As the Supreme Court begins its next term, we must keep in mind that the recent allegations leveled against Justice Clarence Thomas that he failed to disclose travel and lodging from a friend are nothing more than a poorly disguised attack on the legitimacy of the nation’s highest court. Justice Thomas complied with the disclosure rules. The real reason behind these accusations is that for the first time in more than half a century, the left does not control the Court. As a result, it cannot use the Court to implement its social agenda. Even worse for the left, the Court is fulfilling its constitutional responsibilities to check the executive and legislative branches.
While the left started by trying to attack most Republican-appointed justices, including Alito, it landed on Justice Thomas. The attacks are nothing new for him since he has endured unfounded allegations since his confirmation hearings. The recent pressure, though, includes an effort to convince Congress to adopt an ethics code or for the appointment of an inspector general, which raise important questions about whether the Constitution provides Congress with the authority to regulate a co-equal branch of government.
The attacks against Justice Thomas are completely hypocritical because the left ignores similar actions by Democratic-appointed justices. Let’s take the basics of the allegations against Thomas: he failed to disclose trips taken with a friend who happens to be a billionaire and he failed to disclose the sale of his mother’s house to the same friend. The attacks were false, as revealed by his amended financial disclosures, though similar conduct by Justices Sotomayor and former justices Breyer and Ginsburg escaped major scrutiny.
Justice Sotomayor’s pressuring of taxpayer-funded institutions into purchasing her books, former Justice Breyer’s travel with his friends, and Justice Ginsburg’s receipt of prize money from a left-leaning organization did not result in the same calls for increased ethical or Congressional scrutiny. On X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, Mark Paoletta provided examples of no fewer than seventeen trips Justice Breyer accepted from the Hyatt Hotels’ Pritzker family. Justice Ginsburg accepted a $1 million prize awarded by the Berggruen Institute. When the Judicial Conference – the entity of the federal judiciary responsible for enforcing rules and disclosures—questioned her receipt of the prize money, she assuaged it by promising to donate most of the money to charity, though she never disclosed the recipients, nor the amounts donated.
Justice Sotomayor and her publisher pressured libraries, universities, and colleges into purchasing hundreds of thousands of dollars of her books, such as pressuring Michigan State University into spending more than $100K on her memoir in 2018 or asking the Multnomah County Library to purchase hundreds of copies of her children’s book in 2019. Similarly, her publisher, Penguin Random House, has pressured “public institutions to commit to buying a specific number of copies or requesting that attendees purchase books to obtain tickets.”
The left makes the argument that Justice Thomas’s travel with his friend somehow clouded his judgment. Yet activists can cite to no case where his friend was a party in a case before the Supreme Court. At the same time, they mostly ignore Justice Sotomayor’s failure to recuse herself in cases involving her publisher.
None of the Justices either violated existing ethics standards. All the justices mentioned followed the guidance issued by the Judicial Conference. Justice Sotomayor, for example, disclosed the income she received from Penguin Random House, just as Justice Thomas amended his disclosures after the guidance was updated.
The activists’ goals are not noble. They are, instead, thinly veiled partisan attempts to impugn the integrity of the entire judicial branch. As partisan attacks, the activists are not trying to “fix” any supposed judicial ethical quandaries. Since Justice Ginsburg died and President Trump and Senator McConnell replaced her with Justice Barrett, the left lost its ability to use the Court as a vehicle to achieve its social and economic goals. Even worse for those on the left, the Court is now an obstacle to many of those goals, with recent Court decisions preventing the Biden administration from using the EPA to implement its climate change agenda absent congressional approval, stopping the attempted rewrite of the president’s spending power through the student loan-forgiveness program, or decreasing the left’s use of the courts to derail state election integrity measures.
Without control of the Court, the left needs a way to foment anger and encourage Congress to invade the judiciary’s constitutionally protected responsibilities. The only way to do that, from their perspective, is to make Justice Thomas into a type of boogeyman. Though, like every other attempt to smear him, this too will fail.