Why bother to ask?
He won’t, and there’s no way to make him. That’s the end of it.
It’s not a closely-held secret that his wife, Ginni Thomas, is a hyper-partisan dickhead wrapped in rightwing conspiracy theories. She’s been that for a long time (see her profile here).
So it didn’t come as a surprise when emails subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, and made public last week, showed her urging Mark Meadows, Trump’s ex-chief of staff (and now under investigation for voting fraud, see story here), to pressure then-Vice President Pence to overthrow the 2020 election.
Ginni Thomas is, by any measure, a political guttersnipe. She’s also married to a Supreme Court justice. That’s his prerogative. He can marry anyone he wants. And her actions, while thoroughly despicable, at least arguably didn’t cross a line from free speech to criminal conspiracy.
Justice Thomas, who himself isn’t a model of moral rectitude (I believe Anita Hill, not him), isn’t a towering giant of judicial propriety either. He didn’t recuse himself from deciding whether the National Archives had to release materials to the Jan. 6 committee. His wife’s emails were in those materials. In the Supreme court’s 8-1 decision to release them, he was the “no” vote.
He’s catching flak, and deserves to. A New York Times editorial on Friday, March 25, 2022, said he should resign (see story here). Of course he should (for reasons why, go here.) And there’s precedent for a justice resigning over a conflict of interest (details here). Some people think he should be impeached if he won’t resign (see story here), but you know how futile that would be, given Senate Republicans.
There’s no way they would let Biden replace the court’s most reactionary member with a liberal appointee, even if Thomas were to stand in the middle of Constitution Avenue and shoot somebody (analogy here).
Clarence Thomas won’t resign, recuse himself, or be removed from office, no matter what his wife has done, or he has done. All of this talk is mere pissing in the wind.
Because this isn’t about judicial propriety, judicial ethics, preserving the court’s reputation, or doing the right thing.
It’s about power.
Photo: Washington D.C. power couple Ginni and Clarence Thomas
