Former Thomas clerks have now been confirmed to the Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits, along with two judges confirmed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals—Katsas and Neomi Rao, the former head of Trump’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The D.C. Circuit is particularly influential, because it is responsible for reviewing the actions of federal agencies; in recent years, it has issued important decisions on topics ranging from Obamacare to gun rights.

Thomas is famously silent during oral arguments. But as a writer, he has been prolific:He wrote the most concurrences, dissents, and opinions of any justice during each of the past five terms, according to data from SCOTUSblog. Over time, his work has significantly shifted the window of acceptable legal opinions on various issues, said John Yoo, a former Thomas clerk and law professor at UC Berkeley who is best known for his work on the George W. Bush administration’s torture memos. “When I clerked for him, he published some opinions I thought were really radical, and the legal profession would never be interested,” Yoo told me. “Now those opinions are heavily debated in law schools and are very influential.” He specifically mentioned Thomas’s concurrence in a 1995 case on affirmative action, Adarand v. Peña, and another concurrence in a case on the Constitution’s commerce clause, United States v. Lopez.

On the Court, Thomas’s purist approach may cost him the ability to convince his fellow justices on controversial cases. “He’s less of a traditional politician,” Yoo told me. “I think he’s more interested in saying, ‘This is the correct view of the Constitution,’ rather than assembling five votes. And that’s a trade-off.” Thomas’s views often come out in dissents or concurrences, offered solo or joined by just one or two other justices.“He has not, until recently, written any of the blockbuster majority opinions,” Yoo said, “because to do that, you have to horse-trade to get votes.” (Notable majority opinions by Thomas include a 2001 case concerning the rights of a religious student group, Good News Club v. Milford Central School, and a 2018 First Amendment case involving a crisis-pregnancy center, NIFLA v. Becerra.)

This is all the more reason the rise of Thomas’s former clerks is important. His approach to controversial legal questions—generally opposing affirmative action, favoring limited power for federal agencies, defending gun rights, and more—has been developed and popularized over his decades on the bench, and will be carried forward by a new generation of judges. He openly defies what he sees as bad precedent—just last month, Thomas wrote in a concurrence that “the Constitution itself is silent on abortion.”

[Adam Cohen: Clarence Thomas knows nothing of my work]

Other conservative justices’ clerks have had a significant footprint in the Trump administration. Two of former Justice Anthony Kennedy’s clerks, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, now sit on the Supreme Court. Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, and his solicitor general, Noel Francisco, both clerked for Scalia, as did the White House counselor Emmet Flood and the recently confirmed Seventh Circuit judge, Amy Coney Barrett, who is widely thought to be on Trump’s short list for any potential future Supreme Court slots.

Thomas’s influence, however, is particularly broad, reaching from the Department of Justice to the White House to the federal bench. Thomas is now 71 years old. If he follows the path of his colleagues Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who are both in their 80s, he could easily have a decade or more to go on the Supreme Court. His greatest legacy, however, may be in the intellectual seeds he has planted in the generation of lawyers who came up studying his work.

Olivia Paschal contributed reporting to this article.

Emma Green is a former staff writer at The Atlantic.

https://abovethelaw.com/2017/08/the-clarence-thomas-clerk-mafia-legal-brain-trust-of-the-trump-administration/

no lnx

you can learn a lot about a judge based on the law clerks that she hires. And you can also learn a lot about a judge from her clerks’ post-clerkship careers.

What can we say about Justice Clarence Thomas based on the career trajectories of his former law clerks? We can safely call him the legal godfather of the Trump administration.

Yes, President Donald Trump’s first Supreme Court appointee, Justice Neil Gorsuch, is a former law clerk to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. But if you look at the Trump administration as a whole, you’ll see a proliferation of CT clerks in positions of great power and prominence. Many former SCOTUS clerks hold positions in Trumpworld, but the Thomas clerks predominate.

If you don’t believe me (perhaps because you don’t share my admitted textualist and originalist leanings), take it from a pair of prominent progressive legal commentators,Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern. In The Clarence Thomas Takeover, a comprehensive and well-argued Slate piece (that’s being gleefully circulated among Thomas clerks right now), Lithwick and Stern make a strong case for the dominance of the CT clerk mafia:

Everywhere you turn in Trumpland, you’ll find a slew of Thomas’ former clerks in high places. They are serving in the White House counsel’s office (Greg Katsas, John Eisenberg, David Morrell); awaiting appointment to the federal judiciary (Allison H. Eid, David Stras); leading the departments of the Treasury (Heath P. Tarbert, Sigal Mandelker) and Transportation (Steven G. Bradbury); defending the travel ban in court (Jeffrey Wall); and heading the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (Neomi Rao). Thomas clerks are also working with dark money groups to execute Trump’s agenda (Carrie Severino) and boosting him in the far-right media (Laura Ingraham).

To be sure, clerks to other conservative justices also occupy top posts in the Trump administration. On this list of 26 White house Counsel staffers, for example, there are seven former SCOTUS clerks (three Thomas clerks, two Scalia clerks, and two Alito clerks).

But numbers don’t tell the whole story. There’s also the issue of sensibility and attitude, as explained by Professor Steve Vladeck:

Stephen Vladeck, who teaches law at the University of Texas and serves as a Supreme Court analyst for CNN, says it’s instructive to compare the career paths of clerks who worked for Thomas and those who served under Scalia.The latter, Vladeck says, have gravitated more toward the conservative establishment—institutions like law schools and legal foundations. The Thomas clerks, who have “a bit more of a libertarian or populist streak,” are a more logical fit for the key legal jobs serving the Trump White House.It is the Thomas alums that have risen to prominence in the past six months, and they are working zealously to put their mentor’s ideas into action.

And this makes sense, Lithwick and Stern argue, given the philosophical similarities between Thomas and Trump:

Donald Trump’s crude understanding of the United States government aligns startlingly well with Thomas’ sophisticated political worldview. The president’s belief that the commander in chief can wage war in whatever way he wishes corresponds neatly to Thomas’ theory of the “unitary executive,” and his visceral hostility to the Affordable Care Act dovetails with Thomas’ abhorrence of the federal social safety net. The two men also share an absolutist opposition to gun control, a belief that the government may favor and promote Christianity over other faiths, a deep skepticism of the elite academic establishment, and a nostalgia for the perceived America of yesteryear. Both take a hard-line stance against illegal immigration and show little concern for the rights of individuals accused of terrorism. Thomas is a thinker and Trump is a feeler, but together they have arrived at similar conclusions. They want less government, a more authoritarian executive, more God, fewer racial entitlements, and more guns.

One can agree or disagree with Lithwick and Stern’s normative judgments, but it’s hard to argue with their bottom line: Justice Thomas and President Trump think alike, and even if there’s not much CT can do by himself to help DJT (other than cast votes for the administration), he has certainly provided President Trump with lots of brainpower — lawyers who are very smart, and very conservative:

Thomas is known to be ideologically rigid when it comes to hiring (and in everything else). Prior to 2013, every clerk he’d brought on during his Supreme Court tenure had first served under an appellate-level judge who’d been appointed by a Republican president.* Even Scalia occasionally hired “counter-clerks,” liberal-leaning men and women who had clerked for Democratic appointees on lower courts. Thomas has expressed no interest in this kind of ideological diversity. (To his credit, he does value educational diversity, intentionally hiring clerks from lower-ranked schools. Compare that with Scalia, who was openly biased against schools outside the T14.)

[UPDATE (6:10 p.m.): Actually, as Ed Whelan just pointed out, “a quick check of Wikipedia would have revealed that Thomas has hired three clerks since [the 2010 New York Times article the authors rely upon] who had clerked for Democratic appointees. (Plus, one of Thomas’s first clerks had previously clerked for JFK appointee Byron White.)”]

Interestingly enough, the Thomas clerks serving in the Trump administration hail mostly from T14 schools (just as President Trump himself graduated from elite U. Penn, his populist rhetoric notwithstanding). Of the dozen CT clerks name-checked by Lithwick and Stern in the first blockquote above, eleven out of twelve went to T14 schools: three from conservative-leaning U. Chicago; two each from Harvard, Yale, and Chicago; and one each from UVA and Michigan. (The exception is Justice Dave Stras, a graduate of Kansas Law — a fact that could help his SCOTUS chances, given the constant complaints about too many Harvard/Yale justices on the Court.)

As the old saying (or book title) goes, “Ideas have consequences.” You might not like all the consequences of a Trump presidency for the legal world (or world more generally) — but when it comes to many of the ideas, credit Clarence Thomas.

P.S. You should definitely read Lithwick and Stern’s full article, in which they note — correctly, in my view — that “liberals consistently underestimate Thomas’ influence.” Maybe the Trump administration will bring an end to that.

The Clarence Thomas Takeover [Slate]

Earlier: Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch: To Know A Judge, Know Her Clerks

David Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@abovethelaw.com.

TOPICS

Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, Allison Eid, Allison H. Eid, Carrie Severino, Clarence Thomas, Constitutional Law, Dahlia Lithwick, Dave Stras, David Morrell, David Stras, Department of Justice, Federal Government, Gregory G. Katsas, Gregory Katsas, Heath P. Tarbert, Heath Tarbert, Jeffrey Wall, John Eisen, Judicial Nominations, Judicial Nominees, Justice, Laura Ingraham, Mark Joseph Stern, Neomi Rao, Politics, SCOTUS, Sigal Mandelker, Slate, Steve Vladeck, Steven Bradbury, Supreme Court, White House Counsel

ref dahlia 2017

https://slate.com/news-and-politics**/2017**/08/clarence-thomas-legal-vision-is-becoming-a-trump-era-reality.html

no lnx many?

There’s a reason Clarence Thomas writes so many solo dissents and concurrences. The second-longest-tenured justice on the Supreme Court has spent more than 25 years staking out a right-wing worldview that can generously be described as idiosyncratic. Thomas’ Constitution is one that gives a president at war the powers of a king while depriving Congress of any meaningful ability to regulate the country. His opposition to the very existence of much of the federal regulatory state, too, has never quite found five votes on the court. No other justice, except perhaps Neil Gorsuch if he continues down his current path, would carry his conservative principles to such an extreme position with regard to presidential authority and congressional constraint.

Now a judge who’s spent his career teetering off the right edge of the federal bench finds himself at the center of the table. Thomas was on hand at the inauguration to swear in Vice President Mike Pence, using the same Bible that Ronald Reagan used when he was sworn in for both of his terms as president. But Thomas is more than just the Trump administration’s philosophical hero. His once-fringy ideas are suddenly flourishing—not only on the high court, through his alliance with Gorsuch, but also in the executive branch.

Donald Trump’s crude understanding of the United States government aligns startlingly well with Thomas’ sophisticated political worldview. The president’s belief that the commander in chief can wage war in whatever way he wishes corresponds neatly to Thomas’ theory of the “unitary executive,” and his visceral hostility to the Affordable Care Act dovetails with Thomas’ abhorrence of the federal social safety net. The two men also share an absolutist opposition to gun control, a belief that the government may favor and promote Christianity over other faiths, a deep skepticism of the elite academic establishment, and a nostalgia for the perceived America of yesteryear. Both take a hard-line stance against illegal immigration and show little concern for the rights of individuals accused of terrorism. Thomas is a thinker and Trump is a feeler, but together they have arrived at similar conclusions. They want less government, a more authoritarian executive, more God, fewer racial entitlements, and more guns.

While Trump may share Thomas’ intuitions, he is far too witless to grasp, let alone implement, the justice’s complex theories of law. And save for the occasional ruling in the administration’s favor, there isn’t much Thomas can do directly to guide the course of Trump’s presidency. Nevertheless, the justice’s fingerprints are all over the executive branch. That’s because he’s trained a small army of acolytes to implement his larger project of shrinking the regulatory state and fighting back against the supposed chokehold of political correctness. (It’s exactly this scourge of “political correctness,” both Trump and Thomas would have you believe, that allowed claims of improper sexual conduct to briefly overshadow their professional accomplishments.)

Everywhere you turn in Trumpland, you’ll find a slew of Thomas’ former clerks in high places. They are serving in the White House counsel’s office (Greg Katsas, John Eisenberg, David Morrell); awaiting appointment to the federal judiciary (Allison H. Eid, David Stras); leading the departments of the Treasury (Heath P. Tarbert, Sigal Mandelker) and Transportation (Steven G. Bradbury); defending the travel ban in court (Jeffrey Wall); and heading the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (Neomi Rao). Thomas clerks are also working with dark money groups to execute Trump’s agenda (Carrie Severino) and boosting him in the far-right media (Laura Ingraham).

[Jeffrey Wall

Former Thomas clerk Jeffrey Wall is now Trump’s acting solicitor general. Department of Justice

In an era in which former clerks seem, on balance, to be drifting away from Washington jobs, a whole lot of members of the old Thomas crew are moving back home. It’s near impossible to count every former Supreme Court clerk who is now playing a role in the sprawling executive branch, but it’s easy to see that an enormous number of Thomas protégés are stepping into positions of immense power. Every expert we spoke to, among them the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, agreed the Trump administration has brought on a striking number of Thomas clerks.

To be sure, a number of clerks who trained under Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and other conservative justices have taken jobs with the government. But Stephen Vladeck, who teaches law at the University of Texas and serves as a Supreme Court analyst for CNN, says it’s instructive to compare the career paths of clerks who worked for Thomas and those who served under Scalia. The latter, Vladeck says, have gravitated more toward the conservative establishment—institutions like law schools and legal foundations. The Thomas clerks, who have “a bit more of a libertarian or populist streak,” are a more logical fit for the key legal jobs serving the Trump White House. It is the Thomas alums that have risen to prominence in the past six months, and they are working zealously to put their mentor’s ideas into action.

Consider Wall, Trump’s acting solicitor general, who left his law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, to join the administration. Wall is the attorney who, back in May, so adroitly argued the travel ban case before the lower federal appeals courts and aggressively litigated the case in pleadings this summer at the Supreme Court. It was Wall who insisted on the “presumption of regularity” in the litigation, cautioning the judges to focus on the long tradition of deference to executive authority—especially in the realm of national security—and to ignore Trump’s incendiary tweets and campaign statements.

Wall has said that the judges for whom he has clerked are still his “close friends.” Perhaps most significantly, at an event last year celebrating Thomas’ 25th anniversary on the court, Wall defended the justice’s singular relevance and influence, rejecting any criticism that Thomas hasn’t had a profound impact on the court as “pernicious and wrongheaded.” (He’s quite right about that; liberals consistently underestimate Thomas’ influence.) Describing his former boss as an “intellectual catalyst,” Wall said that Thomas “is content to sow ideas that result later in changes in the law.”

That’s precisely the influence we are now seeing at work across the federal government. In arguing the travel ban cases, Wall insisted that limiting Muslim immigrants’ access to the United States does not amount to unlawful animus, that the president must have near-total authority to control the nation’s borders, and that his decisions must not be second-guessed by the courts. These are classic Thomas principles, and the justice himself embraced them in a partial dissent when the court allowed only part of the ban to take effect.

Thomas’ influence can also be seen in the work of Neomi Rao,whom the Senate recently confirmed to lead the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Until her appointment as Trump’s regulatory czar, Rao served as a professor at George Mason University’s law school—an institution that, at Rao’s urging, was recently renamed in honor of Antonin Scalia. Rao has devoted her academic career to criticizing the administrative state—the web of agencies and committees that promulgate federal regulations. Her attacks on the government sit at the intersection of two quintessential Thomas principles: an aversion to regulations (especially labor and environmental rules) and a hostility toward limits on executive authority.

[Neomi Rao

Former Thomas clerk Neomi Rao is set to lead the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Screenshot via YouTube

Rao believes, for instance, that independent agencies are unconstitutional. These commissions—which include the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Communications Commission, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Reserve—flourish in part because they are removed from political pressures. Rao would like to change that. She believes that since these agencies are part of the executive branch, the president must be empowered to fire and replace their leaders.

Thomas sees his clerks as trainees in a very specific ideological program.

It seems extremely likely that Rao has been placed in her perch at OIRA not only to bust traditional agency regulations but also to bring independent agency rules under her purview. While her office does not currently review rules by independent agencies, she has argued that it should. Thomas has strongly suggested that all agencies within the executive branch, independent or not, must ultimately be accountable to the president. If Rao gives herself veto power over these agencies’ rules, she will bring Thomas’ vision a step closer to the reality. In the process, she could nullify whatever vestiges of liberalism are still lingering from the Obama era. For example, the EEOC recently took the position that federal law protects gay employees, directly contradicting Trump’s Justice Department. If Rao’s view wins out, Trump could fire as many EEOC commissioners as he needs to in order to reverse the agency’s position. Thomas, who takes a dim view of nondiscrimination law and gay rights, would be doubly proud.

The justice must already be delighted at the work of his former clerk Allison Eid, whom Trump has nominated to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Eid currently serves on the Colorado Supreme Court, where she established her conservative bona fides by dissenting from a ruling that prohibited the state from sending public funds to private religious schools. The court’s decision was compelled by the Colorado Constitution, which bars the government from spending “any public fund or moneys … to help support or sustain any school … controlled by any church or sectarian denomination.”But according to Eid, this constitutional bar on public funding of parochial schools was likely motivated by unconstitutional animus toward religion—even though its plain text indicates nothing more than a desire to observe the separation of church and state.

Eid’s dissent, which she wrote in 2015, maps neatly onto Thomas’ own concurrence in 2017’s Trinity Lutheran v. Comer. In Trinity, the court ruled that Missouri could not deny a grant to a Christian school solely on account of its “religious character.” (A day after the court decided Trinity, it vacated the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision on parochial schools, effectively vindicating Eid’s dissent.) Thomas asserted that the court had not gone far enough in Trinity: He wrote that the government may never “discriminate against religion” by refusing to subsidize houses of worship and sectarian programs. Thomas, like Eid, appears to believe that when a state declines to fund religious activity—even out of respect for the Establishment Clause—it engages in unconstitutional discrimination. When Eid is confirmed, he will gain a critical ally in his fight for ever-more entanglement between church and state. And she will be the first of many Trump picks who are as immutable in their views as their former bosses. This is a movement and a cause, not just constitutional theory.

[Allison H. Eid

Trump has nominated former Thomas clerk Allison H. Eid to the 10th Circuit. Joe Amon/The Denver Post via Getty Images]

Thomas, who has described his clerks as his “little family,” sees them as trainees in a very specific ideological program.He famously invites them to watch The Fountainhead at his home each yearand has taken them on annual trips to Gettysburg to reflect on what he views as the conservative lessons of the Civil War. He also tutors his clerks on his judicial philosophy, instilling in them a profound reverence for his own vision of the rule of law.

It’s no surprise that so many of Thomas’ clerks share a belief system with their former boss, and with each other. Thomas is known to be ideologically rigid when it comes to hiring (and in everything else). Prior to 2013, every clerk he’d brought on during his Supreme Court tenure had first served under an appellate-level judge who’d been appointed by a Republican president.* Even Scalia occasionally hired “counter-clerks,” liberal-leaning men and women who had clerked for Democratic appointees on lower courts. Thomas has expressed no interest in this kind of ideological diversity. (To his credit, he does value educational diversity, intentionally hiring clerks from lower-ranked schools. Compare that with Scalia, who was openly biased against schools outside the T14.)

[Trump’s reactionary view of conservatism is causing a schism at the Supreme Court.

Like all justices, Thomas tends to get his clerks from a handful of feeder judges. Thomas’ chief feeders are J. Michael Luttig and J. Harvie Wilkinson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, Laurence Silberman and David Sentelle of the D.C. Circuit, Edith Jones of the 5th Circuit, and William Pryor of the 11th Circuit—all rock-ribbed conservatives except for Wilkinson, who has recently drifted to the center. By drawing from this pool, Thomas ensures he won’t hear many progressive counterpoints to his conservative instincts. And that’s OK with him. Thomas has said that picking clerks is like “selecting mates in a foxhole,”explaining: “I won’t hire clerks who have profound disagreements with me. It’s like trying to train a pig. It wastes your time, and it aggravates the pig.”

While Thomas is famously one of the most personable justices on the high court—the stories of his generosity to former clerks and court staff are myriad—he has also cultivated a with-us-or-against-us mindset that owes more to AM radio than George Will, and that maps perfectly onto Trump’s Fox News–inflected worldview. Thomas is close buddies with Rush Limbaugh (he officiated at Limbaugh’s third wedding) as well asfringe radio dogmatist Mark Levin. Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman has described him as “the Tea Party of the Supreme Court.”

Thomas does not travel in the same conservative legal circles as John Roberts. Throughout his campaign, Trump derided the chief justice as an open traitor to the conservative project, explaining that “what he did with Obamacare was disgraceful.” Trump called Roberts a “nightmare for conservatives” in January 2016 and claimed that he writes like a “dummy.” He has described Thomas, meanwhile, as his favorite justice, calling him “very strong and consistent.” We also know from a leaked email sent to the Daily Beast in February that Thomas’ wife, Ginni Thomas, tried to organize conservative activists to defend Trump’s initial travel ban. This political activism did not preclude Thomas from participating in the court’s travel ban decisions, in which he has twice supported the president. There is a long-standing debate about whether Ginni Thomas’ political activities might affect her husband’s votes.

At the very least, the fact that she openly aligns herself with Trump—even as the rest of the justices try to ignore the unseemliness of it all—reflects his comfort with the Trumpian worldview.

It feels increasingly evident that Trump’s reactionary view of conservatism is causing a schism at the Supreme Court. Over the past two terms, a split has opened up between the two center-right justices, Roberts and Kennedy, and the three far-right justices, Samuel Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas. One explanation for the trend is that the center of the court is distancing itself from the hard-right crusaders, whom Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono recently dubbed “the three horsemen of the apocalypse.” This rift, if it continues, presages a possible split between the kinds of judges and justices Trump prefers—polemicists and bomb throwers—and the more traditional movement conservatives who have historically populated the federal bench. If Trump seeds the lower courts with judges like Allison Eid who share Thomas’ views, he stands to reshape the country for decades. That means that long after the Cabinet appointees and White House lawyers leave the scene, constitutional law will bear the thumbprints of Thomas and his clerks. Thanks to Trump, Thomas’ ideas—about the unitary executive, the wall between church and state, and so much more—will now surely outlive both men.

Both Trump and Thomas have spent decades as the brunt of liberal jokes and slights. Both see themselves as innocent victims of women and interest groups that have fabricated claims against them. Both have seen their ideas slip from the very fringes of political discourse into the ascendancy.

Now, Thomas stands as a symbol of what a faltering, lawless Trump may yet accomplish—if his supporters can turn a blind eye on the faltering lawlessness. At the precise moment in which the more than 120 vacancies on the federal courts may be the only reason for conservatives to hold their noses and stand by Trump, it’s Clarence Thomas who stands as a living embodiment of wars already won and triumphs yet to come.

*Correction, Aug. 3, 2017: This story originally misstated that during his Supreme Court tenure, Clarence Thomas had never hired a clerk who’d served under a judge appointed by a president from the opposite party. Before 2013, Thomas had not brought on a clerk who’d worked under an appellate-level judge appointed by a Democrat.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/stephen-breyer-gun-control-dissent/

no lnx

Stephen Breyer delivers a scathing and ‘ominous’ dissent in Supreme Court gun control ruling

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer with President Joe Biden in January 2022 (Wikimedia Commons).

Alex Henderson June 23, 2022

On Thursday, June 23, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision in the case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen — striking down the “proper cause” part of the Sullivan Act of 1911 as unconstitutional. And Justice Stephen Breyer, was especially vehement in his dissent.

The Sullivan Act, passed 111 years ago and named after State Sen. Timothy Sullivan — a Tammany Hall Democrat — has limited licenses for concealed-carry handgun permits to those with specific defense needs. Under the Sullivan Act, a New York State law, anyone applying for a permit to carry a concealed handgun has had to show “proper cause.” And the High Court has ruled that the “proper cause” requirement is a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s 2nd Amendment.

Attorney Neal Katyal, who served as acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama and often appears on MSNBC, described the warning that opened Breyer’s dissent as “ominous.”

The 83-year-old Breyer, who is retiring from the High Court and will be replaced by President Joe Biden’s nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, later this year, wrote, “In 2020, 45,222 Americans were killed by firearms.... Since the start of this year (2022), there have been277 reported mass shootings — an average of more than one per day.... Gun violence has now surpassed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of death among children and adolescents.”

Breyer continued, “Many states have tried to address some of the dangers of gun violence just described by passing laws that limit, in various ways, who may purchase, carry, or use firearms of different kinds. The Court today severely burdens States' efforts to do so. It invokes the Second Amendment to strike down a New York law regulating the public carriage of concealed handguns. In my view, that decision rests upon several serious mistakes.”

All three of the dissenters in the High Court’s ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen were appointed by Democratic presidents: Breyer, Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan. After Jackson — who will be the first African-American woman on the Court — replaces Breyer, it will still have a 6-3 right-wing supermajority. And none of the GOP-appointed justices in that supermajority voted with the Democratic-appointed justices in the New York State ruling.

The majority opinion in the case was written by Justice Clarence Thomas, who was joined by three Donald Trump appointees (Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Justice Neil Gorsuch) as well as two George W. Bush appointees: Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts.

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Leftists Demand Clarence Thomas Be Impeached Over His Wife ...

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The Women's March wants Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas impeached… for texts his wife sent. The latest attempt by Leftists to bring down Thomas involve texts his wife, Ginni, sent to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows following the 2020 presidential election. The 29 text messages were obtained by The Washington Post and CBS .

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/clarence-thomas-2657046647/

tom b raw story

In an interview with Rolling Stone's Andrew Cohen, historian Jeff Shesol said he has no doubt thatSupreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni Thomas are in "lockstep" when it comes to believing Donald Trump should still be in the White House and claimed they see what they are doing as a "holy war."

According to the historian, he can't be sure Ginni Thomas was talking about her husband when she referenced support for election interference from her "best friend" -- but he has his suspicions.

According to Shesol, Ginni Thomas is up to her neck in involvement t in the Jan 6th insurrection and there is little reason to believe that her husband didn't know it.

Youcan read more here.

john s edit bd 3 22

It’s not clear to me yet why Virginia “Ginni” Thomas admitted to being at the gathering that came before the J6 insurrection. But I’m sure the spouse of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has her reasons.

Ginni Thomas told the Washington Free BeaconMonday that she attended the rally organized by the former president to “stop the steal.” She said she left before Donald Trump ordered a throng of insurgents, some armed, to sack and loot the seat of government.

“There are important and legitimate substantive questions about achieving goals like electoral integrity, racial equality and political accountability that a democratic system like ours needs to be able to discuss and debate rationally in the political square. I fear we are losing that ability,” she told the Free Beacon, a rightwing paper.

Thing is, those “important and legitimate substantive questions” had been addressed and settled by one federal judge after another. They had been answered by Republican secretaries of state in states won by the current president. You’d think the wife of a Supreme Court justice would respect court rulings. I suppose that might be too much to ask.

Like I said, it’s not clear to me why she outed herself. It could be she’s aware of a forthcoming story about to come to light, and turned to a sympathetic news outlet to “get ahead of the story,” as elites say. That way she can minimize damage to her and her husband’s public image.

If I were to guess, I’d say Ginni Thomas was aware of Donald Trump’s effort to pressure the former vice president, Mike Pence, into sending certified electoral votes back to states, which would reelect Trump, or otherwise sabotage the situation so the Supreme Court had to decide.

That would be bad. It would mean some people are above the law. Unfortunately, we don’t need a treasonous conspiracy to know that.

Ginni Thomas is untouchable.

She’s a leading figure in right-wing politics. Her activism frequently involves cases Justice Thomas will hear. She is a middleman, as it were, between the GOP’s very obscenely rich donor class and the court’s GOP supermajority, which is eager to give what’s asked of them.

There’s nothing you can do about it.

When the people are powerless, democracy isn’t all that.

Even if Congress were to pass laws regulating the behavior of Supreme Court justices, who would enforce those laws. The US Department of Justice? The FBI? Which among all the federal law enforcement agencies would investigate a justice’s spouse? The Congress? Hardly. It couldn’t remove a president for extortion.

I talk about this and other depressing things with Gabe Roth. He’s the executive director of Fix the Court, a nonprofit dedicated to reforming the federal judiciary, especially the highest court. When no one is above a justice, Gabe said, “you're free to do whatever you want.”

“I think that bulletproof-ness rubbed off on Ginni Thomas.”

With normal people in mind, can you explain whether it’s wrong for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice to be politically active?

It's not wrong for a justice's spouse to be politically active. Justices' spouses can and should have their own lives and their own jobs.

But Ginni Thomas is different from any other Supreme Court spouse in the history of Supreme Court spouses in terms of her brand of activism and how so much of it intersects with the court’s work.

She's been the for the last three decades. WhenBush v. Gore[which decided the 2000 election] was at the court, she was vetting resumes for a potential Bush administration.

As Obamacare reached the court, she was lobbying against the law.

When a case on whether Congress could subpoena certain J6-related records was at the court, she was signing a letter saying Congress was harassing “private citizens who have done nothing wrong."

Supreme Court justices are supposed to recuse themselves from cases in which their "impartiality might reasonably be questioned."

Justice Thomas has often said he and Ginni are one – fused together in the fire of his confirmation. He’s said there’s no daylight between them.

These comments make me — and I think I'm pretty reasonable about this — question his impartiality on several issues before the court.

Has Thomas ever ruled against his wife's interests?

It's hard to quantify since the court has issued more than 2,000 rulings since Thomas joined it in 1991. But in general, the answer is no.

On major cases, the Republican justices rule the way average Republicans would want them to rule. Similarly, the Democratic justices rule the way average Democrats would want them to rule.

The Republican exceptions — Roberts on Obamacare, Kennedy on gay marriage, Gorsuch on tribal sovereignty — don't include Thomas.

How would you characterize Ginni Thomas's brand of politics?

Mean-spirited and misinformed. How can you be a functioning adult and think it's OK to share memes on Facebook related to the Holocaust, saying gun control is the reason 6 million Jews died?

Hoo-boy.

She gives out awards every year to some of the most brazen, shameless and horrible people you can imagine. Covid deniers, election-fraud maker-uppers, anti-Muslim bigots, the works.

With respect to gun control causing 6 million Jews to die, I wonder if perhaps she does know it's not OK, but she’s saying it anyway. From that perspective, we can see the role of bad faith. Someone like that could violate conflicts of interest norms knowing they were.

The truth is there really are no set conflict-of-interest rules if you're a Supreme Court justice. Rules only work if there are consequences. If there's no one above you, if you're never going to be impeached and removed since it's too hard, you're free to do whatever you want.

I think that bulletproof-ness rubbed off on Ginni Thomas.

With that in mind, there's no way of holding a justice’s spouse accountable for her role, however, minimal in J6. Am I correct?

Correct.

I would bet the J6 Committee would be squeamish about subpoenaing Ginni Thomas, though they did subpoena Donald Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, with whom Ginni is close.

They don't want to be seen as "political," and I could imagine some of them think that going after a justice's spouse would be seen that way.

So it's possible for the spouse at the Supreme Court justice to be engaged in sedition, a crime that could rise up to the Supreme Court, and the justice in question could rule in favor of his spouse?

Yes.

That’s fucked up.

Ginni Thomas would say she left before the crime happened.

She already said she left in remarks made to the Washington Free Beacon. If she's bulletproof, why bother going to a sympathetic newspaper to explain why she's not guilty of anything?

My guess is enough people saw her at the Ellipse that the story of her being there was going to get out. She wanted to get ahead of it.

So what if the story got out, though?

My guess is that more is coming out – that she was in touch with Meadows or someone on J6 who’s been subpoenaed. She wanted to quash the rumor she paid for buses to get people to DC that day.

So what’s the solution to a laughably corrupt system, as it appears to be? Can Congress put teeth in conflict-of-interest norms?

First, they can require justices to write and adopt a code of conduct that sets expectations for conduct inside and outside the court.

Second, they can require justices to explain when they recuse themselves and make it easier for litigants to ask why they don't recuse in cases in which there's a perceived conflict of interest.

Third, they can amend the federal recusal statute to say that if you as a justice received a benefit from an individual or group — whether a gift, a free trip or personal hospitality — you have to sit out SCOTUS cases brought by that individual or group for a certain number of years

Fourth, they can hold more oversight hearings so judicial ethics issues are in the open, not merely discussed whenever a justice messes up.

I could keep going.

Yes, please.

Fifth, they could require that judges and justices put annual financial disclosure reports online (currently they're placed on thumb drives and the disclosures office always has a multi-year backlog).

Congress could require that every time a judge or justice buys or sells a stock, or other financial instruments, they have to file a contemporaneous transaction report, as members of Congress must.

Sixth, Congress could write a law that would require justices to take senior status after 18 years, so they'd keep life tenure, but after 18 years, they'd have to move to a lower court – or they could fill back in at the Supreme Court in case of an unexpected vacancy.

Seventh, they could require judges and justices to fill out contemporaneous travel reports, as members of Congress must. These show in real-time who's paying who for what (flights, hotels, etc).

These sound good, but rules and laws don't mean much unless they're enforced. Assuming Merrick Garland would never touch a case involving a Supreme Court justice’s spouse, who would enforce these laws and rules even if they were enacted?

That'd be my assumption, yes.

The DOJ wouldn’t bring charges against a Supreme Court spouse.

It'd have to be a bribe to get to that point.

A bribe would be blessedly simple, but what about a spouse of a Supreme Court justice who’s cheerleading sedition?

I don't see how that's enforced, correct.

This is very depressing isn't it?

I guess. I'm used to it.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas recently expressed concern about the possibility of "cancel culture" and politicization of the courts eroding legal institutions.

On Friday, March 11, Thomas appeared at an event in Salt Lake City, Utah that was hosted by former Republican U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch's foundation.

During his speech, Thomas, the oldest Supreme Court Justice on the bench, spoke to a crowd of approximately 500 attendees where he shared his concerns about the long-term drawbacks that could come from so-called trends like "cancel culture."

At one point during his speech, Thomas recalled how times were when he was growing up as he noted how things have changed. The justice grew up in Georgia during the times of segregation.

"I'm afraid, particularly in this world of cancel culture attack, I don't know where you're going to learn to engage as we did when I grew up," he said. "If you don't learn at that level in high school, in grammar school, in your neighborhood, or in civic organizations, then how do you have it when you're making decisions in government, in the legislature, or in the courts?"

Thomas went on to discuss some of the repercussions that he believes could derive from the changes in politics.

"You can cavalierly talk about packing or stacking the court. You can cavalierly talk about doing this or doing that. At some point the institution is going to be compromised," Thomas told the audience. "By doing this, you continue to chip away at the respect of the institutions that the next generation is going to need if they're going to have civil society."

Despite Thomas' concerns, his own party appears to be eroding systems. Per NPR.org: "The court has leaned increasingly conservative since three justices nominated by former President Donald Trump joined its ranks. Progressives have in turn called to expand the number of justices on the court, including during the 2020 presidential primary. Democrats in Congress introduced a bill last year to add four justices to the bench, and President Joe Biden has convened a commission to study expanding the court."

clerk mafia? let jan 6 off hook:

Nichols clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas during the 1997-1998 term. At the high court, Nichols' fellow clerksincluded former Hughes Hubbard & Reed partner John Wood, who recently joined the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as chief legal officer and general counsel. Another co-clerk that term, Arthur Long, is a partner in the New York office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, where he co-chairs the financial institutions practice. He married a fellow Thomas clerk from that term, Wendy Stone, a Republican who unsuccessfully challenged Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer in 2016.Earlier, Nichols clerked for Judge Laurence Silberman on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Nichols is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School.

https://www.americanoversight.org/ginni-thomas-republican-connections-raise-ethics-concerns-for-scotus

The activism of prominent conservative Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has for years raised questions about partisan influence on the judicial system and ethics in the Supreme Court. American Oversight is actively investigating Ginni Thomas’ connections and influence in right-wing networks and their potential impact on Justice Thomas’ ethics decisions. Records we have obtained through public records requests reveal Ginni Thomas’ ties to the Trump administration as well as evidence of Justice Thomas’ contact with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

As detailed in a recent :{update:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, emails between Ginni Thomas and DeSantis, obtained by American Oversight and reported on by *Politico*, suggest that Justice Thomas may have been in :{regular contact:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: with the Republican governor. On June 10, 2021, Ginni Thomas :{reached out:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: to DeSantis’ scheduling office to invite him to speak to a “coalition” of “conservative patriots.” Thomas :{explained:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: that the governor would know her because her “husband has been in contact with him … on various things of late.”

Ginni Thomas said the “cone of silence coalition” of “about 83 national leaders” was formerly known asGroundswelland included former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows among its attendees. The group, now called the :{Third Century Group:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear;background-color:#ffff66;"):}: (TC Group), was focused on “the greatest threats and opportunities to constitutional governance,” Thomas :{wrote:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: in her email, “and admittedly we are weary about the GOP divisions, lack of courage and lack of leadership.” Thomas also wrote that the group met “through the help of [conservative organization] Judicial Watch.”

DeSantis was eventually :{scheduled:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: to present during the group’s July 21 virtual meeting. According to an :{email:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: from a vice president at the Heritage Foundation who was planning to introduce the governor at the meeting, DeSantis was invited to speak “about whatever is on his mind in terms of national politics” and the attendees were “very concerned about [critical race theory], election integrity and immigration.”

:{The Coalition Formerly Known as Groundswell

}:Formerly known as Groundswell, TC Group is a secretive right-wing strategy group led by Ginni Thomas and others, which has been bringing together conservative activists for :{nearly a decade:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:. Members have :{included:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: former Trump chief strategist Stephen Bannon and former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton, among others. The network was :{well-connected to the Trump administration:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: — in 2019, Thomas and others :{compiled lists:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: of anti-Trump officials in executive agencies for the administration to dismiss and replace with Trump allies.

Public records obtained by American Oversight show the degree of access Thomas and her coalition had in the Trump administration. A calendar entry from :{March 5, 2020:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, shows Russ Vought, then the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, was scheduled to have “Breakfast with Ginni Thomas.”

On :{Dec. 10, 2018:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, Thomas, on behalf of her lobbying firm Liberty Consulting, invited a Department of Health and Human Services official — likely :{Steven Wagner:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, the director of the Administration for Children and Families — to a “Conversation and Strategic Discussion” with conservative commentatorJordan Peterson. The invitation noted that the event would be “closed to press and off the record” and that “a primary goal of this meeting is to determine specific action steps/solutions for winning back the next generation.” The reception was hosted by Thomas along with conservative Christian activist Bill Dallas and the Heritage Foundation’s Bridgett Wagner. The :{list of participants:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: included prominent conservatives.

On :{Aug. 22, 2018:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, Neomi Rao, then the administrator of OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, was scheduled to have a “Groundswell Mtg.” It is not confirmed whether this is Ginni Thomas’ Groundswell. Early in her career, Rao served as a law clerk for Justice Thomas on the Supreme Court, and in 2019, she was appointed by Trump to serve as federal judge in Washington, D.C.

:{Thomas’ Activism Raises Judicial Ethics Questions

}:Ginni Thomas’ career as a prominent conservative activist, more heavily involved in politics :{than any other spouse:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: of a Supreme Court justice in history, has for years raised concerns among :{legal experts:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: who note that justices typically avoid even being seen as partisan. Through her activism, Ginni Thomas has taken stances on issues that have come before the Supreme Court, such as on abortion, gun rights, and the :{Affordable Care Act:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, and recently took on major role in challenging Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. Justice Thomas’ repeated :{failure to recuse himself:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: on multiple matters relevant to his wife’s advocacy, especially as the court hears increasingly politically polarized cases, has been the subject of scrutiny.

Recently, Ginni Thomas was among the conservatives who :{signed a letter:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: criticizing the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. A month later, Justice Thomas was the only Supreme Court justice to support Trump’s request to block that committee from accessing White House records.

Ginni Thomas also played a role in challenging the 2020 election results as a leader of the conservative Council for National Policy (CNP), according to the *New York Times*. Following the November 2020 election, CNP directed its members to :{spread misinformation about the election:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: and pressured Republican lawmakers in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania to challenge the election results by awarding their states’ electoral votes to Trump. In a newsletter, CNP’s political advocacy arm :{advised:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, “There is historical, legal precedent for Congress to count a slate of electors different from that certified by the Governor of the state.” :{Fake electoral certificates:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: submitted by Trump allies in swing states to Congress to dispute Biden’s victory were obtained by American Oversight last year.

American Oversight continues to investigate Ginni Thomas’ connections and influence. We have filed records requests seeking communications between Thomas and federal agencies during the Trump administration, and in January 2022, we submitted public records requests to attorneys generals and governors across the country for communications with both Ginni Thomas and Justice Thomas.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/clarence-thomas/

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' right leaning political views have been obvious for decades in his writings for the Court. A new report in the Daily Beast, however, spotlights just how intertwined his financial connections are to an ultra-conservative judicial activist.

When Thomas was looking to promote the release of his memoir last October he chose to hire a public relations firm, CRC Advisors, run by the former chief of the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo. Leo is a top fundraiser for right-wing judicial activist groups. The Daily Beast reports that "Leo has raised hundreds of millions of dollars over the three decades on behalf of right-wing dark money groups to influence the federal judiciary and Supreme Court. He advised and persuaded Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump in their appointments of Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Chief Justice John Roberts—and prepped Justice Thomas for his nomination hearings."

The report also says that Leo is the "hub" of dark money groups that stealthily fund and link up with parties who argue cases before the Supreme Court, something that Supreme watchers have dubbed an "amicus flotilla."

Leo’s affiliations with the court - and especially Thomas - are especially pronounced. He made the justice the godfather of one of his children and has hosted him on vacation at his New England retreat.

Paul Collins is a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of several books about the high court. He says Thomas’ choice of Leo’s firm is “strange” and “unnecessary.”

“It signals that this world of the Federalist Society is even smaller than we thought,” Collins told The Daily Beast.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/clarence-thomas/

bob b raw

The network of former Clarence Thomas clerks was mobilized to action following the 2020 presidential election,The New York Times reported Tuesday.

The report focused on wife Ginni Thomas, reporting "it was after Trump’s November loss that she would prove her loyalty beyond doubt, when she and her group urged on efforts to overturn the election."

"New reporting also shows just how blurred the lines between the couple’s interests became during the effort to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in the rally held at the Ellipse, just outside the White House grounds, aimed at stopping Congress from certifying the state votes that gave Joe Biden his victory. Many of the rally organizers and those advising Trump had connections to the Thomases, but little has been known about what role, if any, Ginni Thomas played, beyond the fact that on the morning of the March to Save America, as the rally was called, she urged her Facebook followers to watch how the day unfolded," the newspaper reported.

The deep-dive report focused on Ginni Thomas' political activism.

"In the weeks after Trump’s loss, court challenges began to pile up from his team, his allies and even Republican lawmakers," the newspaper reported. "By then, the network around the Thomases was lighting up. On Dec. 10, aformer Thomas clerk and close friend of the couple’s, John C. Eastman, went on 'War Room,' a podcast and radio show hosted by Bannon. Eastman argued that the country was already at the point of a constitutional crisis — and he urged the Supreme Court to intervene. Bannon eagerly agreed."

The report noted Ginni Thomas was not only tied to Eastman and Bannon, but also Cleta Mitchell, who was on Trump's Jan. 2 call trying to overturn the election results in Georgia.

"Turning Point USA, on whose advisory board Ginni Thomas had served, was a sponsor of the Jan. 6 event and provided buses for attendees. Other sponsors included two more groups with which Ginni Thomas had long ties. One was the Tea Party Patriots, headed by Jenny Beth Martin, a fellow Council for National Policy activist. The other was Women for America First, which held the permit for the rally at the Ellipse and was run by Amy Kremer," the newspaper reported. "The spectacle of a Supreme Court justice’s spouse taking to Facebook to champion the attempt of a defeated president to stay in power, as Ginni Thomas did on the morning of Jan. 6, crossed a line for several people in the Thomases’ circle who talked toThe Times."

Read the full report.

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Supreme Court rules allow Clarence Thomas to decide for himself if wife’s activism presents a 'conflict of interest': report

Ginni Thomas speaking at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, Gage Skidmore

Alex Henderson January 31, 2022

Critics of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his equally far-right wife, GOP activist Ginni Thomas, have recently been using the phrase “conflict of interest” in connection with Justice Thomas — arguing that it is wildly inappropriate for him to have a wife who has been promoting former President Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election and expressed her solidarity with the “Stop the Steal” rally of January 6, 2021. Washington Post reporter Michael Kranish discusses these criticisms in an article published on January 31, stressing that under Supreme Court rules, it’s up to Justice Thomas to decide whether or not his wife’s activism is a conflict of interest.

“Ginni Thomas’s name stood out among the signatories of a December letter from conservative leaders, which blasted the work of the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection as ‘overtly partisan political persecution,’” Kranish reports. “One month later, her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, took part in a case crucial to the same committee’s work: former President Donald Trump’s request to block the committee from getting White House records that were ordered released by President Biden and two lower courts.”

Kranish continues, “Thomas was the only justice to say he would grant Trump’s request. That vote has reignited fury among Justice Thomas’ critics, who say it illustrates a gaping hole in the Court’s rules: Justices essentially decide for themselves whether they have a conflict of interest, and Thomas has rarely made such a choice in his three decades on the Court.”

The journalist notes that Gabe Roth, executive director ofFix the Court, believes that “absolutely…. Clarence Thomas should have recused from the January 6 case.” But according to Kranish, deciding whether or not to recuse himself from a case is up to Justice Thomas himself.

“While the Supreme Court is supposed to operate under regulations guiding all federal judges, including a requirement that a justice ‘shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned,’ there’s no procedure to enforce that rule,” Kranish explains. “Each justice can decide whether to recuse, and there is no way to appeal a Supreme Court member’s failure to do so. Unlike in lower courts, there is no other judge that can step in — and thus, a recusal by one justice would mean considering the case with only eight justices, increasing the chance it could not be resolved.”

Ginni Thomas’ activism, according to Kranish, has, in some instances, “overlapped with cases that have been decided by Clarence Thomas.”

Kranish notes, “Thomas’ vote in the January 6 case is such a striking conflict of interest, critics say, that some hope it sparks further support for long-sputtering efforts to toughen rules governing the justices — an effort bolstered by a White House commission last month that noted the inherent problem with (the) Court’s recusals.”

Kranish’s article comes several days after the Post published an article by author James D. Robenalt, who took a look at a Supreme Court justice of the 1960s who came under fire because of his wife’s activities: Justice Abe Fortas, a Lyndon B. Johnson nominee. Ginni Thomas, Robenalt stressed, was not the first controversial wife of a High Court justice.

Caroline Fredrickson, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., argues that Justice Thomas has no business making decisions on issues that his wife is associated with.

Frederickson told the Post, “In every case that has come up, he has shown no interest in recusal and has, in fact, seemingly been defiant. To be a Supreme Court justice and to be married to a firebrand activist who’s trying to blow things up (is unique)…. It’s so out of bounds that if it weren’t so frightening, it would be comical.”

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/ginni-thomas-2656468326/

no lnx twt

Clarence Thomas' wife spoke at an event featuring Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes: report

Ginni Thomas speaking at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, Gage Skidmore]

Alex Henderson January 24, 2022

GOP activist/attorney Ginny Thomas, the wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is every bit as far-right as her husband — and according to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, that includes being part of an event that featured Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes.

Rhodes, who founded the extremist militia group in 2009, is facing federal charges of seditious conspiracy for his connection to the January 6, 2021 insurrection. That day, Ginny Thomas passionately endorsed then-President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C. and sent out her “love” to the insurrectionists who were trying to overthrow 2020’s presidential election results.

In 2010, Thomas co-hosted the Remember the Ladies Banquet at the 2010 Liberty XPO & Symposium, and the Symposium featured Rhodes.

Mayer, in an article published by The New Yorker on January 21, notes, “Another organizer of the January 6 uprising who has been subpoenaed by the congressional committee, Ali Alexander…. has long-standing ties to Ginni Thomas. …. Alexander spoke at a rally in Washington the night before the riot, leading a chant of ‘Victory or death!’ A decade ago, Alexander was a participant in Groundswell, a secretive, invitation-only network that, among other things, coordinated with hard-right congressional aides, journalists, and pressure groups to launch attacks against Obama and against less conservative Republicans. As recently as 2019, Ginni Thomas described herself as the chairman of Groundswell, which, according to documents first published by Mother Jones, sees itself as waging ‘a 30-front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation.’”

Ginni Thomas, according to Mayer, “has held so many leadership or advisory positions at conservative pressure groups that it’s hard to keep track of them — and many, if not all, of these groups have been involved in cases that have come before her husband.”

Mayer interviewed Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, for her article on Ginni Thomas. Eisen told Mayer, “It is hard to understand how Justice Thomas can be impartial when hearing cases related to the upheaval on January 6, in light of his wife’s documented affiliation with January 6 instigators and Stop the Steal organizers…. Justice Thomas should recuse himself, given his wife’s interests in the outcome of these cases.”

1/22

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/clarence-thomas

2/24 raw story

Democrats must take action against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for flouting judicial ethics as his wife pushes extremist Republican politics.

"In a sane world, Jane Mayer’s excellent piece on Ginni Thomas in The New Yorker would set off a series of events that would lead to her husband Clarence Thomas’s impeachment and removal from the Supreme Court. Ginni is involved with numerous far-right organizations and schemes that take very public positions on Court decisions across a range of social and political issues, such as last week’s 8-1 holding that Donald Trump could not block the release of documents related to the January 6 insurrection," New Republic editor Michael Tomasky wrote. "Thomas was the lone dissenter in that case. His wife sat on the advisory board of a group that sent busloads of insurrectionists to Washington that day. In addition to that, she cheered the insurrection on Facebook."

Tomasky argued that the corruption had been going on for decades.

"They’ve been doing this for years. This first came up back in 2000, in a case Mayer doesn’t even go into, when it was revealed after that election that as a Heritage Foundation staffer,Ginni was screening resumes for the incoming Bush administration while the nation awaited a ruling from the Court on the Florida recount. There was pressure then on Thomas to recuse himself," he wrote.

While the Supreme Court was deciding Obamacare, Ginni Thomas' group Liberty Central was urging the law to be repealed and Clarence Thomas was urged to recuse himself.

"He didn’t do so in either case. And in the first one, he was part of the 5-4 majority in Bush v. Gore, one of the most self-discrediting decisions in the Court’s history," he explained. "So for 20 years, Ginni Thomas has been operating in the white-hot center of far-right activist circles, involved in everything from Obamacare to abortion rights to same-sex marriage to you name it—all issues that have come before her husband. A more honorable man would recuse himself from all such cases, or indeed quietly ask his spouse to find another, less incendiary line of work that has no impact on the appearance of her husband’s ethical standards."

Thomasky wrote that if there were a liberal justice acting in a similar manner, Republicans in Congress would raise the issue and Fox News would turn it "into a symbol of liberal corruption." He suggested the GOP would hold hearings and ultimately impeach the justice.

He urged Democrats to pursue the issue.

"The House Judiciary Committee could hold hearings into Ginni’s organization and associations. The select committee on January 6 could ask her to testify and, once she refuses, subpoena her, which would require her husband to recuse himself on all January 6–related matters," he explained. "That would be hugely controversial, so they probably won’t do it. But why not? Here’s a question for you. If the Republicans retake the House this November, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee is going to be Jim Jordan. He’s probably going to lead an impeachment of Joe Biden. Think he’ll be cowed because it’s hugely controversial?"

Tomasky concluded that for Democrats, "it’s long past time to make an issue of [Clarence Thomas] and his wife."

Read the full column.

an 2 22

The political activism of a Supreme Court spouse is the focus of a New York Times exposé titled “The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas.”

The newspaper noted her work for theCouncil for National Policy, which it said “brings together old-school Republican luminaries, Christian conservatives, Tea Party activists and MAGA operatives, with more than 400 members who include leaders of organizations like the Federalist Society, the National Rifle Association and the Family Research Council.”

The newspaper explained that “Ginni Thomas insists, in her council biography, that she and her husband operate in ‘separate professional lanes,’ but those lanes in fact merge with notable frequency. For the three decades he has sat on the Supreme Court, they have worked in tandem from the bench and the political trenches to take aim at targets like Roe v. Wade and affirmative action. Together they believe that ‘America is in a vicious battle for its founding principles,’ as Ginni Thomas has put it. Her views, once seen as on the fringe, have come to dominate the Republican Party. And with Trump’s three appointments reshaping the Supreme Court, her husband finds himself at the center of a new conservative majority poised to shake the foundations of settled law. In a nation freighted with division and upheaval, the Thomases have found their moment.”

The report noted how Ginni Thomas gained access to the Oval Office during the Trump administration.

“This article draws on hours of recordings and internal documents from groups affiliated with the Thomases; dozens of interviews with the Thomases’ classmates, friends, colleagues and critics, as well as more than a dozen Trump White House aides and supporters and some of Justice Thomas’s former clerks; and an archive of Council for National Policy videos and internal documents provided by an academic researcher in Australia, Brent Allpress,” the newspaper reported. “The reporting uncovered new details on the Thomases’ ascent: how Trump courted Justice Thomas; how Ginni Thomas used that courtship to gain access to the Oval Office, where her insistent policy and personnel suggestions so aggravated aides that one called her a “wrecking ball” while others put together an opposition-research-style report on her that was obtained by The Times; and the extent to which Justice Thomas flouted judicial-ethics guidance by participating in events hosted by conservative organizations with matters before the court.”

Read the full report.

chao DOT atty clerked

ok gerry again?!

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/scotus-voting-rights/

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/clarence-thomas-2656518356/

ethics coi

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/clarence-thomas/

impeach?

an recap of nyer

bombshell exposé by an award-winning investigative journalist takes a deep look into lobbyist and far right wing activist and conspiracy theorist **Ginni Thomas**, and the ties she has to people, groups – and money – that have or may have business before the U.S. Supreme Court, on which her conservative husband sits.

“Is Ginni Thomas a Threat to the Supreme Court?” The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer asks point-blank. “Behind closed doors, Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife is working with many groups directly involved in controversial cases before the Court.”

Mayer writes that “Ginni Thomas has declared that America is in existential danger because of the ‘deep state’ and the ‘fascist left,’ which includes ‘transsexual fascists.'”

But that’s just a small piece of her massive reporting.

“Ginni Thomas’s political activism has caused controversy for years. For the most part, it has been dismissed as the harmless action of an independent spouse. But now the Court appears likely to secure victories for her allies in a number of highly polarizing cases—on abortion, affirmative action, and gun rights,” Mayer reveals.

How bad and how close are these ties? Thomas, unbeknownst to almost anyone, was “an undisclosed paid consultant at the conservative pressure group the Center for Security Policy, when its founder, Frank Gaffney, submitted an amicus brief to the Court supporting Trump’s Muslim travel ban.” 230K$ ?!

Did Justice Clarence Thomas know? Did the couple discuss the case, or her financial and political ties? No one knows.

And that’s just one example. Mayer notes that Ginni Thomas “has held leadership positions at conservative pressure groups that have either been involved in cases before the [Supreme] Court or have had members engaged in such cases.”

“In 2019, she announced a political project called Crowdsourcers, and said that one of her four partners would be the founder of Project Veritas, James O’Keefe. Project Veritas tries to embarrass progressives by making secret videos of them, and last year petitioned the Court to enjoin Massachusetts from enforcing a state law that bans the surreptitious taping of public officials. Another partner in Crowdsourcers, Ginni Thomas said in her announcement, was Cleta Mitchell, the chairman of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative election-law nonprofit. It, too, has had business before the Court, filing amicus briefs in cases centering on the democratic process. Thomas also currently serves on the advisory board of the National Association of Scholars, a group promoting conservative values in academia, which has filed an amicus brief before the Court in a potentially groundbreaking affirmative-action lawsuit against Harvard.”

Should Americans be concerned? Should Justice Thomas? Should Chief Justice John Roberts?

“If Ginni Thomas is intimately involved—financially or ideologically tied to the litigant—that strikes me as slicing the baloney a little thin,” David Luban, a professor of law and philosophy at Georgetown, who specializes in legal ethics, tells Mayer.

Surely Justice Thomas has the ability to separate his work and home life, right?

“Even before” Clarence Thomas’ controversial and contentious confirmation hearing, which included the accusations – labeled “credible” by many – from Anita Hill, “a friend told the Washington *Post*, the couple was so bonded that‘the one person [Clarence] really listens to is Virginia.'”

In 2019 then-Congressman Mark Meadows, who because White House Chief of Staff to President Donald Trump and now appears to have been intimately involved in aspects of the January 6 insurrection, told members of a “nonprofit that mobilizes conservative evangelical voters” that “Ginni was talking about how we ‘team up,’ and we actually have teamed up. And I’m going to give you something you won’t hear anywhere else—we worked through the first five days of the impeachment hearings.”

Mayer adds, “Ginni Thomas has her own links to the January 6th insurrection.”

The nearly 7000 word deep dive can be read here.

// acb non-part charm offensive?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/clarence-thomas-court/

ginni hired i hate blk ppl

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/neil-gorsuch/

travis g raw

the U.S. Supreme Court's newly tilted right-wing majority will have a chance to leave its stamp on cases involving abortion, gun rights and torture, and the rulings will reveal who controls the court after Donald Trump jammed through three hardline conservatives.

The confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg takes away Chief Justice John Roberts' power to cast the deciding vote on any ruling, but legal experts disagree who will drive the majority's opinions in the session that starts this week, reported The Guardian. GUK

"Roberts's ambition is to keep the law as narrow as possible and keep as much of the court's legitimacy as possible while twirling ever toward the Republicans' agenda," said Elie Mystal, a justice correspondent for The Nation. "[Brett] Kavanaugh likes beer. Amy Coney Barrett likes Jesus. These are fundamentally narrow positions. Gorsuch wants to fundamentally change the law and reframe the way we think about the law. [Neil] Gorsuch wants to do horrible things, but ambitious things. He's got the intellectual tools to accomplish it."

Another court watcher thinks Justice Clarence Thomas will emerge as the most powerful member of the court.

"Roberts is only marginally in charge to the extent that he can bring Kavanaugh or Barrett with him," said Josh Blackman, of the South Texas College of Law Houston. "I think we are living in Justice Thomas's world. He is always thinking ahead several steps and has built an army of supporters."

Barrett and Justice Samuel Alito recently made unusually defensive remarks about the court's legitimacy after Mitch McConnell used his power as Senate majority leader to engineer a 6-3 conservative majority, which then allowed Texas to outlaw most abortions through its controversial "shadow docket" process.

"I think the thing to watch is whether Roberts can pick off one of the members of the [conservative] super majority to have the result come out differently than the hard right would want," said Garrett Epps, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law. "I think it may not be his court, but his role is by far the most interesting of any of the justices because he is – and he alone – an institutionalist, in the sense that he really cares about the Supreme Court and his place in history, more than he really cares about his own policy goals."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Reversing precedent is unusual

The Supreme Court rarely overturns its past decisions or precedents.

In my forthcoming book, “Constitutional Precedent in Supreme Court Reasoning," I point out that from 1789 to 2020 there were 25,544 Supreme Court opinions and judgments after oral arguments. The court has reversed its own constitutional precedents only 145 times – barely one-half of one percent.

The court's historic periods are often characterized by who led it as chief justice. It was not until the 1930s under Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes that it started to overturn precedents with any frequency. These were cases such as United States v. Darby, in which the court began to affirm President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal economic policies after previously rejecting them as unconstitutional.

Before then, of course, many cases asked the court to interpret clauses of the Constitution for the first time, so there were often no precedents to confront or overturn.

Under Chief Justices Earl Warren, Warren Burger, William Rehnquist and now John Roberts, the court overturned constitutional precedent 32, 32, 30 and 15 times, respectively. That is well under 1% of decisions handled during each period in the court's history.

When is precedent overturned?

For most of its history the court changed its mind only when it thought past precedent was unworkable or no longer viable, perhaps eroded by its subsequent opinions or by changing social conditions.

This happened in Erie Railroad v. Tompkins, a 1938 Supreme Court case overturning a 96-year-old precedent in which the court had constructed rules about how federal courts should handle cases involving parties from different states. The court in Erie said that the original decision proved to be unworkable and had been undermined by the court's own later decisions.

The court has also said that its precedents based on constitutional grounds deserve less respect than those in which the court interprets statutes or laws. The reason is that if Congress thinks the court has erred in a matter of interpreting a statute or law, it is relatively easy for them to overturn it by passing a new law. But it's quite hard to pass a constitutional amendment, so the only real way to update the judicial understanding of the Constitution is to overrule a precedent.

Of course the most famous reversal of precedent is the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education under the Warren Court, in which it reversed Plessy v. Ferguson and struck down segregation under the “separate but equal" doctrine.

Roe v. Wade is an important precedent. In 1973 the Supreme Court ruled that women have a right to terminate their pregnancies. That right was reaffirmed in 1991 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, with Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter noting that an entire generation of women came of age relying upon their right to control their bodies and terminate pregnancies in most circumstances. The justices said it would be wrong to upset that expectation.

Roe has also spurred opposition, with many wanting to overturn it. For years, presidents including Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Donald Trump sought to appoint justices to the Supreme Court with the goal of overturning Roe and, with it, abortion rights. Now with a 6-3 conservative majority, the court may be poised to do that.

Justices get more comfortable reversing precedent

Beginning with the Rehnquist court, justices have become more willing to reject precedents they think were badly reasoned, simply wrong, or inconsistent with their own senses of the constitutional framers' intentions. Justice Clarence Thomashas taken this position on abortion. Justice Amy Coney Barrett during her Senate confirmation hearing argued that Roe is not a so-called superprecedent, a decision so important or foundational that it cannot be overturned.

Chief Justice Roberts has been willing to overturn settled law when he thinks the original opinion was not well argued. He did so in Citizens United, a 2010 decisionoverturning two major campaign finance decisions, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and part of McConnell v. FEC.

In 2020, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh in Ramos v. Louisiana went out of their way to explain and justify their views on when constitutional precedent may be overturned. They echoed Justice Samuel Alito's discussion in 2018 in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Council Number 31. All three justices said constitutional precedent is merely a matter of court policy or discretion, more easily overturned than a precedent about a law. Sometimes, they said, constitutional precedents can be overruled if later judges view them as wrongly decided or reasoned.

Abortion foes have been preparing practically since Roe was decided to overturn it. They have set both the political conditions and legal justification to overturn Roe, and perhaps this year it will be the time when it finally happens.

David Schultz, Professor of Law, University of Minnesota; Professor of Political Science, Hamline University

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/amy-coney-barrett/

alexh

Although Donald Trump went down in history as a one-term president when he was voted out of office in 2020, he accomplished something that the United States' last two one-term presidents—Democrat Jimmy Carter and Republican George H.W. Bush — didn't: Trump appointed three justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Neil Gorsuch in 2017, Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 and Justice Amy Coney Barrett in 2020 were all Trump nominees. In an article published by CNN's website on May 5, legal analyst Joan Biskupic lays out some reasons why Barrett has been more of a game-changer on the High Court than Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh was a game-changer in that he replaced a libertarian: former Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired in 2018. Appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, Kennedy was a right-wing libertarian who was fiscally conservative but socially liberal and often sided with the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg over far-right social conservatives such as Justice Clarence Thomas and the late Justice Antonin Scalia when it came to abortion or gay rights. And Trump replaced a libertarian with a social conservative.

But the change from Ginsburg to Barrett was more dramatic, as Trump replaced Ginsburg — the High Court's most famous liberal — with a severe social conservative who is even more to the right than Kavanaugh. Barrett is very much in the Scalia/Thomas vein.

Yet Barrett, as Biskupic explains in her article, is more low-key in her demeanor than Scalia.

Biskupic explains, "Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett hasaligned most often withClarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch in her first months on the bench…. As she has adopted the legal method of her mentor, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Barrett has avoided the flamethrower rhetoric that defined him and some followers on the bench today. Of the cases heard in oral arguments and resolved already this term,she has voted 100% of the time with Thomas and Gorsuch."

Comparing Kavanaugh and Barrett, Biskupic observes, "Barrett's pattern so far contrasts with that of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who in the conservative bloc, has sided mainly with Roberts on the center-right. Differences between the newest appointees of former President Donald Trump could play out in major cases to be decided in the next two months over the Affordable Care Act, voting rights, and religious liberties when tested against LGBTQ interests, as well as next session in a 2nd Amendment gun rights case already on the calendar. The justices are also considering an abortion rights case for the 2021-22 term that would further illuminate Barrett's brand of conservatism."

Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed by President George W. Bush, has been right-wing in his judicial philosophy but more nuanced than Thomas or Scalia. And Biskupic notes that when Kavanaugh and Barrett are compared, Kavanaugh has been more likely to agree with Roberts.

"Kavanaugh has sidled since his 2018 appointment toward Roberts," Biskupic observes. "The chief and Kavanaugh have shared among the highest voting alignments for the past three years, according to statistics compiled by SCOTUSblog. Yet patterns of statistical togetherness go only so far. In several important cases when Roberts joined the liberal side, Kavanaugh remained with the right wing…. Barrett has voted so far in only a dozen cases that have been argued. That's where she has consistently been with Thomas and Gorsuch."

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/clarence-thomas/

higher profile

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/heres-the-case-for-impeaching-clarence-thomas-the-most-corrupt-supreme-court-justice

With the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, the radical right has completed its long and painstaking project to seize control of the Supreme Court, and to reshape constitutional law for generations to come. Barrett's elevation will give conservatives a 6-3 majority on the court and usher in a crisis of legitimacy for the third branch of government not seen since the 1930s.

The right's triumph has prompted anger and soul-searching among Democrats and progressives, sparking calls to expand the number of Supreme Court justices, echoing Franklin D. Roosevelt's unsuccessful effort to add additional seats to the high tribunal in the midst of the Great Depression.

Enlarging the Supreme Court is entirely within the power of Congress, as the number of justices is not set by the Constitution. The court's composition has, in fact, varied over time, ranging from six justices when the Constitution was ratified to 10 in 1863. The panel was reduced to nine by an act of Congress in 1867 and has remained there since then by statute.

While Democrats should definitely demand court expansion if they retake the White House and the Senate and hold the House, there is at least one additional step they should take to address the court's legitimacy crisis—the impeachment of its most corrupt member—Clarence Thomas.

Thomas should be impeached on charges of perjury for allegedly lying in his annual financial disclosure statements for over a decade and, more fundamentally, for lying in his 1991 confirmation hearing about his disgusting history of sexual harassment.

Although federal judges are appointed for life, their terms are subject to "good behavior." Like all civil officers of the United States, they can be removed, under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, "on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."

The impeachment process, as we were reminded by the experience of President Trump, consists of two basic steps: First, members of the House of Representatives impeach an official by adopting, on a simple majority vote, one or more articles of impeachment, which read very much like a criminal complaint or a grand jury indictment. Step two proceeds with a trial in the Senate, which has the power to convict on a two-thirds ballot. Ouster from office follows conviction automatically, and cannot be appealed.

Only three presidents—Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Trump—have been impeached in our history, and all were exonerated in their Senate trials. A fourth, Richard Nixon, resigned in the face of near-certain impeachment and removal for his role in the Watergate scandal.

The impeachment of federal judges, by contrast, has been far more common. To date, 15 federal judges have been impeached, and eight have been convicted by the Senate. Indeed, the only Senate impeachment trials resulting in convictions have involved judges.

Since 1988, three federal judges have been impeached and removed on charges involving perjury. The last judge to be impeached was G. Thomas Porteous Jr. of the Eastern District of Louisiana, a Clinton appointee who was convicted by the Senate and ejected from office in December 2010 for accepting bribes and, among other derelictions, signing false financial declarations under penalty of perjury.

Thomas, if targeted, would become just the second Supreme Court Justice to be impeached. In 1804, the House charged Associate Justice Samuel Chase with eight articles of impeachment for engaging in arbitrary and oppressive conduct and expressing political bias while serving as a trial judge in certain Sedition Act cases during an era when Supreme Court justices also conducted trials. An outspoken Federalist and supporter of John Adams, Chase incurred the ire of Thomas Jefferson and his Republican allies. Chase was acquitted the following year in a Senate trial presided over by Vice President Aaron Burr. (The chief justice of the Supreme Court presides only in presidential impeachment trials.)

As the Senate's website instructs, Chase's exoneration has since been construed to insulate the "judiciary from… congressional attacks based on disapproval of judges' opinions." Guided by the Chase example, an impeachment proceeding against Thomas could not be initiated because of policy differences Democrats may have with him, even though Thomas has demonstrated a flagrant disregard for the constitutional rights of minorities, women and criminal defendants during his tenure on the Supreme Court.

Like Porteous, however, Thomas is vulnerable to perjury allegations.

Under the 1978 Ethics in Government Act, all high-ranking federal officials are required to file yearly financial disclosure statements for themselves and their spouses to safeguard against conflicts of interest. But for 13 years, Thomas failed to report his wife Virginia's earnings on the mandatory annual financial disclosure forms that he signed under penalty of perjury, indicating that his spouse had no non-investment income when in fact she was steadily employed in high-level jobs as a policy analyst and an outspoken conservative activist.

According to Common Cause, Virginia—who is also a lawyer and a one-time aide to former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey—received more than $686,000 between 2003 and 2007, working for the Heritage Foundation. In 2011, claiming incredulously that he had misunderstood his reporting responsibilities, Thomas amended his financial disclosures, which can now be examined on the OpenSecrets.org website.

As University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos pointed out in a 2011 Daily Beast article, "The relevant question on the disclosure form isn't complicated: Even if Justice Thomas wasn't a lawyer, he shouldn't have needed to hire one to explain to him that the box marked NONE next to the phrase 'Spouse's Non-Investment Income' should only be checked if his spouse had no non-investment income." In Campos' view, Thomas' omissions were "criminal."

Thomas' alleged perjury in his testimony before Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 was of a far greater magnitude...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/why-the-right-wing-has-put-marriage-equality-and-lgbtq-rights-on-the-ballot/

same-sex marriage advocates expressed concern Monday after rightwing Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito issued a fresh attack on a landmark 2015 decision that had been hailed as a "transformative triumph'" for marriage equality and LGBTQ rights.

The attack came when the top court declined to hear an appeal from Kim Davis, a former county clerk in the Kentucky who refused, after the Obergefell v. Hodges et. al. decision, to issue same-sex marriage certificates citing her religious beliefs.

In a statement (pdf) accompanying the denial of Davis's appeal, written by Thomas and joined by Alito, the justices say "Davis may have been one of the first victims of this court's cavalier treatment of religion in its Obergefell decision, but she will not be the last."

The "petition provides a stark reminder of the consequences of Obergefell," they added.

"By choosing to privilege a novel constitutional right over the religious liberty interests explicitly protected in the First Amendment," Thomas and Alito wrote, "the court has created a problem that only it can fix. Until then, Obergefell will continue to have 'ruinous consequences for religious liberty.'"

The opinion drew sharp rebuke from James Esseks, director of the American Civil Liberties Union LGBT and HIV Project.

"It is appalling that five years after the historic decision in Obergefell, two justices still consider same-sex couples less worthy of marriage than other couples," said Esseks.

"When you do a job on behalf of the government—as an employee or a contractor—there is no license to discriminate or turn people away because they do not meet religious criteria. Our government could not function if everyone doing the government's business got to pick their own rules," Esseks said.

Attorney and trans rights activist Chase Strangio warned the comments from Alito and Thomas could signal a broad attack on the LGBTQ community.

First day of the SCOTUS term and Alito & Thomas call for the overturning of Obergefell. https://t.co/IwejJL6dGX

— Chase Strangio (@Chase Strangio)1601905370.0

"The attack on marriage equality will be part of a larger wave that also includes the criminalization of trans healthcare, the formulation of a constitutional right for cis people not to share space with trans people, the attack on our very existence," said Strangio, adding, "We must fight."

According to Tim Holbrook, a professor at Emory University School of Law, the choice of words in the opinion by Thomas and Alito sends "a signal to state legislatures to challenge Obergefell, at least on religious liberty grounds."

In his op-ed at CNN, Holbrook warned, "Such efforts could be successful," and continued:

Does this mean marriage equality will be overruled? It may not. Instead, the justices, with Justice Thomas's and Alito's statement as a preview, may carve out sweeping religious liberty exceptions to marriage equality. The court may also chip away at attendant rights, like adoption and allowing same-sex couples to be named as parents on birth certificates. It also would be problematic, if not impossible, for the court to eliminate existing marriages between same-sex couples. That may stay the court's hand to some extent.

"Nevertheless," added Holbrook, "marriage equality may be at risk."

Amplifying concerns is the fact that the Republican-controlled Senate is set to move " full steam ahead"—Capitol Hill Covid-19 infections be damned—with confirmation hearings next week for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, whom progressive activists say poses a threat to healthcare, reproductive justice, and LGBTQ rights.

"Amy Coney Barrett has openly claimed to hold similar views to [late Supreme Court Justice Antonin] Scalia, who Thomas and Alito channel with this opinion," HRC president Alphonso David said in a statement Monday.

"That fact, along with Barrett's ties to anti-equality extremist groups who aim to criminalize LGBTQ relationships in the United States and abroad," said David, "shows that Barrett will only embolden these anti-equality extremist views on the court."

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voter felon suppression 2020, pal of ginni and jok? invite to wedding

Cash matters, but O’Keefe’s personal connectionsare where the depth and seamlessness of this coordination with the Republican Party become truly apparent. They also offer a glimpse into the vast network that has formed to suppress the vote this fall—a network years in the making, of which Project Veritas is but a humble node.

Take litigator William Consovoy, the legal point man on many of the conservative-funded election integrity cases pursued during the Trump era. He is, like O’Keefe, a New Jersey native with a long history in local Republican politics. A former law clerk for Clarence Thomas, Consovoy is also reportedly a friend of Federalist Society Executive Vice President Leonard Leo, whose nephew David Maxham has been a friend of O’Keefe’s since their undergraduate years at Rutgers. (Maxham, naturally, was also invited to O’Keefe’s wedding.)

This year, Leonard Leo has stepped aside from day-to-day management of the Federalist Society to run a new conservative donor group, CRC Advisors, that is pouring money into Consovoy’s legal challenges in key battleground states across the country. CRC has been steering money into something called the “Honest Elections Project,” a fictitious name filed in Virginia for Leo’s old group the Judicial Education Project,now officially called the 85 Fund. As The Guardian reported, 99 percent of the Judicial Education Project’s funding in 2018 was a single $7.8 million donation funneled through Donors Trust.guk?

With generous assistance from the Honest Elections Project and the RNC, Consovoy’s firm Consovoy McCarthy PLLC has recently brought cases against the re-enfranchising of felons in Florida and sued to block California’s plans to deliver absentee ballots to all of the state’s registered voters.Consovoy has contributed to related motions filed in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, and Texas, where Ken Paxton’s victory against mail-in voting in May earned praise from President Trump on Twitter.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/conservative-supreme-court-justices-tortured-reasoning-in-the-disastrous-wisconsin-case-is-a-thin-excuse-for-their-true-purpose/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/the-supreme-court-is-poised-to-extend-gun-rights-at-the-worst-possible-time/

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The Supreme Court is poised to extend gun rights at the worst possible time

Supreme Court of the United States

Written by Bill Blum / Independent Media Institute April 8, 2020

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” —Second Amendment to the United States Constitution

As the deadly COVID-19 contagion sweeps across the country, gun sales are surging, spurred in many regions by panic buying and purchases by first-time firearm owners. Fearful and insecure Americans are taking advantage of weak and ineffective gun-control laws and stocking up, as President Trump might say, “like never before.”

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is poised to issue its first major Second Amendment opinion in more than a decade in a case that originated, fittingly, in New York City, now the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States. The case—New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York—has the potential to vastly extend the rights of gun owners, and not just in New York, but throughout the entire nation.

At issue is a New York City “rule” (the term the city uses for its local ordinances) that was adopted in 2001 to prohibit residents from transporting licensed handguns beyond municipal limits. The rule was challenged in a federal lawsuit filed in 2013 by the NRA’s New York affiliate and three individuals. A district court judge ruled in the city’s favor in 2015, as did the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 2018. The Supreme Court, however, agreed to review the case at the NRA’s request in January 2019, and heard oral arguments in December.

The plaintiffs contend that the city’s handgun transportation ban should be declared unconstitutional because it conflicts with the Supreme Court’s landmark 2008 decision on the Second Amendment, District of Columbia v. Heller.

In Heller, the Supreme Court struck down a ban on handgun possession in the nation’s capital, ruling for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to gun ownership. Deeply controversial and hotly contested, Heller split the Supreme Court along strict ideological lines, and was resolved on the basis of a 5-4 vote of the justices. The late Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion stood the prior judicial consensus on the Second Amendment on its head, rejecting the great weight of prior scholarship and earlier court opinions, including the Supreme Court’s 1939 decision in United States v. Miller, that had construed the amendment as protecting gun ownership only in connection with service in long-antiquated state militias.

Scalia’s opinion was met by a blistering dissent written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired from the bench in 2010 and passed away last year. Drawing on a wide array of historical sources, Stevens chided Scalia for ignoring the actual debates that took place during the founding era on the ratification of the Constitution and the drafting of the Second Amendment. Those debates, in Stevens’ view, demonstrated the amendment’s purpose was not to safeguard individual gun rights, but to guarantee the survival of the militias as a “collective right” of the citizenry as an alternative to the creation of a large federal standing army.

Stevens lost the battle of persuasion in Heller, and in 2010, in another 5-4 decision that also featured a Stevens dissent—McDonald v. Chicago—the Supreme Court extended Heller, holding that the individual right to keep and bear arms was incorporated by the 14th Amendment’s due process clause and hence was applicable to the states and local governments. The Second Amendment, as interpreted by Scalia, thus became the law of the land.

Although Scalia and Stevens are no longer with us, the ideological divisions they represented remain on the Supreme Court today. Indeed, when it comes to gun rights, the current court is even more conservative than it was in 2008. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, both appointed by Trump, are outspoken proponents of Scalia’s vision of the Second Amendment. And the tribunal’s remaining conservatives—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—participated in Heller and joined Scalia’s majority opinion.

Still, Heller by no means precluded all measures of gun control. As the Second Circuit noted in its evaluation of the New York handgun transportation ban that is now before the court, Heller was technically limited to possession of guns in the home, and established no clear limits on legislation aimed at regulating gun rights outside of the home.

“Like most rights,” Scalia wrote in Heller, “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited… [N]othing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

And in an enigmatic footnote to the above paragraph, Scalia added: “We identify these presumptively lawful regulatory measures only as examples; our list does not purport to be exhaustive.”

Adhering to Scalia’s reasoning, in the years following Heller, lower courts have upheld a broad range of state and local gun-control regulations, a dynamic that has prompted the NRA and other gun-lobby groups to urge the Supreme Court to take up another Second Amendment appeal to reaffirm the amendment’s importance and place stricter limits on gun control. They may have found the perfect test case in the New York transportation ban. Like Heller, the New York ban concerns an outright prohibition, which will be hard, if not impossible, to justify before the court’s conservative majority.

Realizing it would likely lose the case, New York City amended its transportation rule in June to permit residents to take their handguns to second homes, businesses or shooting ranges outside city limits. And in July, the city filed a formal motion with the Supreme Court, requesting that the case be dismissed as moot. The court denied the motion in October, setting the stage for another Second Amendment showdown.

In December’s oral arguments, the city again asked the court to moot the case. The city made no attempt to defend the transportation ban.

Unfortunately, given the city’s capitulation and the Supreme Court’s right-wing orientation, the only real remaining question is the scope of the NRA’s inevitable victory. Even if the court reconsiders the city’s request and enters a dismissal order, the NRA will walk away with a significant win, having forced the city to rescind one of the most stringent gun-control laws in the country. On the other hand, a decision on the merits on constitutional grounds in the NRA’s favor would reward the organization with an even bigger triumph, endangering gun-control laws everywhere.

A nation awash in firearms in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic awaits the court’s decision, which is expected by the end of June.

Bill Blum is a retired judge and a lawyer in Los Angeles. He is a lecturer at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. He writes regularly on law and politics and is the author of three widely acclaimed legal thrillers: Prejudicial Error, The Last Appeal, and The Face of Justice.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

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Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly February 25, 2020

You might be wondering why Trump decided to go on the attack against Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor this week.

To understand why Sotomayor has suddenly become a target, it is helpful to talk about the way that this administration is changing how presidential policies are being handled in the courts.

One of the reasons Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is so committed to stacking the courts with extremist conservative judges is that, as I pointed out last week, the Trump administration’s incompetence has led to an abysmal record in the courts. Whereas previous administrations prevailed in the courts 80 percent of the time, this president has failed in over 90 percent of the cases his administration has argued.

What this often means is that lower courts issue injunctions against the implementation of the administration’s policies while the case works its way through the courts. Attorney General William Barr complained about that practice in his speech to the Federalist Society.

First used in 1963, and sparely since then until recently, these court orders enjoin enforcement of a policy not just against the parties to a case, but against everyone. Since President Trump took office, district courts have issued over 40 nationwide injunctions against the government. By comparison, during President Obama’s first two years, district courts issued a total of two nationwide injunctions against the government…

It is no exaggeration to say that virtually every major policy of the Trump Administration has been subjected to immediate freezing by the lower courts. No other President has been subjected to such sustained efforts to debilitate his policy agenda.

Of course, Barr didn’t mention that those major policies have been frozen by the lower courts because the Trump administration failed to make a coherent case in support of them, so the courts have temporarily halted their implementation. As an example, this is what Coral Davenport wrote about their efforts to roll back Obama’s fuel efficiency standards.

In January, administration staff members appointed by President Trump sent a draft of the scaled-back fuel economy standards to the White House, but six people familiar with the documents described them as “Swiss cheese,” sprinkled with glaring numerical and spelling errors (such as “Massachusettes”), with 111 sections marked “text forthcoming.”

The cost-benefit analysis showed that consumers would lose more money than they would gain. And, because the new auto pollution rule lacks the detailed technical analyses required by law, the regulations would be unlikely to withstand court challenges…

More basic issues holding up the regulations point to another problem: the skeleton crew of inexperienced political appointees who are heading the drafting process may not be up to a job that would usually be handled by career federal workers with decades of expertise.

The Trump administration’s response to these failures has been to go directly to the Supreme Court and ask them to expedite emergency relief from the injunctions of the lower courts.

Professor Steve Vladeck, a CNN contributor who has studied the issue of emergency requests, noted in a recent piece for the Harvard Law Review that Solicitor General Noel Francisco has been more aggressive in seeking to “short-circuit” the ordinary course of appellate litigation than his immediate predecessors.

In an interview, Vladeck noted that Francisco has not always prevailed, “but he has done so far more often than his predecessors.”

“This is now the 24th time that the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to put a lower court decision on hold in less than three years compared to a total of eight such requests during the 16 years of the George W. Bush and Obama administration’s combined,” Vladeck said.

That is precisely what sparked Justice Sotomayor’s critique against the conservative justices on the Supreme Court, who have consistently been willing to grant that relief to the Trump administration.

The justice wrote that granting emergency applications often upends “the normal appellate process” while “putting a thumb on the scale in favor of the party that won.” Targeting her conservative colleagues, she said “most troublingly, the Court’s recent behavior” has benefited “one litigant over all others.”…

“Claiming one emergency after another, the Government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases,” Sotomayor said. “It is hard to say what is more troubling,” she said, pointing to the case at hand, “that the Government would seek this extraordinary relief seemingly as a matter of course, or that the Court would grant it.” She noted that in the case at hand, the lower court order that the Supreme Court lifted was narrow and only impacted one state.

That is what has placed Sotomayor’s name in the news. I seriously doubt, however, that Trump understands or cares about these legal maneuverings, which is why he couldn’t articulate his objections to Sotomayor during a news conference in India today.

The reason Trump is on the attack against liberal Supreme Court justices probably has more to do with a case that is being made against Justice Clarence Thomas. As we’ve seen, the president is in the midst of a purge of federal employees who don’t demonstrate enough loyalty to him. Jonathan Swan reported thatGinni Thomas—the wife of Clarence Thomas—has been deeply involved in lobbying on behalf of a purge, providing the administration with lists of who needs to go as well as potential replacements.}:

In response, there have been calls for Thomas to recuse himself on matters related to Trump and his administration. Trump’s call for Sotomayor and Ginsberg to recuse themselves is not only a way to further politicize the Supreme Court; it also provides his media enablers with a distraction from the issues surrounding Thomas and the ability to pretend that both sides do it.

As I’ve been suggesting for a while now, the Supreme Court is scheduled to issue rulings in several explosive cases prior to the November election. One of them has to do with whether or not Trump will be required to release his tax returns. From everything we’ve seen, that is the hill that this president is prepared to defend at all costs. And according to CNN, the latest dissent issued by Sotomayor could indicate that tensions are rising as the justices consider these major cases.

The justices are behind schedule in releasing opinions, and court watchers have questioned if the delay is caused in part by Chief Justice John Roberts’ required participation in the impeachment proceedings, or if the justices themselves are fractured over a number of cases. Although Sotomayor wrote alone, her opinion suggests unease behind the scenes.

All of this is probably just the opening salvo in what promises to be a very contentious season for the Supreme Court.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/heres-the-real-reason-trump-is-lashing-out-at-supreme-court-justices-as-his-cronies-try-to-short-circuit-the-judicial-process/

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/here-are-5-of-the-darkest-factors-in-justice-clarence-thomas-crusade-to-drag-the-supreme-court-to-the-far-right/

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Here are 5 of the darkest factors in Justice Clarence Thomas’ crusade to drag the Supreme Court to the far-right

written by Alex Henderson July 12, 2019

Arguably, the most damaging part of President George H.W. Bush’s legacy was nominating Justice Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991. Bush 41 didn’t replace the liberal Justice Thurgood Marshall with a Rockefeller Republican like Justice Sandra Day O’Connor or a right-wing libertarian like Justice Anthony Kennedy; he went far right with the Thomas nomination.

And as the Supreme Court has moved more and more to the right, the 71-year-old Thomas has only grown more influential.

Thomas is not only the justice who has spent the most time on the Supreme Court — he is also the most influential right-winger on the Court, especially after Kennedy’s resignation in 2018. That influence goes well beyond his seat, as countless clerks who worked for Thomas in the past have been nominated for the lower federal courts or joined the Trump Administration in some capacity.

Here are some of the reasons why Thomas’ far-right influence is so troubling.

1. Thomas opposes right-to-privacy decisions in general

With the addition of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018, it is entirely possible that Roe v. Wade — the 1973 ruling that, in effect, legalized abortion in all 50 states — will be overturned. And Thomas would no doubt vote to overturn Roe. But Thomas’ extreme social conservatism goes way beyond abortion: Thomas opposes right-to-privacy decisions in general and believes that there is no such thing as a right to privacy in the U.S. Constitution. So if Roe is overturned, other right-to-privacy rulings could be in danger as well — for example, 1965’s Griswold v. Connecticut (which struck down a contraception ban for married couples in that state), 2003’s Lawrence v. Texas (which struck down a Texas sodomy law) and 1969’s Stanley v. Georgia (which said that simple possession of sexually explicit adult material isn’t a crime even if it is obscene). Thomas is not only a threat to abortion rights: he is also a threat to everything from legal contraception to LGBTQ rights to the right to view consensual adult porn on the Internet.

2. Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a Thomas/Scalia disciple

It cannot be stressed enough how much of a departure Kavanaugh is from the justice he replaced, Anthony Kennedy. Although Kennedy was a fiscal conservative and a right-wing appointee of President Ronald Reagan, he was clearly a libertarian when it came to sexual freedom, LGBTQ rights and right-to-privacy decisions — and the Christian Right hated Kennedy as much as they love Thomas. But Kavanaugh is no libertarian: he is a severe social conservative in the vein of Thomas and the late Justice Antonin Scalia (Reagan’s most extreme appointee). So if Thomas, in the future, votes to roll back right-to-privacy decisions, Kavanaugh will no doubt be voting with him. And Kavanaugh is likely to be making far-right decisions for decades to come: as a 54-year-old Gen X-er, Kavanaugh might be on the Court 30 years from now if he lives as long as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

3. Thomas has no problem striking down long-established case law

In Latin, the term “stare decisis” means “let the decision stand.” When Sen. Susan Collins claimed — wrongly so — that Kavanaugh considers Roe v. Wade “settled law,” she was delusional. Kavanaugh, as a Thomas/Scalia disciple, doesn’t believe in stare decisis. So Kavanaugh would have no problem striking down decisions that were handed down 40, 50 or 60 years ago if he believed it would advance the cause of social conservatism. And Thomas, in his writings, has made it abundantly clear that he has no use for the “stare decisis” idea. Thomas would gladly roll back civil liberties protections added in the 1950s or 1960s if he believes they were wrongly decided, and both of the justices Trump has appointed so far (Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch) have been avid students of Thomas’ writings.

4. Thomas has influenced the Trump Administration even more than the George W. Bush Administration

As president, George W. Bush nominated right-wing jurists for the Supreme Court. But at least Chief Justice John Roberts, a Bush appointee, has had some nuance; Trump has no interest in nuance and has made it clear to the Christian Right that he will only nominate far-right social conservatives in the Thomas/Scalia vein. And Thomas, as Emma Green points out in a July 10 article for The Atlantic, has been a major influence on the Trump Administration.

Thomas, Green notes, “has had more of his former clerks nominated to federal judgeships under Trump than any other justice, past or present: ten, compared with Anthony Kennedy’s seven and Scalia’s five. Roughly one-fifth of Thomas’ former clerks either are in the Trump Administration or have been nominated to the federal bench by the president.”

The people who served as clerks under Thomas, Green explains, have ranged from Fox News’ Laura Ingraham to Carrie Severino (policy director of the Judicial Crisis Network).

In August 2017, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern reported that “everywhere you turn in Trumpland, you’ll find a slew of Thomas’ former clerks in high places.” And Thomas’ influence on the Trump Administration has only grown since then.

5. Thomas and his disciples believe that insurance companies should be allowed to victimize people with illnesses as much as they want

When the Supreme Court upheld most of the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare, as constitutional in 2012, Thomas was among the dissenters and argued that Congress doesn’t have the right to regulate interstate commerce in the way that Obamacare does. And with Gorsuch and Kavanaugh now on the Court, health care reform is facing even more danger than it did seven years ago. If the Supreme Court agrees with the premise of the GOP’s Texas v. Azar lawsuit and strikes down Obamacare as unconstitutional, at least 20 million Americans would lose their health insurance (according to the Urban Institute). Thomas and his disciples Kavanaugh and Gorsuch would have no problem with that.

If Democrats regained the presidency in 2020, kept their House majority and achieved a Senate majority, they could pass new health care legislation should the ACA be struck down. But with far-right ideologues like Thomas and his disciples having so much influence in the higher and lower federal courts, any type of laws that challenge the abuses of health insurance companies could be legally challenged as well.

In other words, health insurance companies will be allowed to abuse, harm and bankrupt Americans all they want if Thomas and his army of ideologues in the judicial system have their way.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/everybody-hates-john-roberts/

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Everybody hates John Roberts

THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY

30 JUN 2019 AT 14:08 ET

If a successful compromise is one that leaves both sides disappointed, then John Roberts had a banner day on Thursday. Liberals inclined to view the Supreme Court chief justice as a loyal Republican operative saw bitter confirmation in his decision that federal courts have no power to stop partisan gerrymanders. But conservative die-hards who questioned Roberts’s commitment to the movement will shake their heads at his decision to block the Trump administration, at least temporarily, from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census. That’s not to say that the partisan impact of the two rulings will be symmetrical. Roberts, who once famously insisted that his job is “to call balls and strikes,” tends to afford Republican pitchers a wider strike zone. But the pair of rulings gave each side plenty to fume about.

If you don’t believe me, just read Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissent in Department of Commerce v. New York, the census case. The question was whether the U.S. Census Bureau, which is part of the Commerce Department, would be allowed to add a question to the 2020 census asking whether respondents are U.S. citizens or not. While Roberts agreed with the other four conservatives that the answer ordinarily would be yes, he joined the liberal bloc in ruling that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s stated rationale for adding the question—that it was necessary to allow the Department of Justice to protect minority voters—was transparently false. The real reason was that the Census Bureau’s own research showed that a citizenship question would suppress response rates among undocumented immigrants, thereby leading to an undercount in Democratic-leaning areas and further enhancing Republican power after the 2021 round of redistricting.

The proof of this was overwhelming. As Roberts put it in an understated summary:

That evidence showed that the Secretary was determined to reinstate a citizenship question from the time he entered office; instructed his staff to make it happen; waited while Commerce officials explored whether another agency would request census-based citizenship data; subsequently contacted the Attorney General himself to ask if DOJ would make the request; and adopted the Voting Rights Act rationale late in the process.

In short,Roberts concluded, the voting-rights rationale was a pretext. Judges should give government officials the benefit of the doubt, he wrote, but “[a]ccepting contrived reasons would defeat the purpose of” judicial review.

You might think that would be an uncontroversial notion. But all four of Roberts’s conservative colleagues would have allowed the government to go forward with the question. Thomas’s dissent, which was joined by Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, was dripping in indignant contempt, all but accusing the majority of discriminating against the Trump administration: “The Court therefore upholds the decision of the District Court—which, in turn, was transparently based on the application of an administration-specific standard.” Later, in a passage that, other than syntactically, would not seem out of place in a Sean Hannity monologue, Thomas added: “I do not deny that a judge predisposed to distrust the Secretary or the administration could arrange those facts on a corkboard and—with a jar of pins and a spool of string—create an eye-catching conspiracy web.”

From the pitch of his outrage, you could almost forget that Thomas and the conservatives claimed victory in the day’s more consequential ruling, on partisan gerrymandering.

There’s nothing inherently conservative about gerrymandering—indeed, Thursday’s case, Rucho v. Common Cause, involved both a Republican gerrymander in North Carolina and a Democratic one in Maryland—but the decision is a boon to Republicans for the simple reason that they currently benefit far more from it. There are, in other words, more North Carolinas than Marylands. When Republicans swept into power in statehouses around the country in 2010, just in time for redistricting, they were armed both with both sophisticated new technology and an unprecedently rigorous plan for deploying it. The result is that in many states, Democrats are effectively locked out of taking back the legislature. In Wisconsin, for example, Democrats won 53 percent of the popular vote last year—and only 36 percent of legislative seats.

In his majority opinion in Rucho, Roberts didn’t deny that partisan gerrymandering is bad for democracy. Rather, he argued, there’s simply no manageable way for federal courts to police it. Since districting decisions made by elected officials will inevitably take political considerations into account, everyone knows some element of partisanship must be allowed. Therefore, Roberts reasoned, striking down a partisan gerrymander would require the Court to answer an unanswerable question: “How much is too much?” As distasteful as gerrymandering is, he concluded, it’s up to the political process (and perhaps state courts), not federal judges, to address the problem.

This line of reasoning drove liberals up the wall. The problem with egregious partisan gerrymandering is precisely that it makes it all but impossible for the disadvantaged side to win back power. To say that it’s up to the North Carolina legislature to undo its gerrymander is to say that the state’s Republicans should voluntarily cede their advantage. The practical upshot of Thursday’s ruling will be to help Republicans (and Democrats, in states like Maryland) hang onto power without actually winning over a majority of voters.

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan excoriated the conservative majority for failing to recognize that lower federal courts have already been converging on a manageable test for identifying excessive partisan gerrymanders, one that looks at whether the purpose and effect of districting is to “substantially” entrench the dominant party in power by diluting the other party’s votes. “But in throwing up its hands,” she wrote, “the majority misses something under its nose: What it says can’t be done has been done.” Liberal commentators have gone farther. Prominent election law scholar Rick Hasen wrote in the New York Times that “the opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts is disingenuous” because the Supreme Court regularly imposes vague-sounding standards like “reasonable” or “substantial” to draw boundaries in other areas of the law.

But while Roberts’s liberal critics have landed some punches, it’s a stretch to treat the gerrymandering ruling as a clear case of bad-faith partisan judging. Drawing the constitutional line between “partisan” and “too partisan” is no easy task. Consider Kagan’s response to Roberts’s question, “How much is too much?” Pointing to the truly extreme level of partisan precision in the North Carolina case, she treated the concern as trivial. “How about the following for a first-cut answer,” she wrote: “This much is too much.” It’s a cute line, but it’s not really an adequate answer. If the Court is to weigh in on these cases, it’s fair to expect it to establish a rule that goes beyond ad hoc judgments.

We may ultimately get a clearer answer to the question of whether Roberts’s ruling was really disingenuous. To show that the democratic process is up to the challenge of curtailing gerrymandering, he cites a litany of reforms, including nonpartisan redistricting commissions, which voters in Michigan and Colorado approved last fall. As it happens, the Court affirmed the constitutionality of such commissions in 2015, in a 5-4 decision with the now-retired Anthony Kennedy joining the liberals. Do you know who wrote the dissent? John Roberts. With Kennedy now replaced by Kavanaugh, it’s a safe bet that there are enough votes to overturn that precedent. But if Roberts chooses that path, it will be yet another blow to the flagging legitimacy of the institution he leads. And that much might really be too much.

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/6/3/clarence_thomas_cited_this_authors_book

Justice Clarence Thomas sparked harsh rebuke last week after claiming that abortion rights can be traced back to the 20th century eugenics movement. He made the comments in a 20-page opinion after the Supreme Court declined last week to take up a provision of an Indiana law that bars abortions based on the sex, race or disability of the fetus. The decision keeps in place a lower court injunction on the measure. But Justice Thomas indicated that he supports the law, writing in his opinion, “Enshrining a constitutional right to an abortion based solely on the race, sex, or disability of an unborn child, as Planned Parenthood advocates, would constitutionalize the views of the 20th-century eugenics movement.” To make his case, Justice Thomas cited a book by Adam Cohen titled “Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck.” We speak with Adam Cohen, who has since refuted the justice’s claims. In a piece for The Atlantic titled “Clarence Thomas Knows Nothing of My Work,” Cohen writes, “Thomas is absolutely right that we need to remember our eugenics past and make sure that we do not make the same mistakes again. He is absolutely wrong that individual women making independent decisions about their pregnancies are the eugenicists of our time.”

‘A gross misuse of historical facts’: Scholars tear apart conservative Justice Thomas’s latest anti-abortion screed

In that latest sign that at least that the Supreme…

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/attacks-on-federal-district-courts-are-the-perfect-distillation-of-whats-wrong-with-the-trump-presidency/

Here’s a proposed step towards the new autocracy that Donald Trump is promoting that we ought to stop in its tracks.

Vice President Mike Pence told the Federalist Society on Wednesday that the Trump administration intends to challenge the right of federal district courtsto issue rulings blocking nationwide policies, arguing that such injunctions are obstructing Trump’s agenda on immigration, health care and other issues.

It’s a perfect distillation of what’s wrong about the direction of the Trump presidency. It is a call for disruption – again – of judicial procedures and jurisdictions, all with the intent to protect any policy announcement by an imperial White House to be questioned. And it is not the White House’s jurisdiction to change.

In effect, the policy being presented by Pence would require multiple court challenges to reach a nationwide effect. The whole point of a federal judiciary is the opposite.

That the courts have become the favored battleground for Trump critics is as much a reflection of the fact that Trump policies have been announced too often in violation of the Constitution, of standing law and procedures, is not a fault of the judicial system. It is an indictment of the Trump policy-making machinery.

Pence argued that nationwide injunctions issued by federal judges “prevent the executive branch from acting, compromising our national security by obstructing the lawful ability of the president to stop threats to the homeland where he sees them.” He said the administration wants to bring the issue to the Supreme Court “to ensure that decisions affecting every American are made either by those elected to represent the American people or by the highest court in the land."

Administration officials have complained that announced policies like a Muslim Travel Ban were blocked in the courts simply get in their way, Constitutional issues apparently be damned.

Simply put, Pence is saying that lower courts should not be allowed to block the government from enforcing a law even if that law is found unconstitutional — they should only be allowed to exempt the specific person or people who sued from the law, argued RawStory.com.

The Supreme Court has never addressed the nationwide extent of the injunction against the ban issued by lower courts because the justices upheld the ban in its entirety. Experts say that for the Supreme Court to issue a definitive ruling on nationwide injunctions, it would first have to rule against the administration on the underlying merits of the case before it. Only at that point could the court consider whether a lower court order should apply nationwide or only to the people who are challenging an administration policy.

Obviously, a nationwide injunction has the effect of stopping “a federal policy everywhere,” as argued in the travel ban case. An alternative is for a judge to issue an order that gives only the people who sued what they want.

In his remarks,Pence quoted from an opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas,who joined the majority opinion upholding the Trump travel ban last June, but also wrote separately to say nationwide injunctions “are legally and historically dubious” and that the high court would have to step in “if federal courts continue to issue them.”

Trump has long railed against district courts, especially the 9th Circuit, on the West Coast, for blocking his initiatives, including efforts to overhaul the nation’s immigration system.

Trump raised the courts issue at a Florida rally, saying, “Activist judges who issue nationwide injunctions based on their personal beliefs undermine democracy and threaten the rule of law.”

Ironically, Trump won a 2-1 ruling from the 9th Circuit just this week that allows the administration to make asylum seekers wait in Mexico for immigration court hearings while a court challenge continues.

Yes, there is an argument that lawyers go “forum shopping” for a believed-to-be friendly court. But adoption of such a ban on national injunctions could adversely affect cases with classes of individual plaintiffs as well. More importantly, these court challenges have become a necessary defense in an increasingly authoritarian presidency. Trump simply wants to eliminate all challenges to any policy he favors.

This one ought to be stopped in its tracks.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/justice-clarence-thomas-bucks-neutrality-and-expresses-total-disdain-for-legal-precedents-report/

Now 70, Justice Clarence Thomas has become the elder statesman of the far-right “strict constructionist” or “originalist” wing of the U.S. Supreme Court.Thomas, who was nominated by the late President George H.W. Bush in 1991,has made it abundantly clearly that he believes many of the liberal and progressive Warren Court decisions of the 1950s and 1960s were wrongly decided—and journalist Adam Liptak examines the “originalist” nature of Thomas’ views in a March 4 article for the New York Times.

Liptak never actually mentions the late Chief Justice Earl Warren in his piece, but some of the rulings he examines—rulings Thomas is critical of—came from the Warren Court. For example, Liptak notes that Thomas is critical of the High Court’s 1964 ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan (which protects journalists against frivolous libel suits from politicians) as well as 1963’s Gideon v. Wainwright (which said that the 6^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires the government to provide defense attorneys for people accused of serious crimes). And not surprisingly, Thomas is highly critical of the post-Warren Court 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, which Thomas has described as “notoriously incorrect.”

In the article, Liptak quotes some legal scholars who address Thomas’ “originalist” views, including Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston. According to Blackman, “Justice Thomas, more than any other justice, is willing to revisit and reverse old precedents that are inconsistent with the Constitution’s original meaning.”

Liptak also quotes Stephen L. Wasby, an emeritus professor of political science at the University at Albany in Upstate New York. According to Wasby, Thomas “has written more than 250 concurring or dissenting opinions seriously questioning precedents, calling for their reconsideration or suggesting that they be overruled.”

Thomas’ views on Gideon v. Wainwright are a perfect example of his “originalist” thinking. When the Warren Court handed down that decision 56 years ago, it was taking an expansive, broad-minded view of the 6^{th Amendment}. Liberal and progressive legal scholars, citing Gideon, will argue that government is obligated to provide defendants in a criminal case with first-rate public defenders—and that defendants should be represented by sharp legal minds regardless of their financial status. But Thomas, Liptak notes, “wrote that the Sixth Amendment, as understood by those who drafted and ratified it, guaranteed only the right to hire a lawyer.”

Liptak’s article examines Thomas’ views on the doctrine of “stare decisis,” which, in essence, means respect for legal precedent. Thomas, Liptak writes, doesn’t believe in the doctrine at all.

Sen. Susan Collins addressed stare decisis when she voted to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh, Collins has insisted, would not vote to overturn Roe v. Wadebecause he considers it “settled law” and precedent—and Collins’ critics have argued that she is delusional if she truly believes that.

To Thomas, the fact that Roe v. Wade was handed down 46 years ago is irrelevant because stare decisis is a bogus concept. Liptak quotes the late Justice Antonin Scalia as saying that Thomas “does not believe in stare decisis, period.”

Donald Trump’s presidency has been a game changer on the U.S. Supreme Court. The death of Scalia in 2016 wasn’t really a game changer, as Trump replaced a far-right social conservative with another far-right social conservative: Justice Neil Gorsuch. But by replacing libertarian Justice Anthony Kennedy with Justice Kavanaugh in 2018, Trump made the “originalist” or “strict constructionist” mindset more prominent on the Supreme Court. And as Liptak’s New York Times piece illustrates, the “originalist” view of jurisprudence—and its disdain for 1960s and 1970s precedents—is alive and well in Justice Clarence Thomas.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/justice-clarence-thomas-has-been-secretly-lobbying-senators-to-get-controversial-trump-judicial-nominee-confirmed/

In a rare move **Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas** has been secretly lobbying Republican Senators to urge them to vote to confirm **President Donald Trump**‘s highly controversial judicial nominee, **Neomi Rao**.

Justice Thomas “is working behind the scenes to boost the prospects of his former law clerk, Neomi Rao, to serve on a powerful federal appeals court in Washington,” The Washington Post reports Thursday.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is a small but highly powerful appellate court that has the power to hear cases brought by or against the federal government. It “tends to have exclusive jurisdiction over matters that are likely to have a national effect,” and its judges are considered prime candidates to become Supreme Court justices.

Most recently, Judge, and now Justice Brett Kavanaugh sat on the D.C. Court of Appeals. Neomi Rao, whose rulings and stated beliefs are considered far out of the mainstream and by some entirely inappropriate for any judge sitting on the federal bench, is President Trump’s nominee to replace Kavanaugh now that he has been elevated to the nation’s top court. Four of the nation’s current sitting Supreme Court justices came directly from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Justice Thomas is not the only lobbyist in his family. His wife, far right wing Tea Party activist **Ginni Thomas**, a professional lobbyist, was recently in the news after it was discovered she has been lobbying President Trump inside the White House, disparaging transgender troops and women serving in the U.S. Armed Forces.

Thomas’ husband, Justice Thomas, likely will hear at least one case on the constitutionally of banning troops because they are transgender.

Meanwhile, Republicans opposed to Rao believes she is not extreme enough to overturn Roe v. Wade, the top target of the religious right and many conservative groups. Others, including some Democrats, point to her refusal to say if she believes same-sex relationships are a sin.

Other critics of Rao point to her college-era writings “about date rape, sexual assault and the responsibility of those involved. At times, she placed the onus on women to ‘accept responsibility,'” NBC News reported during her confirmation hearing.

“She was asked repeatedly about one article in the Yale Herald, headlined, ‘Shades of Gray,’in which she posited that sexual assaults at college parties might be avoided if women didn’t drink too much. She wrote that ‘a good way to avoid a potential date rape is to stay reasonably sober.'”

Rao has expressed regret about some of her earlier writings, “but she also said some of what she wrote amounted to ‘common sense observations’ that would make women less likely to be a victim of assault.”

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arch conservative Justice Thomas is now the most senior justice on the bench – and that has many troubling implications

Mon 2 Jul 2018 07.55 EDT Last modified on Tue 24 Jul 2018 13.08 EDT

‘Unthinkably horrible as it is, we may very well be entering a new era, the era of the Thomas court.’ Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

He is the most silent supreme court Justice. He has written almost no landmark decisions. Perhaps because of this, his extreme, rightwing jurisprudence has not been seen as very influential, unlike that of his ideological clone, the late Antonin Scalia or the court’s newcomer, Neil Gorsuch. But with the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas is now the most senior conservative and quite possibly, the most important.

By most measures he is, since Scalia’s death, the furthest right on the court’s ideological spectrum. Already, this most recent court term has been a debacle for the liberal justices who, according to Adam Liptak of the New York Times, largely failed to peel off Kennedy to form a majority in the major cases.  

So, unthinkably horrible as it is, we may very well be entering a new era, the era of the Thomas court.

Already there is much speculation that Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Kennedy will be, if confirmed, the decisive vote to overturn Roe v Wade, the decision legalizing a woman’s right to have an abortion. Trump is on record saying he intends to nominate justices who oppose Roe. Thomas is the lone surviving justice who voted in the 5-4 minority in Casey v Planned Parenthood, the landmark 1992 decision that upheld Roe. In a joint dissent, the conservative minority, including Thomas, said in Casey: “We believe that Roe was wrongly decided, and that it can and should be overruled consistently with our traditional approach to stare decisis in constitutional cases.” So, it would be perfectly plausible that, if and when a new, even more conservative majority on the court decides to overturn Roe, Thomas would be chosen to write the notorious decision.

This would be the ultimate irony, given that one of the epic lies Thomas told during his 1991 confirmation hearing was that he had never discussed Roe v Wade. In subsequent books and articles, various people have said they heard him express his opposition to abortion before he joined the court.

Already, there are signs of Thomas’s growing influence. The Judicial Crisis Network, a rightwing organization, is already spending $1m to support whoever emerges as Trump’s new nominee. That organization is headed by Carrie Severino, a former Thomas law clerk. Her group spent millions to confirm Justices Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito and John Roberts. The group is closely allied with the Federalist Society, which has screened virtually all of the Trump judicial appointments.

JCN operates as a dark money pit and does not disclose its donors. According to tax filings, another rightwing dark money group, the Wellspring Committee, has given JCN nearly $10m through 2014. Wellspring, in turn, is run by a couple known to be close to Justice Thomas and his wife, Ginni, who has been active in various rightwing groups and causes. It is likely that Ginni Thomas will be a player, visible or not, in any upcoming supreme court confirmation battle.

Where once he spoke only before rather obscure and reliably friendly conservative audiences, Thomas has been more public of late. According to Slate, he appeared in April with Kyle Kashuv, a Parkland survivor who opposes gun control at an event in Washington DC, where according to Kashuv, the justice told him the second amendment “won’t be touched”. The previous November, Thomas gave an interview to Fox’s Laura Ingraham,the rightwing host who is another one of his former law clerks. In February, according to Slate:

“the justice issued his Trumpiest opinion yet, condemning his colleagues for refusing to review a lower court’s decision affirming the constitutionality of California’s “cooling-off” period for gun purchases. (These waiting periods have been shown to save lives.) He assailed the court for having “more favored rights” than the Second Amendment, overturning laws restricting abortion, free speech, and personal privacy while ignoring gun restrictions. He also rebuked the lower court for protecting the free expression of nude dancers and the marriage rights of same-sex couples. His dissent was an embarrassing, discursive tirade that might as well have been ghostwritten by Dana Loesch; no other justice joined it.”

It’s been too easy to dismiss Thomas as a rightwing crank who doesn’t matter much. That’s about to change. By inheriting the mantle from Kennedy as the longest serving conservative on the court, his stature inherently grows. On a Thomas court, John Roberts could become the swing, more moderate vote in certain cases. This is a measure of how far to the right the court has tilted.

In the era of #MeToo, it’s also beyond galling to see the man who sexually harassed Anita Hill and lied his way to confirmation in 1991 become so influential.

But this is exactly what Donald Trump has undoubtedly dreamed of.

And a Thomas court is exactly what people who truly value the constitution and human rights must fight to make sure we never see.

• Jill Abramson is a Guardian US columnist

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