Stop expecting Clarence Thomas to do the right thing
A realist diatribe
Justice Clarence Thomas stepped into the ethical mud once again and likely will emerge from it without the need to visit the drycleaners.
Why?
Simple, it’s conceptual mud and no one has pushed Justice Thomas or the Supreme Court into the mudpit created by Ginni Thomas, who has been implicated in the fake elector plot1 — a critical precursor to the January 6th Insurrection,.
The conceptual mud at the moment occured when Justice Thomas, who supervises the 11th Circuit, which includes Georgia, issued a temporay freeze stopping a judicial order compelling Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to testify before a grand jury investigating election meddling in 2020.2
Donald Trump, who post 2020-election banked on baseless claims of elections fraud, the John Eastman memo, and fake electors to stay in office, also attempted to rig the election results in Georgia to his benefit. Lindsey Graham, who opposed Donald Trump pre-presidency then became his chief boot-licker thereafter, was involved in Trump’s Georgia gambit.
And Ginni Thomas, who is married to Clarence Thomas, was actively involved with Trump’s attempts to overturn the election of Joe Biden in 2020 from the get go.
Idealists, who have issued a constant barrage of social media tweets about Justice Thomas’s constant ethical and legal lapses, chimed in right away.
I love Professor Tribe and agree with him on most everything; but please, for the love of God, stop with this idealistic whining. Everyone knows Justice Thomas is breaking the law and has crossed so many ethical lines in his lifetime, it’s frightening he’s still on the Supreme Court.
But Clarence Thomas is on the Supreme Court and he is not going to impose any ethical constraints on himself, because there is not a set of such rules for the Supreme Court.3 There are, however, plenty of laws to cover such ethical lapses.4
But here’s the problem — it’s all idealistic nonsense. Clarence Thomas is not concerned he might be charged with a crime. And he has made clear that he is not going to recuse himself.
In poker, checking one’s hand is a weak but often practical move when unsure of where they are in a particular hand. It’s a pragmatic solution.
Most poker books leans towards the agressiveness of betting versus checking and raising versus calling. Why? It forces other players to make tough decisions.
The realist solution to the current conundrum for the Political Left is to push the entire Supreme Court towards the mudpile.
Someone, in this particular case — Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis, needs to file a motion asking the Supreme Cout to remove Justice Thomas from considering any cases in which his wife might appear to have an interest in the outcome, i.e. any 2020 election cases. Then every legal idealist can throw in with amicus briefs supporting the motion.
What will happen then?
Chief Justice John Roberts, who has been concerned about Court’s reputation for some time now (it’s abysmal), will find enough Justices to cow Clarence Thomas into agreeing to recuse himself.
Of course, it’s all theoretical. What’s not is the fact that nihilists on the Right and idealists on the Left have no respect for the Supreme Court and it will take more than a trip to an imaginary drycleaners to fix it.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/24/politics/supreme-court-lindsey-graham-clarence-thomas/index.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/28/six-questions-clarence-thomas-scotus-ethics-00021142