Ginni Thomas payments mark a tipping point for the Supreme Court

It seems as though the press is dropping a new Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas corruption scandal every day. Yesterday we got two. First, Pro-Publica published yet another story about Thomas' wealthy benefactor Harlan Crow passing on a lavish gift to his pal which Thomas once again failed to report. This time, it was private school tuition for the grand-nephew Thomas and his wife Ginni have said they raised like he was their own son since he was 6 years old. By evening, we found out that Federalist Society guru Leonard Leo instructed longtime GOP operative Kellyanne Conway back in 2012 to have her polling firm bill his nonprofit group "another $25,000" but give the money to Ginni Thomas — adding, with "no mention of Ginni, of course."

What the hell is going on here?

It's bad enough that Ginni Thomas is a hardcore far-right Republican activist who even participated in the coup attempt of 2020 and spouted QAnon conspiracy theories. This was not a huge surprise since she's been working in far-right circles for some time, even helming her own Tea Party group and working with the shadowy Groundswell organization. But it's particularly unnerving since her husband was the lone Justice to dissent from the Supreme Court's rejection of former President Donald Trump's bid to block the release of some presidential records to the January 6 committee. She claimed that she never talks to the man she famously calls her "best friend" about any of that — which nobody believes. So we're left with the fact that while it's unseemly that she's so involved in issues that come before the court in the first place, and her husband refuses to recuse himself, they both are completely shameless about their rank partisanship so there doesn't seem to be anything anyone can do about it.

But now we have evidence that money is exchanging hands — and a lot of it.

To be precise, this isn't exactly news. Back in 2004, the Los Angeles Times published a big expose of Crow's lavish gifts to Thomas, which he wasn't disclosing. And in 2011, Ian Millhiser, then at Think Progress, came out with yet another article revealing even more examples of Crow's largesse to the Thomases. They both made brief splashes at the time but Thomas didn't care and that was that. We'll have to see if this time is different.

The story about Leonard Leo in cahoots with Kellyanne Conway to secretly funnel money to Ginni Thomas is a new twist. We knew that Crow had bankrolled Ginni's activist group Liberty Central back in 2009 with over half a million dollars, $120,000 of which was used to pay her salary. As it happens, Leonard Leo co-founded that group with Ginni Thomas and the non-profit he told Conway to bill for her non-existent services filed a brief in a landmark case, Shelby County v. Holder, which was the first step in gutting the Voting Rights Act. So Crow may not have had immediate business before the court but Leo certainly did. The opinion was 5-4 with Thomas voting in the majority. I doubt the money caused Thomas to vote the way he did — he has always been hostile to the right to vote — but it certainly is nice to have so many good friends with similar ideas making a public servant's life so comfortable, isn't it?

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In 2010, Ginni left the group so that it would not be encumbered by the distractions her "media celebrity" was causing. This happened shortly after it was revealed that Ginni had left a message with Anita Hill, the woman who had accused Thomas of sexual harassment back in 1992, demanding an apology. Shortly thereafter, Justice Thomas amended 13 years of his financial disclosures after having omitted his wife's employment. He said he had misunderstood the rules. It seems to be an ongoing problem with Thomas, which is odd for a man who is charged with interpreting the U.S. Constitution.

Then came all the lavish trips and the purchasing of Thomas' mother's house, which she lives in rent-free, and various other perks and presents, none of which Thomas disclosed even after having been caught numerous times in the past. He seems so addled about all this that you have to wonder if he might have neglected to claim all these gifts on his taxes which would not just be an ethical violation but an illegal one as well. Maybe nobody told him that either. He's just an old country Supreme Court justice, after all.

With the revelations about Ginni Thomas combined with the sheer volume of Harlan Crow's cash and the justice's ongoing refusal to disclose it, we might finally be reaching a tipping point. But it's a long shot. The Senate can hold more hearings and give Ted Cruz a platform to say "high tech lynching" again but Chief Justice John Roberts claims there is a separation of powers issue that precludes him, and I assume any other justice, from testifying so that's not going anywhere. They can bring Harlan Crow up to the Hill but I'm not sure what good that would do as long as the Republicans are protecting Thomas. And Roberts could push through some new ethics requirements but he doesn't seem inclined to do it and anyway. This looks like rank corruption which some new norms and rules won't fix. Disclosure requirements are supposed to make judges embarrassed to take big sums of money from "friends" and cause them to recuse themselves when there are conflicts of interest (or the appearance of such conflicts.) Thomas obviously has no such concerns and neither do his defenders.

Obviously, impeachment is off the table with the House in the hands of Marjorie Taylor Greene and her loyal manservant Kevin McCarthy. Even if the Democrats were in control, the Senate doesn't have even close to the votes to convict. (So much for our vaunted checks and balances.) That leaves the only option being Thomas resigning in disgrace and I am quite sure that will never happen. He won't even stop taking "gifts" from Harlan Crow.

As long as Clarence Thomas is the patron saint of the right-wing legal establishment, he will not be held liable for his actions. He can do what he wants and he knows it. He could have accepted suitcases full of hundred dollar bills on the courthouse steps and Ginni could have rampaged through the Capitol chanting "hang Mike Pence" and it would have changed nothing. The Supreme Court has a radical majority made up of hard-right extremists and Republican partisans and apparently at least one of them is openly corrupt and they have gone rogue. And they have the full support of the Republican Party.

The country has lost trust in the institution and the members of that institution could not care less. That's a serious problem for our system of government and unless the political system wakes up and takes some kind of action like passing term limits or expanding the numbers of justices (very difficult to do, of course) we are in for decades of turmoil no matter who sits in the White House or has a majority in Congress.