As President Joe Biden moves forward on the confirmation process for the Supreme Court’s first Black woman justice, the extremists on the court are demonstrating that one appointment is not going to be adequate. Nor are the reforms discussed by President Biden’s court reform commission, including whether the court’s justices should be required to adhere to the Code of Conduct that all other federal judges operate under. That should absolutely happen and is long overdue. But this set of conservatives is just as likely to thumb their noses at any kind of rules as not.
Case in point, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. Both are Federalist Society triumphs and one is squatting in a seat stolen from President Barack Obama by Mitch McConnell, so that the seditionist-in-chief could have the appointment.
Gorsuch is a featured speaker at a Federalist Society shindig this weekend as part of a political lineup that includes former vice president Mike Pence, former Trump press liar Kayleigh McEnany, and Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. Gorsuch will be speaking Friday night, in secret. There is no press allowed at the event. Let’s hope there are some wait staff at the venue, the Disney Yacht and Beach Club Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, who can smuggle in their smart phones.
One of the panels at this weekend’s conference is titled “The end of Roe v. Wade?” Gorsuch isn’t scheduled to be on that panel, because that might just be a bit too far for the justice who is supposedly now deliberating over whether to make forced birth the law of the land (spoiler alerter: he’ll vote for forced birth). But c’mon. Pence, DeSantis, and McEnany are going to be sharing that stage.
His presence there reinforces the public perception that the court is entirely politicized—a perception that also happens to be reality. “I think we’re facing a real crisis of public confidence with respect to the Supreme Court,” said Alicia Bannon, director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “[W]e currently have a court where the ideological divides among the justices correspond perfectly to the party of the president that nominated them, which didn’t used to be the case.”
When the president who nominated three in the court’s majority just tried to overthrow the government, that’s more than just a perceptual problem: It’s a crisis. Which is a good segue to Clarence Thomas and the person he lives with, Ginni Thomas. As in his wife Ginni Thomas, who cheered on the insurrectionists on Jan. 6.
The same Ginni Thomas who, last summer, invited DeSantis to join her weekly “cone of silence” Groundswell meetings, saying Justice Thomas had been in touch with the governor too. In her invitation to DeSantis, Thomas says Groundswell “is a cone of silence coalition that Mark Meadows attends and has presented at as well as may other allies [DeSantis] would know.” Oh, and also she lets the scheduler she is emailing know that the governor is in regular contact with her husband. Clarence Thomas. “My husband has been in contact with him too on various things of late,” she writes.
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In her essential exposé of Ginni Thomas in The New Yorker, Jane Mayer describes Groundswell as “a secretive, invitation-only network that, among other things, coordinated with hard-right congressional aides, journalists, and pressure groups.” Thomas described herself as chair of that organization as recently as 2019, and a former member told Mayer she chairs the weekly meetings. Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka are also members.
Partners in life, partners in sedition. Speaking of which, Ginni Thomas was also one of the signatories of a letter from extremist leaders sent in December to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy blasting the House January 6 select committee for being “overtly partisan political persecution.”
The group demanded that Republican Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois be kicked out of the Republican caucus. The committee, they wrote, put out “improperly issued subpoenas and other investigatory tactics designed not to pursue any valid legislative end, but merely to exploit for the sake of political harassment and demagoguery.”
In an extremely related Supreme Court case one month later—Trump’s appeal that the court block the committee from getting the White House records two lower courts and the Biden administration ordered released—Clarence Thomas was the sole justice who would grant Trump’s request.
Clearly, neither Gorsuch nor Thomas give a rat’s ass about whether their actions or their decisions are perceived as purely partisan. So they certainly aren’t going to quibble about overthrowing decades of jurisprudence moving the nation toward equality and justice. Hell, Thomas seems downright supportive of the failed coup.
There’s one immediate thing to be done: expand the court and dilute these justices’ nefarious, dangerous power.
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