ricky silberman

see judge lawrence fedsoc

see vast RW conspir:

the cabal is Laurence silberman clerks (ricky) master leaker says david brock (feeder farm team to clarence clerks?)

ginni mafia? Women for Thomas --> IWF

let jan 6 guy off, but came down hard on bannon?

judge Nichols received a Bachelor of Arts in 1992 from Dartmouth College, where he majored in philosophy and graduated with high honors. He received a Juris Doctor in 1996 from the University of Chicago Law School, where he graduated Order of the Coif and was a member of the University of Chicago Law Review. He began his legal career as a law clerk to Judge Laurence Silberman of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He then clerked for Associate Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court of the United States.^[2]

^=^

omg

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/i-knew-brett-kavanaugh-during-his-years-republican-operative-don-ncna907391

no lnx

I knew Brett Kavanaugh during his years as a Republican operative. Don't let him sit on the Supreme Court.

We were part of a close circle of cynical hard-right operatives being groomed for much bigger things.

Sept. 7, 2018,

By David Brock

I used to know Brett Kavanaugh pretty well. And, when I think of Brett now, in the midst of his hearings for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, all I can think of is the old "Aesop's Fables" adage: "A man is known by the company he keeps."

And that's why I want to tell any senator who cares about our democracy: Vote no.

Twenty years ago, when I was a conservative movement stalwart, I got to know Brett Kavanaugh both professionally and personally.

Brett Kavanaugh proves the Supreme Court swing vote is dead

SEPT. 4, 2018]

Brett actually makes a cameo appearance in my memoir of my time in the GOP, "Blinded By The Right." I describe him at a party full of zealous young conservatives gathered to watch President Bill Clinton's 1998 State of the Union address — just weeks after the story of his affair with a White House intern had broken. When the TV camera panned to Hillary Clinton, I saw Brett — at the time a key lieutenant of Ken Starr, the independent counsel investigating various Clinton scandals — mouth the word "bitch."

But there's a lot more to know about Kavanaugh than just his Pavlovian response to Hillary's image. Brett and I were part of a close circle of cold, cynical and ambitious hard-right operatives being groomed by GOP elders for much bigger roles in politics, government and media. And it’s those controversial associations that should give members of the Senate and the American public serious pause.

[Related OPINION

GOP's maneuvering during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings will seriously damage the Supreme Court's legitimacy]

Call it Kavanaugh's cabal: There was his colleague on the Starr investigation, Alex Azar, now the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Mark Paoletta is now chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence; House anti-Clinton gumshoeBarbara Comstockis now a Republican member of Congress. Future Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson were there with Ann Coulter, now a best-selling author, and internet provocateur Matt Drudge.

At one time or another, each of them partied at my Georgetown townhouse amid much booze and a thick air of cigar smoke.

In a rough division of labor, Kavanaugh played the role of lawyer — one of the sharp young minds recruited by the Federalist Society to infiltrate the federal judiciary with true believers. Through that network, Kavanaugh was mentored by D.C. Appeals Court Judge Laurence Silberman, known among his colleagues for planting leaks in the press for partisan advantage.

[Related OPINION Tom Steyer and Ron Fein: Stop Kavanaugh's confirmation until Mueller's investigation is done]

When, as I came to know, Kavanaugh took on the role of designated leaker to the press of sensitive information from Starr's operation, we all laughed that Larry had taught him well. (Of course, that sort of political opportunism by a prosecutor is at best unethical, if not illegal.)

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Another compatriot was George Conway (now Kellyanne's husband), who led a secretive group of right-wing lawyers — we called them "the elves" — who worked behind the scenes directing the litigation team of Paula Jones, who had sued Clinton for sexual harassment. I knew then that information was flowing quietly from the Jones team via Conway to Starr's office — and also that Conway's go-to man was none other than Brett Kavanaugh.

[Recommended OPINION

What could be Florida Gov. DeSantis’ undoing on the national stage? HBCUs.

OPINION

Trump's election plot was eye-opening. And the Senate is finally paying attention.]

That critical flow of inside information allowed Starr, in effect, to set a perjury trap for Clinton, laying the foundation for a crazed national political crisis and an unjust impeachment over a consensual affair.

But thecabal'sgodfather was Ted Olson, the then-future solicitor general for George W. Bush and now a sainted figure of the GOP establishment(and of some liberals for his role in legalizing same-sex marriage). Olson had a largely hidden role as a consigliere to the "Arkansas Project" — a multi-million dollar dirt-digging operation on the Clintons, funded by the eccentric right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife and run through The American Spectator magazine, where I worked at the time.

Both Ted and Brett had what one could only be called an unhealthy obsession with the Clintons — especially Hillary. While Ted was pushing through the Arkansas Project conspiracy theories claiming that Clinton White House lawyer and Hillary friend Vincent Foster was murdered (he committed suicide), Brett was costing taxpayers millions by pedaling the same garbage at Starr's office.

A detailed analysis of Kavanaugh's own notes from the Starr Investigation reveals he was cherry-picking random bits of information from the Starr investigation — as well as the multiple previous investigations — attempting vainly to legitimize wild right-wing conspiracies. For years he chased down each one of them without regard to the emotional cost to Foster’s family and friends, or even common decency.

[Related OPINION

Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination is the result of years of unopposed conservative organizing]

Kavanaugh was not a dispassionate finder of fact but rather an engineer of a political smear campaign. And after decades of that, he expects people to believe he's changed his stripes.

Like millions of Americans this week, I tuned into Kavanaugh's hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee with great interest. In his opening statement and subsequent testimony, Kavanaugh presented himself as a "neutral and impartial arbiter" of the law. Judges, he said, were not players but akin to umpires — objectively calling balls and strikes. Again and again, he stressed his "independence" from partisan political influences.

But I don't need to see any documents to tell you who Kavanaugh is — because I've known him for years. And I'll leave it to all the lawyers to parse Kavanaugh's views on everything from privacy rights to gun rights. But I can promise you that any pretense of simply being a fair arbiter of the constitutionality of any policy regardless of politics is simply a pretense. He made up his mind nearly a generation ago — and, if he's confirmed, he'll have nearly two generations to impose it upon the rest of us.

https://truthout.org/articles/the-not-so-independent-women-s-forum-was-born-in-defense-of-clarence-thomas-and-the-far-right/

hBO’s new film on demand, Confirmation, revisits the painful battle over the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court in spite of the testimony of Anita Hill that he sexually harassed her.

Some pundits have attempted to the film, even though it has several scenes that portray Thomas and his wife Ginny as quiet, sympathetic figures and not as the outspoken right-wing political activists that they were and are.

One of the harshest critics of the film is a group that calls itself the “Independent Women’s Forum” (IWF).

IWF is hardly independent though, despite its name.

It is deeply imbedded in the right-wing political infrastructure.

In fact, IWF began as part of the coordinated effort to get Thomas confirmed so he could advance the right-wing’s legal agenda on the courts, in the face of deep fears by many that he would limit individual rights as a judge—fears later validated by his rulings and extreme dissents as a Justice.

As Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson wrote in their book Strange Justice: “the falsehoods and distortions involved in the selling of Clarence Thomas to the American people neither started nor ended with the treatment of Anita Hill’s accusations. From the beginning, the placement of Thomas on the high court was seen as a political end justifying almost any means.”

Central to the efforts to get Thomas confirmed were not only the attacks on Hill by GOP Senators but also press outreach used to discredit her that was orchestrated by a small group of powerful right-wing women.

That confirmation battle put one of the most reactionary judges in modern history on the Court, and it also led to the creation of IWF, an ultra reactionary women’s group opposing women’s rights in numerous ways.

IWF’s creators defended Thomas, despite the detailed evidence against him, and the organization they founded has defended him and continued to attack Hill since 1991.

The Thomas hearings also led to a backlash from voters to a US Senate that had 98 men and only two women as Senators.

In spite of a temporary majority supporting the confirmation of Thomas based on the incomplete information provided in the Senate hearings, American voters resoundingly rejected the idea of an all-white male Senate Judiciary Committee examining a woman’s testimony about sexual harassment.

The 1992 election that followed swept out President George H.W. Bush and swept in four women as new Senators and more women in other offices, making that election “the Year of the Woman.”

Today, 20 US Senators are women; and IWF leaders and alums have regularly attacked the most powerful woman elected Senator since the Thomas hearings, Hillary Clinton.

IWF — which has had close ties to the billionaire Koch Brothers, before they were infamous, and to other rightwing donors — has used its well-funded platform to secure numerous press appearances without much scrutiny of its record and sometimes because of its reactionary positions.

That’s in part because media outlets have defaulted to point-counterpoint “reporting” that gives equal weight both to facts IWF opposes and to outlier claims that are IWF’s stock in trade.

Part of the playbook was set as IWF came into being, as its founders deployed women in the press to counter a fellow woman whose testimony threatened their political agenda and ally.

Much of that claim boiled down to denying her experience as inauthentic and deceitful because Thomas had not sexually harassed them. It was a brutally effective tactic.

This is the story of IWF’s roots.

IWF: Born to Give a Woman’s Voice to Defending Clarence Thomas

On June 28, 1991, the first black man to serve on the US Supreme Court, Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall — an icon to the civil rights community — announced his retirement.

Ten days later, President Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, a 43-year old African American judge who had a controversial tenure as President Reagan’s Chairman of the Equal Opportunity Commission (EEOC), where he challenged core ideas about equal economic opportunity for women, such as equal pay andcomparable worth.

Although it was only 16 months before the next presidential election and even though the choice of a young right-winger like Thomas to fill the beloved Justice Marshall’s seat was a lightening rod for controversy, the Democratic-led Senate Judiciary Committee scheduled hearings on his nomination for September.

As the controversy over Thomas’ nomination grew, a small group of right-wing women began meeting for lunch to discuss the nomination at the offices ofTed Olson in the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

One of the women at those lunch meetings was Barbara Kay Bracher, a lawyer who married Olson in 1996.

Following the Thomas confirmation, she would go on to staff investigations of the Clinton Administration as a congressional aide and to write a diatribe called “Hell to Pay: the Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” which was published by the right-wing bookseller Regnery shortly before Olson perished on a plane in the 9/11 attacks on her way to a taping for Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect” TV show.

(Ted Olson became famous for taking theBush v. Gore case to the US Supreme Court, where Justice Clarence Thomas sided with him and four other GOP Justices in stopping the Florida recount in 2000, making Republican George W. Bush president despite Democrat Al Gore winning the popular vote. Bush then named Ted Olson Solicitor General of the United States.)

The driving force at those pro-Thomas strategy sessions in Olson’s office back in 1991 was Rosalie “Ricky” Silberman, who had worked with Thomas as Vice-Chair of the EEOC and was one of his confidantes.

Before that, Silberman had worked as the press secretary for GOP SenatorBob Packwood, who later resigned in 1995 in the wake allegations that he harassed and assaulted numerous women he worked with.

(Ricky Silberman was also married to Thomas’ mentor from Thomas’ brief time as a judge on the DC Circuit: Judge Laurence Silberman, a very political judge who among other things later tried to clear George W. Bush of culpability for lying about Iraq’s weapons and was later given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by Bush.)

The third major figure in these lunches was Anita K. Blair, who was a lawyer who became General Counsel for IWF. President George W. Bush made her Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and in 2011 she was hired as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Department on human resources in the Obama Administration.

In the later 1990s during the Republican effort to impeach Democratic President Bill Clinton, Blair claimed on behalf of IWF that:

“nothing ever did more to trivialize sexual harassment than the sorry spectacle surrounding Anita Hill … Given prime-time exposure on national television Hill told a bizarre, uncorroborated story about Thomas, her boss at two federal agencies. Hearing her belated complaints about off-color jokes allegedly told about 10 years before, millions of Americans wondered, ‘What on earth does this have to do with sexual harassment?’ Americans learned the answer from Hill and her supporters: ‘Sexual harassment isn’t about sex, it’s about power.’ The Anita Hill spectacle wasn’t about sexual harassment; it was about the exercise of pure partisan political power. The media circus surrounding Hill and Thomas was produced and directed by liberal operatives, includingfifth-columnistslike NPR’s Nina Totenberg.” [jewish?]

Those three right-wing politicos—Silberman, Olson, and Blair—formed an ad hoc committee called “Women for Judge Thomas,” which ultimately became a non-profit group dubbed the “Independent Women’s Forum.”

The Clarence Thomas Nomination Begins and IWF’s Founders Step Forward

But even before Anita Hill was in the picture — discovered by Senate Judiciary Committee staffers vetting the Bush nominee — allies of Thomas knew his controversial record as President Reagan’s chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) could play poorly with many women and others concerned about equality.

The Women for Judge Thomas committee began holding press conferences the month President Bush announced Thomas’ nomination to a lifetime position on the Court in July.

Thomas was in his early 40s and had never argued a case before the US Supreme Court, and he had only had 16 months of experience as a sitting judge on any court.

His selection was considered a tactical masterstroke by C. Boyden Gray,President Bush’s White House Counsel, who had been criticized for letting the first vacancy in Bush’s term go to New Hampshire Justice David Souter, who was considered by the far right to be not “conservative” or activist enough to deliver judicial votes to change the law in the ways they wanted.

By putting forward an African American with right-wing bona fides, at Gray’s urging the Bush White House sought to mute Democratic objections for fear of offending a major constituency over fighting a nominee with a rags-to-riches life story.

(Gray is the grandson and also the nephew of three presidents of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco. After President George H.W. Bush lost his bid for another term in the 1992 “Year of the Woman” election, Gray became chairman of David Koch’s Citizens for a Sound Economy, which would later officially join forces with IWF.)

But Thomas’ limited judicial experience and the hearings on his nomination deepened concerns of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

As the New York Times reported: “‘Judge Thomas lacks the experience and qualifications that a Supreme Court Justice ought to have,’ said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont. ‘He fled from his record and he refused to answer legitimate questions.'”

Leahy also noted: “‘Nothing in Judge Thomas’s record or testimony suggests the level of professional distinction or constitutional grounding appropriate for a Supreme Court nominee. His legal and judicial experiences are limited. His speeches and writings have shown little in the way of analysis or scholarship.'”

So, when his nomination was considered, the Committee deadlocked 7-7 on his nomination but then voted to send the nomination to the full Senate for a vote without a recommendation for or against confirmation. Although the Democrats had a 57-43 majority, a number of Southern Democrats had already pledged to vote for Thomas to be confirmed.

Hill Comes Forward and IWF’s Founders Step Up to Counter Her in the Press

Before the Senate vote could be held, however,National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg broke the story that the Senate investigation had uncovered allegations that Thomas had made unwanted advances toward some of his subordinates in his leadership positions in the Reagan Administration.

Totenberg received a tip that Professor Anita Hill, a conservative black law professor, had told the Senate that Thomas had made sexual comments to her when he was her supervisor when they both worked for the Reagan Administration.

This shocking development increased the volume of concern about confirming Thomas to a lifetime job on the highest court in the land, and the Senate Judiciary Committee scheduled another round of hearings to examine the allegations.

Under the guidance of Ricky Silberman, the Women for Judge Thomas Committee identified women who worked with Thomas who said they had not been sexually harassed by him and that he had behaved professionally toward them.

Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigators—including a Democrat named Ricki Seidman—identified another staffer who said she had been subject to sexual advances in the workplace by Thomas and also interviewed colleagues of Professor Hill, whom she confided in about the inappropriate things she said Thomas said.

As Steve Kornacki noted in Salon:

“Three Hill friends — Susan Hoerchner, Ellen Wells and John Carr — testified under oath that she had told them about Thomas’ conduct as it happened between 1981 and 1983. ‘Anita said that Clarence Thomas had repeatedly asked her out … that he wouldn’t seem to take ‘no’ for an answer,’ Hoerchner told senators. ‘The thing Anita told me that struck me particularly and that I remember almost verbatim was thatMr. Thomas had said to her, “You know, if you had witnesses, you’d have a perfect case against me.”‘”

On October 11, 1991, in nationally televised hearings, Hill testified in detail about things Thomas had said to her when she worked for him. While many observers were shocked by the graphic details, the Republicans on the Committee and other Thomas proxies strongly attacked Hill’s character and her decision to continue working for Thomas rather than file a legal complaint, despite her concerns that doing so would destroy her career and her future.

Hill had explained on NPR that her decision to testify was a difficult one, and was made on moral grounds because Thomas, as Chair of the EEOC, the agency that enforces federal workplace discrimination laws, had been “in charge of protecting rights of women and other groups in the workplace” but instead was “using his position of power for personal gain.”

Simply put, by sexually harassing her as she described, Thomas was alleged to be engaging in the kind of workplace discrimination that his agency was tasked with stopping.

Many women believed that such behavior demonstrated that Thomas was unfit for a position of power and a lifetime position on the nation’s highest court.

But the Senate’s hearing about her allegations morphed into an inquisition of her, much like how criminal defense attorneys attempt to discredit rape victims in order to prevent the conviction of their clients.

What people saw on TV was an all-white Senate Judiciary Committee filled with several men who impugned Hill’s character, doubted her intelligence, and attacked her motives — despite her conservative credentials — instead of treating her with respect and giving any credit to her eye-witness accounts of Thomas’ behavior. The attack on Hill was led by Republican Senators Arlen Specter, Orrin Hatch, and Alan Simpson on the Committee, and by Missouri’s John Danforth, Thomas’ champion in the Senate.

More than 20 million American households tuned in to watch Hill testify at hearings chaired by then-Senator Joe Biden, who is now Vice President.

As Politico noted last fall when Vice President Biden was considering running for president: “Biden’s done a lot over the past 24 years, including authoring the landmark Violence Against Women Act … But that hasn’t erased the memories of how Biden presided over those hearings … blamed for doing little to stop the attacks on Hill.”

He has also been criticized for opting not to call Angela Wright, an African American who worked in the press office at the EEOC, whose testimony would have echoed Hill’s charges of sexual harassment.

Wright had “detailed a pattern of harassing behavior, including an instance in which Thomas asked her what her bra size was.” Wright had also told her colleague, Rose Jourdain, at the time that Thomas made comments about “her figure, her body, her breasts, her legs, how she looked in certain suits and dresses.”

Wright’s statement was allowed to go into the official hearing record but she was not allowed to testify to help rebut Thomas’ denial.

In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, another Thomas aide “Sukari Hardnett wrote that many black women at the agency felt they were ‘an object of special interest’ to their boss. ‘If you were young, black, female and reasonably attractive,’ her letter read, ‘you knew full well you were being inspected and auditioned as a female,'” as noted by Kornacke.

But the Senate and the country did not get to hear from these women.

When Mayer and Abrahamson conducted a full investigation for their book, rather than the rushed examination that occurred in the Senate, they also discovered that classmates of Thomas reported:

“that he often recounted sexually explicit films in lurid detail. Kaye Savage, a former colleague, reports that the walls of his bachelor apartment were covered with Playboy nude centerfolds. The owner of a video store near the EEOC [called Graffiti] said Thomas was a regular customer for pornographic movies.”

This evidence would have corroborated Hill's testimony and refuted Thomas’ denial, but none of this was part of the Senate’s hearings.

Years later, another woman “Lillian McEwen, who had dated Thomas in the 1980s and who was promoted by Thomas backers as something of an alibi during his confirmation hearings, spoke publicly about her relationship with him for the first time [in 2010]. Now retired, McEwen said that ‘Hill’s allegations that Thomas had pressed her for dates and made lurid sexual references rang familiar,’ as the [Washington] Post put it—as detailed by Kornacke in Salon.

Kornacke added: “McEwen said that Thomas had been ‘obsessed with porn’ and ‘would talk about what he had seen in magazines and films, if there was something worth noting.’ She also said that Thomas would tell her about the women he worked with — even commenting to her about one’s bra size. ‘He was always actively watching the women he worked with to see if they could be potential partners,’ McEwen told the Post. ‘It was a hobby of his.'”

That information was not known to the Senate at the time Clarence Thomas’ nomination was being considered, but none of that has changed IWF’s line of attack against Hill.

Thomas Fires Back

In response to Hill’s testimony, Thomas attacked the Senate for what he flamboyantly described as a “high-tech lynching” of an “uppity” black man who dared to be conservative.

He used the televised broadcast of the hearings to portray the Senate’s consideration of Hill’s allegations against him as racist and as promoting racial stereotypes—even though his accuser was also a conservative African American.

GOP senators like Arlen Specter were given wide leeway to attack Hill with incredibly derogatory and personal claims such as suggesting she had “fantasies about sexual interest in her” and that she “was having a problem being rejected by men she was attracted to.”

Hill took and passed a lie detector test, but Republican Senators smeared her further claiming she passed because she believed her “fantasies” about Thomas pursuing her.

Many women were disgusted by the way the Senate treated Hill and by the words and actions of Thomas, but not Silberman and her committee of Women for Judge Thomas, which held press conferences and other outreach buttressing the Republican attacks on Hill.

The IWF predecessor did so by pressing the claim that because he had not harassed the women they assembled he could not have harassed Hill and by arguing that she had “other” motives, which fueled the right-wing narrative that she had made up the allegations supposedly because she wanted to be with Thomas.

Meanwhile, the Judiciary Committee hearings ended by effectively giving Clarence Thomas the last word, as Hill did not testify again to rebut Thomas’ denial of her allegations.

Thomas Was Confirmed in One of the Closest Votes in History

Given how forcefully the GOP Senators sought to discredit Hill and the deployment of women in defense of Thomas, perhaps it should come as no surprise that the public remained divided over Thomas’ confirmation. Several polls indicated that a majority favored his confirmation, while the remainder were split between opposing and being undecided.

In a contest of he-said-she-said, it appeared that a majority of those polled believed Thomas, who had so evocatively taken umbrage at the allegations against him. Having other women, like Ricky Silberman, defend him certainly helped his case.

And, at the same time, the public was denied the chance to hear from another woman willing to testify that she had also been sexually harassed by Thomas.

Also lost in the hot-button national conversation was the message that no one is entitled to a lifelong job on the US Supreme Court.

So, on October 15, 1991, the Senate handed Thomas a lifetime job on the Court, with narrow 52-48 vote (with 11 Democrats joining 41 Republicans and 2 Republicans — Senator Jeffords (R-VT) and Senator Packwood (R-OR) — joining the Democrats).

Hill was home in Oklahoma, and Thomas, after he was confirmed for the lifetime post at the youthful age of 43, reportedly swore he would stay on the Court for 43 years to get his revenge on his enemies.

It was out of the ugliness of the Clarence Thomas nomination fight that the “Independent Women’s Forum” was born.

IWF Continued to Fight Hill Even After Thomas Was Confirmed

If the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee had sought to incapacitate Anita Hill with an array of punches at her reputation, Ricky Silberman seemed determined to throw the knockout blow.

A year to the day after her senate testimony, Hill returned to Washington DC to recount her experience. At a conference at Georgetown Law, she spoke in academic terms while analyzing the structures that had colluded against her, and received a standing ovation for her bravery.

Across the city on that same day, Ricky Silberman held a counter-conference at the Federalist Society.

Speaking to that audience, Silberman accused Hill of being a liar, labeled the assembled group of academics at Georgetown “the extreminists,” and proclaimed that Hill’s “unsubstantiated charge of sexual harassment launched the mother of all gender wars.”

Later that year, in 1992, Silberman formally founded IWF with Barbara Bracher (Olson), Anita Blair and Lynn Cheney to fight that so-called “gender war.”

However neither Silberman nor IWF would let the Anita Hill testimony rest.

In 1993, David Brock published the book “The Real Anita Hill,” an alleged investigation into the “true motives” of Hill’s testimony.

Silberman helped Brock edit, assemble, and advertise the book, which by all accounts was an orchestrated hit piece.

Brock, who had repeatedly referred to Hill in the media as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty,” would later apologize for his actions, and label himself as a “witting cog in the Republican sleaze machine.” (Brock has disavowed his past as a political hit man for the right-wing and now leads groups challenging the right-wing and is also now aligned with Hillary Clinton.)

Silberman, who passed away in 2007, never apologized. The IWF tribute to her included a tribute from her memorial by Clarence Thomas.

Beyond Attacking Anita Hill, IWF Routinely Peddles Reactionary Claims

As documented by Barbara Spindel in Slate, five years after Hill’s testimony, IWF ran a cover-story in its 1996 “Women’s Quarterly” magazine where Elizabeth Larson, an IWF staffer, speculated that women were “spurred on by Anita Hill’s example” and now found “it more profitable to litigate than to work.”

In that article, Larson also suggested that women should simply “deal with” sexual harassment, a position the organization would advocate for in the 1990s time and again.

As detailed by researcher Lee Cokorinos in his book, “The Assault on Diversity: An Organized Challenge to Racial and Gender Justice,”IWF received substantial financial underwriting by right-wing funders like the Scaife Foundation and the John M. Olin Foundation to focus many of its efforts on Silberman’s “gender war.”

In the words of Anita Blair, who served as an IWF leader from 1992 until 2000, “it was in 1977 or 1978 that feminism should have declared victory and gone home… All that was needing to be done had been done.”

In keeping with this fictitious worldview, IWF opposed a host of women equality initiatives throughout the 1990s using misleading data and taking some extreme positions:

• when lobbying against the Senator Biden’s “Violence Against Women Act,” IWF claimed “wives instigate violence, including severe violence, against husbands more often than husbands do against wives.”
• IWF argued that gender integration of the Virginia Military Institute would cripple national defense,
• IWF asserted that the problem of sexual assault on college campuses was overblown, since it is “inherently incredible” that female college students “are unable to report assaults to authorities,”
• and much more, including assailing key Title IX protections for female athletes.

Like every GOP-aligned group in the 1990s, IWF also supported efforts to impeach President Clinton, reaching out to Kenneth Starr for legal assistance as early as 1994. Barbara Olson and other IWF-ers helped carry the torch against Bill and Hillary Clinton.

IWF also provided Republicans in Congress with women’s voices to testify against affirmative action, social safety net programs, and gun violence mitigation measures.

As a whole, IWF was focused on combatting a caricature of what it described as “radical feminism.” [strict fr vs nurture mo?]

Over the past 25 years since the Clarence Thomas hearings, IWF has given a female face and voice to opposing almost every mainstream and common sense protection for equality that’s been advanced — opposing equal pay, paid sick leave, increasing the minimum wage, and protecting women’s reproductive privacy and freedom, and much more —many of which Thomas has also sought to weaken or strike down from the Supreme Court.

Over the years, IWF has not lost its interest in attacking Hill, even though its latest spin is about its supposedly “family-friendly” policies that put Wall Street in the driver’s seat and would take away responsibilities from employers regarding maternity leave, despite overwhelming business support for expanding employer-paid maternity and family leave, as the Center for Media and Democracy recently documented in a story broken by Lydia DiPillis in The Washington Post.

IWF’s kind of outlier, free-market fundamentalist approach should come as no surprise since IWF and David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity have been close partners—even sharing space and leadership for a number of years—and because the Koch network of billionaires uses an array of vehicles to push an anti-government, anti-science, anti-worker agenda.

But the claim that IWF is merely a “right-leaning think tank,” given its legacy and extreme positions, ignores the history of a group that began with efforts to discredit Anita Hill and that continues to traffic in denial and disdain, despite the evidence that has mounted against so many of its claims.

==

origin of IWF [trump, kavanaugh?] --> killed Roe

**http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2016/04/clarence_thomas_female_supporters_in_the_iwf.html**

Confirmation Bias

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How “Women for Judge Thomas” turned into a conservative powerhouse.}:

By Barbara Spindel

clarence thomas anita hill.

Anita Hill’s televised testimony that Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her is credited for ushering in the Year of the Woman. But it also has another, less visible legacy.

Right on the heels of FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson, the HBO film Confirmation offers another opportunity to relive a depressing ’90s spectacle—in this case, Clarence Thomas’Supreme Court hearings. Anita Hill’s televised testimony that Thomas sexually harassed her, and her poor treatment at the hands of the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee, are often credited with raising awareness of the issue of workplace sexual harassment and ushering in the so-called Year of the Woman, the 1992 election of four women to the Senate. (Confirmation premieres April 16 and stars Scandal’s Kerry Washington as Hill and The Wire’s Wendell Pierce as Thomas.)

But the Thomas hearings have another, less visible legacy. A small group of prominent Washington women rallied around the nominee; they were headed by the lateRicky Silberman, a friend of Thomas’ who, like Hill, had worked with him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Calling themselves Women for Judge Thomas, they pointedly demonstrated that not all women, simply by virtue of their sex, were ready to don an “I Believe Anita Hill” pin.This ad-hoc bunch—which included Anita Blair, Barbara Ledeen, and the late Barbara Olson—went on to form the Independent Women’s Forum, a D.C. nonprofit devoted to waging war on mainstream feminism.

Back in the 1970s, Phyllis Schlafly and her allies had whipped up fears of unisex public bathrooms and female military conscription in order to help kill the Equal Rights Amendment. After that, groups such as Schlafly’s Eagle Forum and Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America railed against reproductive rights and gay rights and championed traditional gender roles. But among conservative women’s groups, the IWF was something new. If you squinted, its members—enterprising, educated professionals—looked like they could belong to the National Organization for Women. Instead, they had an extreme loathing for the feminist movement.

The IWF argued that second-wave feminism had solved the problem of sex discrimination. In a 1997 interview with now-defunct conservative magazine Insight, Blair, who was by then IWF president, said that current feminists were “playing out their own Freudian drama on the policy stage, saying, ‘Well, my first husband walked out on me, or I never had dates in high school, so all men are bad.’ ” A 1997 IWF press release called National Pay Inequity Awareness Day “a cruel hoax … designed to brainwash girls and young women into believing that they are victims.”

The IWF’s Elizabeth Larson, in the organization’s Women’s Quarterly magazine, called sexual harassment an issue drummed up by “a growing number of women, many spurred on by Anita Hill’s example … [who] find it more profitable to litigate than to work.”After the 1994 passage of the Violence Against Women Act—spearheaded by then-Sen. Joe Biden in what was widely seen as atonement for his mishandling of the Thomas hearings—the IWF argued that the legislation should be repealed or receive zero funding; IWF spokeswoman (and ’90s right-wing It Girl) Laura Ingraham referred to VAWA as feminist “pork” with a “tear-jerker” title. The group also took on affirmative action, headlining a Women’s Quarterly article on the topic “That’s No White Male, That’s My Husband”—a phrase that revealed a lot about IWF constituents’ racial identities and loyalties. (“You can’t have white guys saying you don’t need affirmative action,” Ledeen told the Washington Post when asked why the anti-feminist IWF had organized as women in the first place.)

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[Laura Ingraham appears with Sen. George Allen at a fundraiser on Oct. 7, 2006, in Maidens, Virginia.

In 1995, NOW President Patricia Ireland, in a considerable understatement, called it “a little startling” that the new and tiny conservative upstart IWF, with fewer than 2,000 members, was garnering media coverage to rival that of Ireland’s mass-membership organization. It surely helped that stalwart right-wing donors including Richard Scaife and the Koch brothers were funding the IWF, and that its well-connected roster included former National Endowment for the Humanities chairwoman (and wife of Dick Cheney) Lynne Cheney,Who Stole Feminism? authorChristina Hoff Sommers, neoconservative writer (and wife of Norman Podhoretz) Midge Decter, and Wendy Lee Gramm and Mary Ellen Bork, married, respectively, to Texas Sen. Phil Gramm and rejected Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.

Hill was often dismissed as overreacting to a joke about a pubic hair on a Coke can.

While much of the IWF’s campaign against feminism was waged in the media, the group also took the fight to Capitol Hill; the IWF testified before Congress against the Violence Against Women Act and affirmative action, and filed amicus briefs opposing the enforcement of Title IX and the coeducation of the Virginia Military Institute.

After the election of George W. Bush, the IWF’s clout grew as its members received posts within the new administration, among them Elaine Chao as labor secretary, Diana Furchtgott-Roth as chief of staff of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and Blair as deputy assistant secretary of the Navy. Most absurdly, twoIWF members, then-president Nancy Pfotenhauerand board member Margot Hill, were appointed to the administration’s National Advisory Committee on Violence Against Women.

Despite engaging in serious business, the IWF’s spokeswomen never appeared to take themselves too seriously; they loved to bait feminists but always with a smile. Blair said, “There’s a telltale way to find a liberal feminist: It’s the nasty wrinkles around her mouth that she gets from frowning. You’ll probably find my side with laugh lines.” “We have no angry agenda,” Grace Paine Terzian, then publisher of Women’s Quarterly, told a journalist in 1995. When Wendy Kaminer wrote on right-wing challenges to feminism in the American Prospect the following year, the IWF’s Elizabeth Lurie responded in a letter to the editor that she had found the piece “howlingly funny.” All of this forced cheer was intended to highlight the contrast between the IWF’s anti-feminism and its caricatured version of feminism, which, according toHoff Sommers in a 1996 60 Minutes profile of the IWF, had come to mean “that you’re chronically offended, that you’re looking for oppression and bias under every tree.”

Plenty of people still see Hill as fitting this description, even 25 years after the Thomas hearings. Although she accused Thomas of repeated graphic descriptions of pornographic films, including scenes of rape and bestiality, and of detailed boasts about his own sexual prowess, Hill was and is often dismissed as overreacting to a joke about a pubic hair on a Coke can. Indeed, IWF managing director Carrie Lukas recently described Hill’s allegations against Thomas as “rather PG-rated.”

Of course, the IWF exists not because its founders thought Hill was overreacting but because, as friends of Thomas, they thought she was lying. In the years since—when downplaying the existence and impact of sex discrimination and of gender-based crimes such as harassment, rape, and domestic violence—the IWF doesn’t suggest that all women are lying. The group has frequently suggested, however, that women who speak out about these issues are whining, and should stop playing the victim, and ought to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. In that sense the IWF, whose current mission is to “improve the lives of Americans byincreasing the number of women who value free markets and personal liberty,” has ties to Thomas that are not merely personal but philosophical as well.

The women of the IWF continue to stand by Clarence Thomas, and he by them. After Silberman’s 2007 death, Thomas sat down with the group’s Michelle Bernard and Charlotte Hays to talk about his friend for the IWF newsletter. “Sometimes at IWF we are accused of being anti-women and anti-feminist, because our mantra is that all issues are women’s issues,” his interviewers noted. “I wouldn’t worry about that too much,” Thomas responded, proceeding to describe his own experiences being called “traitor” and “Uncle Tom.” “When I am criticized, I take it as a compliment,” he said. “If I weren’t relevant, they wouldn’t talk about me. Don’t worry about it. You just wish them good health and do it with a smile.”

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/cult/lifespring/main.htm

laura Blumenfeld

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, September 10, 1991; Page F01

ho's afraid of Virginia Thomas? She's a soft-spoken, hard-working daughter of the heartland. A brainy Omaha lawyer who has scaled the sheetrock of professional Washington. A churchgoer who invites homeless people out to lunch. A good friend. A good family. Why the fuss over Mrs. Supreme Court Nominee?

Her critics see her as more than just the supportive spouse who'll accompany her husband, Clarence, today as he begins Senate confirmation hearings. They see a woman with strong opinions on issues that are bound to come before the court. They find in her further grounds for opposing him.

Some women's rights activists are upset by her lobbying against such issues as comparable-worth legislation and the Family Leave Act. Some religious rights groups are troubled by her anti-cult activities in light of her involvement with Lifespring, a controversial motivational group.

Even the color of her skin is being used to determine the content of Clarence Thomas's character. The fact that she is white has drawn criticism from some blacks who see the marriage as evidence that Clarence Thomas has rejected his roots.

"My real question is, Why me?" said Virginia Thomas, when asked for an interview. She has declined to talk with reporters until after the hearings. She's not the story, she said. Yet she is a compelling and persuasive figure.

"The one person {Clarence Thomas} really listens to is Virginia," said longtime friend Evan Kemp, chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. "He depends on her for advice."

Even the way the two of them came together seems surprising -- at first. Clarence spent his childhood with segregation and bigotry, in a dirt-poor town with no sewers or paved roads. His father abandoned him when he was 2 years old. Virginia grew up in lily-white suburbia; her parents wintered in Florida. Her father, a successful engineer, doted on his children.

But look deeper and you'll find the perfect couple. They both keep five pictures of each other on their desks. Married more than four years, they act "like they're on their honeymoon," one close friend said. "Intellectual soul mates," said another. Ideologically, they are so in sync that they both took stands against comparable worth well before they met.

In their respective careers, the Thomases have embraced the view that women and minorities are hindered, rather than helped, by affirmative action and government programs. True equality is achieved by holding everyone to the same standard, they believe.

"I don't think it's fair to say she's anti-women's rights," saidRicky Silberman,vice chairwoman of the EEOC and a friend of the Thomases. She said Virginia Thomas opposed legislation on comparable worth because it would have involved the government in determining wages, which is "not good for the economy, not good for workers, not good for women."

Virginia Thomas has represented the conservative viewpoint in her jobs as a staffer for a Republican congressman, as spokeswoman at the U.S. Chamber of Congress and as deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Labor.

"Virginia Thomas is not supporting the interests of working women in America by the positions she's taken," said Pat Taylor, president of Business and Professional Women. "She can have only a negative influence on her husband, which is unfortunate because you'd like to believe that women who achieve a position of responsibility and influence would use that position to help women."

"If he is influenced by his wife, a white conservative who lobbied against comparable pay for women, he will be anti-women's issues," wrote USA Today columnist Barbara Reynolds in a July 5 piece. Reynolds, who is black, also is concerned by Thomas's choice of a white wife.

"It may sound bigoted; well, this is a bigoted world and why can't black people be allowed a little Archie Bunker mentality?" Reynolds said later. "Here's a man who's going to decide crucial issues for the country and he has already said no to blacks; he has already said if he can't paint himself white he'll think white and marry a white woman."

Clarence Thomas advocates a colorblind society, and his marriage may well be an example of that philosophy. But others see a different symbolism.

"His marrying a white woman is a sign of his rejection of the black community," said Russell Adams, chairman of Howard University's department of Afro-American studies. "Great justices have had community roots that served as a basis for understanding the Constitution. Clarence's lack of a sense of community makes his nomination troubling."

Some religious leaders are troubled as well. Dean Kelley, the National Council of Churches' counselor on religious liberty, wrote a critique of Clarence Thomas that was used as grounds for his organization's opposition to the Supreme Court nominee. The author did not mention Virginia Thomas in his text, but said in an interview that he was concerned about her involvement in theCult Awareness Network (CAN), a Chicago-based organization that says it educates the public about "destructive" cults. That involvement, he said, might affect her husband's handling of religious liberty cases if he shares her views on the subject.

Clarence Thomas is not a member of CAN, although he has attended at least one CAN event with his wife, who is a member, according to Cynthia Kisser, the group's executive director.

"The mere fact that she is involved in CAN is chilling in terms of free exercise of religion," said Earl Trent, counsel for the American Baptist Churches. Kelley, among others, says members of the anti-cult organization support forcible deprogramming of religious adherents. CAN denies the charges.

Trent said freedom of religion has come under attack in recent Supreme Court decisions and "a Supreme Court justice's wife who is involved in activities which threaten that freedom makes us uneasy."

Prairie Republican

Uneasy? Chilling? Negative influence?

She is a tall woman, with friendly brown curls, clever blue eyes and a smile that makes you smile. How did this amiable 34-year-old wind up churning so many a gut?

Ginni Thomas grew up in Omaha, the youngest of four children. Her parents, Donald and Marjorie Lamp, were upper-middle-class Republican Party insiders who stressed family and religion at home.

Ginni loved visiting her uncle's farm in Iowa, where she could drive the family tractor. But she was no corn husker. In high school she showed her proclivity for politics, wowing teachers and her classmates in student government, the debate club and the teenage Republican club.

("She was a good student and that's all," her father said before affirming his wariness toward the press and hanging up.)

"Mom was the big politician and Ginni wanted to be like her," said her brother Russell Lamp, 16 years her senior. Marjorie Lamp ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature, served on county and state Republican central committees and was a delegate to national conventions, he said.

Ginni went on to the Jesuit-run Creighton University in Omaha and earned a BA in business communications and political science. She attended Creighton's law school in the early 1980s and, as always, excelled.

"She was hungrier to learn than most students I've had in 12 years," said Richard Shagrue, a law school professor. Thomas studied constantly, but managed to find time to help organize several campaigns for local Republicans, among them Hal Daub, a friend of the Lamps. Freshman congressman Daub arrived in Washington in January 1981 with his star volunteer in tow.

Thomas thrived in Daub's office, said her then-office manager, Jack Horner. On Ginni's first day, Horner checked in early, at 8 a.m., to show her that he and his staff were a hard-working crew. But when he arrived at the office, he found Thomas busy at her desk. "She had been there since the crack of dawn," he said.

Thomas worked her way up to legislative director. She had a great rapport with Daub and was "in sync" with the congressman's opinions, including his antiabortion stance, Horner said.

"She was exuberant, enthusiastic and very excited," said Mark Mackee, a fellow staffer. "It was the early Reagan years and she was in the middle of it."

The Lifespring Experience

She also was in the middle of a mess.

During the early '80s, Thomas enrolled in Lifespring, a self-help course that challenges students to take responsibility for their lives. Most of the program's 300,000 graduates have found it be a favorable experience. There are, however, a small percentage of clients who are deeply disturbed by Lifespring's methods, which involve intense emotional self-examination.

Thomas told a Washington Post reporter in 1987 that she was confused and troubled by some of Lifespring's exercises. In one session, trainees listened to "The Stripper" while disrobing to skimpy bikinis and bathing suits. The group stood in a U-shaped line, made fun of fat people's bodies and riddled one another with sexual questions.

"At first Ginni was feeling pretty good and enthusiastic about Lifespring," recalls her minister, the Rev. Rodney Wilmoth of Omaha's St. Paul United Methodist Church, who corresponded with Thomas at the time. "But later she was concerned about its influence and began to sense the organization had a cultlike mentality."

Terry Nelson, vice president of Lifespring, said the group is not a cult and that Virginia Thomas's account of the training exercises has been taken out of context. "Are our people enthusiastic, intense and emotional? Yes," Nelson said.

Bronson Levin, a clinical psychologist in Bailey's Crossroads and a Lifespring graduate who specializes in treating what he calls "casualties," said people who are not prepared for the intense emotional experience of Lifespring or who have hidden traumas tend to become overwhelmed as childhood memories come thundering back to them during training.

"I remember Ginni felt manipulated by the group," Wilmoth said. "She was losing her own freedom of who she was."

It took Thomas months to break fully from Lifespring's "high-pressure tactics," she told The Post in 1987. "I had intellectually and emotionally gotten myself so wrapped up with this group that I was moving away from my family and friends and the people I work with. My best friend came to visit me and I was preaching at her using that rough attitude they teach you."

Finally, Daub, Thomas's boss, confronted her. "We talked about it and ultimately she thought it through and took action to extricate herself," Daub said.

Thomas contacted Kevin Garvey, a Connecticut stockbroker turned counselor, who gets a steady stream of referrals from psychologists and physicians.

"I got a phone call from her asking for help," Garvey recalled. He met with her from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. at Hamburger Hamlet in Georgetown on a Sunday afternoon in 1984, he said, and left feeling satisfied that the young woman would be all right. "The picture of her as a totally destroyed individual is not true," he said.

Thomas felt guilty about breaking her Lifespring "commitment," she said in the 1987 interview. She hid out in another part of the country to avoid constant phone calls from fellow trainees who felt it was their responsibility to make Thomas keep her commitment to Lifespring.

Her friends describe her as levelheaded, thoughtful, smart. Her involvement with Lifespring baffles them. But at least one close friend had an inkling.

"There's a kind of naivete about her, a kind of innocence you have to be careful with," said Wilmoth, her minister. "Ginni is a very, very trusting person -- she once invited a homeless man out to lunch with her in a fancy Washington restaurant -- I'm sure that's one of the reasons she was very susceptible to this group. She was looking for spiritual growth and trusted those people would do the right thing."

Cult Awareness

Since 1985 Ginni Thomas has been a public advocate against cult activities. She has attended Cult Awareness Network conventions, including the 1990 convention in Chicago, according to Patricia Ryan, who is the organization's president and the daughter of Leo Ryan, the congressman killed at Jonestown, Guyana. Thomas has spoken on panels and organized anti-cult workshops for congressional staffers in 1986 and 1988.

"Ginni feels she has been personally victimized and feels a responsibility to educate others," Ryan said.

CAN, however, has had its own share of trouble. Religious liberty advocates accuse it of supporting deprogrammers who kidnap members of religious groups and coerce them to undergo treatment. CAN's adversaries have included fundamentalist Christian splinter groups, the Church of Scientology and the Unification Church.

CAN officials maintain that cults tried to stifle Thomas's activities while she worked at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as a labor relations attorney during the mid-'80s. Fred Krebs, Thomas's supervisor, confirmed receiving letters objecting to her involvement in anti-cult work. He declined to name the group that sent the letters but said, "Ginni was very careful not to identify herself with the Chamber while pursuing her anti-cult activities."

CAN officials said cult groups are trying to use Virginia Thomas's involvement with the network to torpedo her husband's nomination.

"If Ginni is the wife of a Supreme Court justice, it's probably a little scary for the cults," Ryan said.

The year Ginni Lamp married Clarence Thomas, now 43, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission began taking an interest in the role of new age groups in the workplace. The EEOC, then headed by Clarence Thomas, started work on a policy statement governing "new age training programs which conflict with employees' religious beliefs," according to Cathleen Courtney, the EEOC staff attorney who drafted the memo in May 1987.

It was the same month the couple were married.

Virginia Thomas was very concerned about such training programs, according to Peter Georgiades, a Pittsburgh lawyer who has filed cases against Lifespring and who met Thomas through their anti-cult activities.

"Ginni was interested in the problem of employers effectively compelling employees to participate in training which was inimical to their religious beliefs," Georgiades said. "She would ask me about it, to think about the problem and possible solutions."

Clarence Thomas signed an EEOC "policy guidance" explaining the legal rights of employees who object to such training in September 1988. Virginia Thomas was thrilled, Georgiades recalls. No one, from top EEOC officials on down, could state with certainty where the initiative for the policy had come from, although Courtney suggested it may have been prompted by press reports or field complaints. Asked about the policy guidance, Ginni Thomas said she was familiar with it, but declined to comment on its genesis.

"Virginia is very smart and a very good lobbyist," said Evan Kemp, current chairman of the EEOC. "She might have discussed it with him, but even though {her husband} is madly in love with her, he is very independent."

Kemp said he did not think Clarence Thomas signed off on the policy because of his wife's anti-cult stance: "He wouldn't even do that for his grandfather."

Comparable Views

Ginni Thomas had plenty of other issues to fight for during those years, from 1985 to 1989, when she served as a labor relations attorney at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. She represented the interests of the business community at congressional hearings on such issues as comparable worth, affirmative action and federal child care legislation.

Acting on behalf of the Chamber, Thomas led the opposition to the Family and Medical Leave Act, which would have required companies with 50 employees or more to provide 12 weeks of unpaid leave and continued medical benefits to employees at the time of childbirth or a medical emergency. While Thomas's friends call her a firm believer in women's rights, her public activities have antagonized many women's groups.

In June of 1985, at least a year before she met Clarence Thomas, Ginni Lamp found herself allied with the EEOC chairman in his rejection of comparable worth. The fact that women don't receive equal pay for different jobs that require equal training and responsibility doesn't mean they suffer from discrimination, Clarence Thomas said. "We found that sole reliance on a comparison of the intrinsic value of dissimilar jobs -- which command different wages in the market -- does not prove a violation of Title VII" of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Clarence Thomas told a news conference.

Lamp, speaking for the Chamber, praised the EEOC decision.

"Rather than using our civil rights laws to identify and address discrimination as it exists in the workplace," she said, "comparable-worth advocates want to label a social phenomenon -- the fact that women on average make less than men on average -- as 'discrimination' and then use our civil rights laws for purposes for which they were never intended."

A perfect match. All they needed now was a boardroom table across which to set eyes on each other.

Love-Struck

That table materialized at an Anti-Defamation League meeting in New York.

During the spring of 1986, they both turned up at an ADL civil rights colloquium.

"Anybody who followed EEOC policy at the time would have read about Ginni in the papers and thought she was a middle-aged woman in a power suit and Oxfords," said Ricky Silberman, vice chairwoman of the EEOC. "And there she sat -- I was thunderstruck -- this very beautiful young woman."

At the end of the session, Thomas and Lamp slipped away and traveled back to Washington together. Three months later, Thomas took Silberman out to lunch at Clyde's in Georgetown and told her, "'I want you to know that I'm in love,' " Silberman recalled. They were engaged soon after and married by the following summer.

"She's made him a much happier man," Silberman said.

She calms him down. She lights him up. He makes her feel like the most important person on the planet. He jokes. She laughs. The Thomases' friends agree: They are thrilled to have found each other.

In a 1986 Good Housekeeping article that named Virginia Lamp as one of "28 Young Women of Promise," Lamp said that her ultimate goal was to run for Congress. Her biggest obstacle, however, was "finding a husband who'll be supportive of a woman in public life."

"She'd always been plain too busy for romance," said her best friend from law school, Jody Agers. "Clarence was one of her first serious relationships."

Clarence Thomas also seemed plain too busy for romance after he divorced his first wife, Kate Ambush, in 1984. ("It was an amiable divorce," said Ambush's father, Nelson, "no knock-down, drag-out fight.")

"You need to find a wife," Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) teased Thomas, Jet magazine reported in 1987, after Thurmond finished Thomas's confirmation hearings for the EEOC. Jet named Clarence Thomas one of Washington's most eligible bachelors.

When Clarence Thomas found the perfect bachelorette, and the couple announced their engagement, they raised eyebrows and blood pressure. This was, however, primarily among those who hadn't met the love-struck pair.

"I can guarantee you I was surprised when I found out she was going with a black man," Ginni Thomas's uncle Ralph Knop said from his farm in Iowa. "It was unusual for us."

"But he was so nice, we forgot he was black," her aunt Opal added, "and he treated her so well, all of his other qualities made up for his being black."

At the wedding, which was held in a largely white Methodist church in Omaha, "there was some buzz in the congregation because people didn't realize he was black and there was a sort of a 'Huh? Oh,' " recalled the Rev. Wilmoth.

But friends and neighbors said the interracial nature of their marriage is irrelevant. They said Ginni Thomas's family welcomed Clarence Thomas from the beginning.

"If you have any feelings about black color, you forget about it as soon as you start talking to him," her father, Donald Lamp, was quoted as saying in the Omaha World-Herald.

Ginni Thomas's color is an issue to some blacks, however. "There's a lot of controversy about an emergent group of black male conservatives who have exhibited a tendency toward interracial marriage," said Ronald Walters, chairman of the Howard University political science department. He cited author Shelby Steele and economist Thomas Sowell as other examples. "White conservatives are {Clarence Thomas's} ideological bedfellows, and his white conservative wife is literally his bedfellow."

Home, Church and Family

Does that matter? The question of the degree that spouses influence each other's public positions is a long-debated subject in Washington.

"I'm married to a federal judge and he influences me and I influence him," said Silberman, a close friend of the Thomases and the wife of D.C. Court of Appeals Judge Laurence Silberman. "That's part of being close to someone -- we certainly have discussions about cases."

Silberman said the Thomases are "great intellectual soul mates who talk a lot about ideas and social policy."

The couple live in a gray, three-bedroom house in Alexandria, in a new Everyburb development, with Clarence Thomas's 19-year-old son, Jamal, from his first marriage. "Jamal said at first when they got married he wasn't sure it would work out," said Gabe Bicoy, the Thomases' 17-year-old neighbor. "But now he thinks Ginni's cool and she takes him shopping."

Jamal, a high school football star as his father was, left recently for Fork Union Military Academy, a military prep school in Fork Union, Va., affiliated with the Baptist General Association of Virginia.

Although Clarence Thomas was raised a Roman Catholic, the couple regularly attend the Truro Episcopal Church, a charismatic congregation in Fairfax. A majority of the congregants oppose abortion, according to Gordon Klooster, the church administrator. A home was established on church grounds for pregnant women who decide against abortion. And the preacher occasionally delivers a antiabortion sermon, Klooster said. On Friday nights, the church holds a "prayer-and-praise service," a casual program that includes community singing, speaking in tongues and prophesying in the spirit of Christ. The Thomases are not Friday night regulars but they have attended within the past two months, Klooster said.

On weekends lately, she has been tending to the garden and mowing the lawn while he has been sitting in the garage wearing a T-shirt and shorts, hunched over a stack of legal books, cramming for the hearings. They prefer to garden together, neighbors say.

They like to drive to work together. She calls him Batman because of his new black Corvette. He sends her flowers when her job at the Labor Department gets stressful. She hauled a four-foot card across the street to the federal courthouse for their anniversary. He pops over to Labor during the day just to say hi.

They go on morning runs. They take after-dinner walks. Neighbors say you can see them in the evening talking, walking up the hill. Hand in hand.

^===