A pair of new investigative reports from ProPublica about
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas are a
testament to not only the importance of good
journalism in a democracy, but also Thomas’s
unfitness on the court, and the need for
better guard rails against moneyed influence.
The first bombshell story, “Clarence
Thomas and the Billionaire,” highlighted how a wealthy man named Harlan Crow
befriended Thomas after he became a Supreme
Court justice and treated him (and often his
wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas) to luxurious
vacations on a near-annual basis. Thomas did
not disclose the trips as he was required to.
Although he at first refused to speak with
ProPublica about the initial story, he
eventually made a statement saying he was advised he didn’t need to disclose the
gifts.
ProPublica followed that up just days later with another
story whose title says it all: “Billionaire
Harlan Crow Bought Property From
Clarence Thomas. The Justice Didn’t
Disclose the Deal.” The property in question “wasn’t a marquee acquisition
for the real estate magnate, just an old
single-story home and two vacant lots down the
road.” Like the vacations, Thomas also did not
publicly disclose the sale. His mother has
lived in the home and continues to do so after
ownership passed to Crow. The billionaire has
been busy making expensive renovations to it.
There is no question that Thomas broke
the law by failing to disclose his financial transactions
with Crow. Every American should read the
ProPublica reports on how one of the nine
Supreme Court justices, whose jurisdiction
covers the entire nation, appears to be in the
pocket of a billionaire. The relationship
between Crow and Thomas is a cozy one that has
borne fruit for wealthy elites: the justice
has routinely
sided with moneyed interests and their influence on policy making.
Before ProPublica’s April 2023 investigations, most
reporting on the court’s first Black justice
had focused on his white conservative wife.
Ginni Thomas has been an activist spouse,
overtly reflecting the conservative political
sensibility that her husband affirms in his
judicial decisions. During Barack Obama’s
presidency, she founded a “Tea Party”
nonprofit called Liberty
Central, a move the New York Times described as “the most
partisan role ever for a spouse of a justice
on the nation’s highest court.”
She then went further, becoming a political lobbyist and
leading a small and secretive organization
called Liberty
Consulting. A 2011
Politico report points out that she touted “her ‘experience and
connections’ to help clients ‘with
governmental affairs efforts.’” She made headlines last year for having pressured former White House
chief of staff Mark Meadows via text messages
to try to overturn the 2020 election results
in favor of Donald Trump. More recently,
the Washington
Post published an investigation into anonymous donations
totaling $600,000 made to yet another
organization she leads called Crowdsourcers
for Culture and Liberty. The donations helped
fund the right’s vicious culture wars.
When asked about the conflicts of interest that her
activism present for her husband’s work on the
Supreme Court, Ginni Thomas has brushed them
off, telling the House Select Committee to Investigate the
January 6th Attack on the United States
Capitol, “It’s laughable for anyone who knows
my husband to think I could influence his
jurisprudence… The man is independent and
stubborn.” She also said in an interview with the conservative outlet the Washington Free
Beacon, “Like so many married couples, we
share many of the same ideals, principles, and
aspirations for America.” She added, “But 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.”
Well, that’s a relief. The sanctity of the nation’s
highest court and its freedom from partisan
influence rests on the word of a person who
promises there’s no undue influence between a
wife and her husband. This is a person
who still believes that the 2020
election was stolen—a view that makes her even worse
than Trump toady and former U.S. Attorney
General William Barr, who said he
would vote
for Trump in 2024 but was at least able to admit that his election fraud claims were false.
In 2021, when Chief Justice John Roberts filed his year-end
report on the federal judiciary, he stressed the importance
of “impartial decision-making,” and that
“[t]he Judiciary’s power to manage its
internal affairs insulates courts from
inappropriate political influence and is
crucial to preserving public trust in its work
as a separate and co-equal branch of
government.” Apparently, Roberts was either
ignorant of the Thomases’ doings or confident
that Ginni’s promise of insulation from
marital influence was good enough.
Although Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni, offer
arguably the most explicit examples of
corruptive influence on the Supreme Court,
they are not alone. In December 2022,
the New
York Times revealed that an innocently named charity called the
Supreme Court Historical Society has “become a
vehicle for those seeking access to nine of
the most reclusive and powerful people in the
nation.” The organization has raised millions
of dollars from secret donors. The majority of
the money that the New York Times was able to
identify came from “corporations, special
interest groups, or lawyers and firms that
argued cases before the court.” Justices
attend the Supreme Court Historical Society’s
annual dinner, offering a tantalizing chance
for individual attendees to influence them—as
the leader
of an anti-abortion group apparently took advantage of.
Notwithstanding the liberal minority that includes
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and
Ketanji Brown Jackson, this is a court that
loves wealth and has protected
it for more than half a century. It’s no wonder there is growing
public disapproval of a body that is so influential that its highly
anticipated decisions impact nearly every
aspect of our lives, from abortion to guns, to labor unions, to LGBTQ rights,
and more.
Supreme Court justices have lifetime tenure—ostensibly a
mechanism to protect them from “partisan
pressures.” But that only works if the regulations preventing
corruptive influence are watertight and if
there are actual consequences for violating
such regulations. In the wake of the Nixon
Watergate scandal, Congress passed the Ethics
in Government Act (EIGA) to ensure that officials like Supreme Court
justices were independent of moneyed
interests.
But even though Justice Thomas appears to have violated
the EIGA, there is no
direct mechanism to hold him accountable short of Congress starting
impeachment proceedings against him—a move
that has almost no precedent short of a House
impeachment more than 200 years ago of a justice who was
ultimately acquitted by the Senate.
No other democratically run nation on the planet gives its
highest court justices lifetime
tenure. Now, some legal experts have suggested term limits, and
numerous Democratic senators have introduced
the TERM
Act, which would introduce 18-year terms for Supreme Court
justices. This would mean that a new justice
would replace one who was termed out every two
years, and presidents would have two
opportunities during each four-year tenure to
appoint new justices.
In passing the TERM Act, the U.S. would join the rest of
the world’s democratic nations in upholding an
impartial judiciary, the Thomases could carry
out their dystopian vision of the nation free
from accusations of corruption—and billionaire
Harlan Crow could even save himself some
money.
This commentary was produced by Economy
for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.