WaPo and many commentators are remarking upon the hijinks of Ginni Thomas, the wife of long-time SCOTUS Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, and well-known far-right extremist in her own, er, right:
Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in a series of urgent text exchanges in the critical weeks after the vote, according to copies of the messages obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.
The messages — 29 in all — reveal an extraordinary pipeline between Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, and President Donald Trump’s top aide during a period when Trump and his allies were vowing to go to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the election results.
On Nov. 10, after news organizations had projected Joe Biden the winner based on state vote totals, Thomas wrote to Meadows: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!…You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.” …
The messages, which do not directly reference Justice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results — and how receptive and grateful Meadows said he was to receive her advice. Among Thomas’s stated goals in the messages was for lawyer Sidney Powell, who promoted incendiary and unsupported claims about the election, to be “the lead and the face” of Trump’s legal team.
Of particular concern here are the actions of the Associate Justice, as Steve Benen notes:
… while Ginni Thomas was pressing the White House to reverse Donald Trump’s defeat, and the White House was pursuing legal strategies to keep the losing candidate in power, Clarence Thomas was ruling on cases related to the 2020 election. …
Circling back to our earlier coverage, let’s also not forget that after the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack subpoenaed White House materials, Trump sued to keep the documents from his administration hidden. The former president ran out of options, however, two months ago: The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Republican’s emergency appeal, clearing the way for disclosure.
While the high court did not release details on each justice’s conclusion, Clarence Thomas was alone in publicly acknowledging his dissent.
That looked bad at the time. It’s a bit worse now.
In other words, it looks like a scandal is brewing.
And what does that mean?
Why, I expect the far-right extremists will use a familiar go-to move: cast aspersions on the Democrats, attempting to make the actions of Justice Thomas, ethically dubious as they are, appear unimportant next to the terrible actions of the Left. It’s all about moral equality. Have you noticed how often the far-right has to cover for an unforced error?
Will one of the two liberal justices on the court, excluding the retiring Breyer, become the target? Or will Judge Jackson, now finished with her SCOTUS confirmation hearings and whose confirmation is reported to be nearly assured now that Senator Manchin has stated he will vote for her confirmation, be the target of some terrible imaginary secret finally revealed?
Or does the position of the target matter less than the revelatory nature?
I’m almost afraid to look at right wing websites now.
