Scott Franklin won his seat running against Republican financial impropriety, but I’m going to imagine I’m only falsely optimistic he is going to be open to the logic below. He voted not to certify Arizona, and before that was against mask mandates on the Lakeland City Council. That said, I know a lot of people on the other side locally who think of him as a principled conservative. So here:
Dear Rep. Franklin,
The Clarence Thomas household augments his $268,000 annual salary as an associate justice for the U.S.Supreme Court by his wife Virginia raking in $13 million a year peddling influence to advocacy groups in the admittedly expensive metropolitan Washington housing market.
This is the essence of corruption. It is the kind of outside-income conflict that almost derailed Richard Nixon's political career in 1952, which threatened to blow apart the Senate with the Bobby Baker scandal in 1962. It is a much more severe conflict than Ross Spano's campaign-finance violation you rightly and successfully campaigned against in 2020.
It violates conservative principles, at least the ones I learned growing up in the '50s, '60s and '70s in small-town Oklahoma. I'm a liberal Democrat, but I was raised to respect those principles – caution about change, thrift, respect for national and cultural institutions, steady awareness of security needs, an enthusiasm toward private enterprise. Most of all, the thing I learned I think from my father and mother, is that liberals and conservatives share, in different forms, a disdain for presuming to take more than one is entitled to. We pay judges well to insulate them from the need to supplement their income. And don't tell me $268,000 won't go very far. My family of four gets by on far less.
We disagree on so many things politically that this shouldn't matter to me, but the integrity of government means so much to me that it does: I would hope, as a principled conservative, that you would not just support but sponsoran article of impeachment against Justice Thomas. It was overdue years ago. It is time now. It won't gain you anything politically,but that shouldn't be the point. Such a move coming from a Republican freshman congressman would have meaning to the country as a whole.
Thank you,
UPDATE
Thank you for the various response. Ansering som eof them:
I got the $#13 million figure googling at looked at several ties. The amount, to me, isn’t as important as that we have it backwards. We shouldn’t be expected him to recuse from stuff affecting her. Her very liveliehood is connected to his causes paying to supplement his income so that he is not really all that beholden to the rule of bleeping law.
I clicked on the choice that I didn’t need to get a response from Rep Frankllin. This after wading through responses from my senior senator, cabana boy Marco Pollo. If the congressman acts on this, I’ll smile. I really don’t care about a note.
I didn’t use the term “principled Republican” and wouldn’t. To me, the Party jumped the shar irrevocably during the 2002 midterms, 18 years after I sword I’d never vote for another one because my state senator candidate, who turned down NY’s right to Life POarty endorsement, told me it was because “I firmly believe that, cause the girl might have been raped by a n---—.”
Don’t call these people conservative. Thbey’re not. They haven’t deserved the term since the Clinton impeachment, or since they replaced Gingrich with a child molester, or since the RGA spent campaign money falsely accusing a Texas Dem of being involved in the torture/murder of a DEA agent because someone had a checking account in the Dem’s bank.There are principles that are by definition conservative. The modern GOP aandoned them years ago.
It was important to me to write respectfully to Rep. Frankllin. I feel the same way about good manners as did the late Molly Ivins.
Thanks again.