Clarence Thomas
President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall–a legal icon to the civil rights community. Prior to his nomination, Thomas was President Ronald Reagan and President George H.W. Bush’s MChairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), where he assailed policies around equal economic opportunity and comparable pay for women. Thomas’s confirmation was shrouded in controversy, as Anita Hill testified under oath on Thomas’s grotesque sexual overtures toward her, when they worked together at the EEOC, which he denied.
Leonard Leo, the man who engineered the right-wing faction of the Supreme Court and chaired the Federalist Society (a network of right-wing lawyers that serves as a pipeline to power as judges and more) helped with Thomas’s confirmation. Leo has also steered almost $2 million into a PR campaign to support Thomas that lasted years, a fact confirmed by Mark Paoletta. Paoletta worked as the assistant counsel to President George H.W. Bush, and was responsible for ensuring Thomas’s successful appointment to the Court. Paoletta has represented Ginni Thomas and has often defended both Clarence Thomas, and his wife. The Leo-tied PR campaign for Thomas included a vanity project/documentary underwritten by billionaires, such as Nazi paraphilia collector Harlan Crow.
In the documentary Thomas claimed, “I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it…I come from regular stock, and I prefer that — I prefer being around that.” Despite his proclaimed preference for “Walmart parking lots,” Thomas has received luxury travel and more from Harlan Crow—who has had business before the Supreme Court and has long funded the Republican party’s policy agenda and electoral campaigns.
ProPublica’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting exposed the financial ties between the Thomases and Crow. In addition to all-expense paid vacations, other financial ties include:
– In 2001, Crow donated $175K for a new Clarence Thomas Wing at the Justice’s childhood library in Pin Point, Georgia. That same year Crow and his wife Kathy gifted a Bible once owned by Frederick Douglass and a bust of President Lincoln, valued at $19K and $15K, respectively.
– In 2008, Crow purchased land for $1.5M in Georgia to build a museum “commemorating the community that raised Clarence Thomas.” That same year, Crow started paying the private school tuition for Thomas’s nephew.
– In 2009, Crow gave at least $500K to Ginni Thomas’s group Liberty Consulting, while the Court was considering the Citizens United decision, where Thomas later cast one of the majority votes in the 5-4 decision to strike down rules around spending by outside groups. Ginni Thomas created that group while the case was pending and her group also attacked the Affordable Care Act, a law her husband later ruled against.
– In 2014, one of Crow’s companies purchased and renovated Thomas’s mother’s home, as well as other lots on the street. Thomas’s mother continues to reside in the home and does not pay rent.
– In 2018 Crow’s foundation gave $105K to Yale Law School, Thomas’s alma mater, for the “Justice Thomas Portrait Fund.”
– In 2021, Crow chartered a plane and traveled with Thomas to a suburb outside of NYC for the unveiling of a statue of Thomas’s junior high teacher. In his speech, Thomas thanked the Crows for paying for the statue.
In 2000, Clarence Thomas complained that his salary was too low and threatened to leave the bench at a “crucial period in his tenure, just as he was developing his relationships with a set of wealthy benefactors,” which included Crow.
Fix the Court, a nonpartisan organization that “advocates for non-ideological ‘fixes’ that would make the federal courts, and primarily the U.S. The Supreme Court, more open and more accountable to the American People,” found that Thomas accepted more than $4 million in luxurious gifts, often secretly, since 2004, with many of these gifts coming from Harlan Crow.
These gifts are not the only examples of Thomas’s lack of ethical conduct and corruption.
Thomas also refused to recuse himself from cases dealing with the 2020 Presidential Election and Trump, despite Ginni Thomas actively trying to subvert the election results. Ginni ardently pushed Mark Meadows’s, Trump’s chief of staff, to help overturn the election results. Ginni texted Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and White House advisor in the White House, in the weeks leading up to the insurrection. She even attended Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the insurrection. She also spouted election denial disinformation during the house January 6th Committee Hearing investigation. She also emailed legislators, in Arizona and Wisconsin, to try to get them to overturn the votes of millions of Americans cast for Joe Biden.
While Ginni claims she never discusses politics with her husband, she did admit to discussing politics with her best friend; and she has identified Thomas as her best friend in the past.
On January 21, 2022, Jane Mayer detailed the extent of Ginni Thomas’s role as a right-wing operative, and asked “Is Ginni Thomas a Threat to the Supreme Court?” Mayer’s exposee also explored how many of Thomas’s close colleagues, like Cleta Mitchell, routinely have business before the court in which her husband sits on.
Mayer found that Ginni has presented “Impact Awards” to other right-wing activists with business before the court at annual luncheons hosted by the evangelical Christian group United in Purpose (UIP), including one to Mark Meadows shortly before he became Trump’s Chief of Staff and another to Cleta Mitchell in 2018.
In 2017 and 2018 Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy paid Thomas over $200K, a period in which the pro-Trump group Making America Great, led by Rebekah Mercer, herself a major Trump booster, was the one of their largest donors. In August 2017, Gaffney submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of Trump’s travel ban, then months later Gaffney was given an “Impact Award” by Ginni Thomas at a UIP event at the Trump International Hotel. According to guest Jerry Johnson, Clarence Thomas was also there, though Paoletta has denied that the Justice attended the event.
He has consistently backed many of Trump’s policies when they have come before the court, including Trump’s efforts to block the January 6th committee from accessing White House records. Thomas was the lone dissent in that case. Those materials contained Ginni’s texts to Meadows and Kushner.
Mayer has also described Ginni Thomas’s role as chair of a secretive group called Groundswell, composed of a who’s-who of far-right insiders which sought to purge non-loyalists from the Trump administration.
For years following the Citizens United decision, Americans have seen their rights and freedoms eroded by “a billion dollar force that has helped remake the judiciary and overturn long standing legal precedents…It funded legal scholars to devise theories to challenge liberal precedents, helped to elect state attorneys general willing to apply those theories and launched lavish campaigns for conservative judicial nominees who would cite those theories in their rulings from the bench.” At the center of these machinations is Leonard Leo, and the person next to him is his “ideological soulmate,” Ginni Thomas. According to whistleblower documents, Leo even arranged for Ginni to be paid tens of thousands of dollars in 2012 from a secret source. He specifically instructed Kellyanne Conway, who years later would serve as Senior Counselor to Trump, to bill a nonprofit group he advised and use that money to pay Ginni.
Clarence Thomas has a history of failing to recuse himself, despite ethical conflicts of interest, that dates back to 2000 and Bush v. Gore. Thomas cast the tie-breaking vote in this case, stopping the Florida recount and making George W. Bush president, despite Al Gore winning the popular vote. At the time, Ginni Thomas worked at the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing group now helming Project 2025, and she “had been actively screening and recruiting appointees for the future Bush administration when she worked [there].” Following this case, Ginni was promoted to “Director of Executive Branch Relations,” working with the Bush administration and “liaising with the administration her husband’s vote secured the presidency for, they were rewarded: she received nearly $1 million in compensation over the next seven years.”
Inventing Presidential Immunity from Criminal Prosecution; and Effectively Pardoning Trump
Thomas joined Chief Justice John Roberts’ 6-3 ruling and wrote a concurring opinion that in effect pardoned Donald Trump for any crimes he committed as president that could be construed as official acts of the executive of the United States. A decision that compelled Justice Sotomayor to end her dissenting opinion with the chilling words, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”
While this edict in theory allows Trump to be prosecuted for activities not cloaked as “official acts,” it bars the use of any evidence of his words or deeds related to official acts. It ignores U.S. law since our nation’s founding that no person is above the law, including the president. It also ignores the language of the Constitution, which grants no such immunity and specifies that any civil officer can be impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and the Constitution’s oath of office, which requires that a President “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
Prospectively, this reckless ruling could potentially give license to a future president to use the powers as chief executive and commander-in-chief, including the use of emergency declarations, to dramatically alter the law and the stabilizing norms central to American democracy, our economy, and our way of life without fear of criminal prosecution.
Thomas in his concurring opinion helped pave the path for Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, to dismiss the case against him—thwarting likely the possibility of criminally prosecuting Trump for stealing classified national security documents. Cannon sidestepped long-standing precedent about independent prosecutors by suggesting that it was not precedent, but instead “dictum.” This was exactly the path laid out by Thomas in his concurring opinion.
Related cases: Fischer v. United States (6-3 ruling limiting the use of obstruction charges against those involved in the violent Jan. 6 insurrection); Trump v. Anderson (5-4 edict restoring Trump to the Colorado ballot despite the 14th Amendment’s bar on insurrectionists holding office.)
Second Amendment: New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen and United States v. Rahimi
Thomas wrote the majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a decision that struck down New York’s century-long ban on publicly carrying firearms. Thomas’ decision in Bruen established a new rule for determining whether or not a gun law violated the Second Amendment. According to Thomas’s opinion in Bruen, “the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition,” a vague litmus test that has invalidated more than a dozen state and federal gun control laws. It is precisely this confusing new rule that led United States v. *Rahimi *to be heard by the Supreme Court. The majority of the Court in that case found that barring domestic abusers from possessing firearms met the new criteria invented by Thomas in Bruen—Thomas did not.
In his dissent Thomas wrote, “The Court and Government do not point to a single historical law revoking a citizen’s Second Amendment right based on possible interpersonal violence…Yet, in the interest of ensuring the Government can regulate one subset of society, today’s decision puts at risk the Second Amendment rights of many more.” He argued that criminal prosecution is enough and that the government could not “strip the Second Amendment right of anyone subject to a protective order…”
This was not the only time Thomas has leaned on “historical tradition” to justify stripping away Americans’ rights.
Overturning Roe v. Wade and the Comstock Act
While Justice Alito wrote the opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade and eliminating federal constitutional protections for abortion in the in 2022, Thomas wrote a concurring opinion that doubled-down on Alito’s question by suggesting the Supreme Court “should reconsider” the Court’s landmark rulings in Griswold v. Connecticut (protecting access to contraception) and in Obergefell v. Hodges (protecting marriage equality for LGBTQ+ Americans to marry the person they love).
Thomas also joined two rulings that effectively postponed decisions to expand the Court’s anti-abortion agenda until after the 2024 election, by remanding cases challenging the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone (FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine) and challenging federal law requiring that pregnant Americans have access to emergency room treatment for abortions if their health is in danger, even if not at the brink of death (Moyle v. United States). Alarmingly, both Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito invoked the Comstock Act during oral arguments for the mifepristone case. This draconian law dates back to 1873 and has been signaled as the backdoor to a national abortion ban by Project 2025.