SPECIAL EDITION: Traveler Clarence Thomas and the Unaccountable SCOTUS
An eye-opening report from Pro Publica
On its face, yesterday’s blockbuster story in Pro Publica on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ acceptance of luxury vacations from the billionaire real estate magnate and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow shocks the senses. On another level, it should not come as a complete surprise.
For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.
First, Thomas and his wife Ginni haven’t exactly been sticklers for ethics to begin with. As Politico and other outlets have pointed out, Clarence Thomas has refused to recuse himself from participating in SCOTUS decisions concerning the Jan. 6 insurrection and decisions related to the disputed presidential 2020 election, even though his wife Ginni has been an outspoken activist on both matters, attending the Stop the Steal rally before the riot even and giving direct advice to Trump’s chief of staff on how to overturn the presidential election.
When the House Jan. 6 committee requested the National Archives turn over documents related to the insurrection and the election fight, then-President Trump invoked executive privilege. The case eventually landed in the Supreme Court, which ruled overwhelmingly against Trump. Thomas, it turns out, was the lone dissenter.
Reaction, especially among progressives, was swift and predictable:
I never much cared for Thomas as a SCOTUS justice to begin with. When appointed by George H.W. Bush in 1991, Thomas had served as a federal appeals court judge for only about 18 months, and as chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for eight years — by far the longest tenure in the 58-year history of the EEOC (by Washington standards, it’s considered a shit job).
As scored by Axios last year, Thomas is easily the most conservative justice on the high court, outpacing even Samuel Alito by nearly 50%. Until a couple of years ago, Thomas went a decade without uttering a peep during oral arguments. I interpreted his silence in three possible ways:
Either Thomas had nothing to say or he had already made up his mind and felt no need to engage in a dialectic that might reveal flaws in his own thinking. Both of those possibilities bespeak an insecurity and/or lack of curiosity.
At any rate, this investigative report in Pro Publica is first-rate. Another report from 2011 in Think Progress, tweeted out by my own U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, shows that “Crow provided $500,000 to allow Thomas’ wife to start a Tea Party group, and he once gave Thomas a $19,000 Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass.”
The question on many minds is what the high court can (or will) do about it. Turns out, not much. Thomas did not list the gifts on his financial disclosures, as he was required to do. But as Pro Publica has reported, “The Supreme Court is left almost entirely to police itself … There are few restrictions on what gifts justices can accept.
That’s in contrast to the other branches of government,” such as Congress, where members “are generally prohibited from taking gifts worth $50 or more and would need pre-approval from an ethics committee to take many of the trips Thomas has accepted from Crow. So we have an enormously powerful government body that is supposed to police itself. What could possibly go wrong?
One parting question: why did it take a nonprofit with fewer than 100 employees to break this story when newspapers such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, all of which have even greater resources, did not or could not?
Pro Publica has produced an amazing story and one that should see Thomas resign from the bench, but I’m putting nothing on that bet. If I had a spare nickel, I might place it on the wager that the Supreme Court as an institution would push for his resignation or some sort of censure, but I wouldn’t expect this to be a winning wager either.
Unfortunately, the level of cynicism and corruption (mostly legal corruption, by the way, brought about by money buying up the government) that is rampant likely means that little will come from the Pro Publica revelations. Unfortunately, the failure of the media to have long ago run the Thomas/Crow story—whether through dereliction of journalistic duty or because of its own overwhelming cynicism—foreshadows the probable outcome, which can be described in one word: bupkis.
Thanks, Terry, for the post.