The smearing of Justice Clarence Thomas — part X
Washington Examiner
Justice Clarence Thomas has been a favorite target of Democrats and the broader Left ever since he was first nominated to the Supreme Court over 30 years ago. Now that the court has a solid conservative majority, Democrats have redoubled their attacks on him, with the clear goal of undermining or disqualifying his judgments and, preferably, removing him from office.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave away the game on the Left’s latest attack minutes after ProPublica published a story detailing Thomas’s friendship with Texas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow.
CRIME, NOT INCARCERATION, IS THE PROBLEM
“This is beyond party or partisanship,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “This degree of corruption is shocking — almost cartoonish. Thomas must be impeached.”
She didn’t say, and presumably didn’t know, what precisely Thomas had done that was corrupt. That’s the thing about being precise — it will expose your superficiality.
ProPublica, which is funded by wealthy left-wing donors, reported that for over two decades, Thomas took vacations around the world with Crow, accepting free travel on Crow’s yacht and private jet. ProPublica noted that Thomas spends a week a year with Crow at a lakeside resort in the Adirondack Mountains, which includes three boathouses, a clay tennis court, and a replica of Hagrid’s hut from Harry Potter.
ProPublica asserts that the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 clearly required Thomas to report these vacations as gifts. This is false. People do not report generally “personal hospitality,” such as Thomas’s vacations. It wasn’t until mere weeks ago that the Judicial Conference issued new guidelines that said free trips and air travel must now be reported. This was announced as a change in policy, meaning disclosure was not required in the past but would be in the future.
Thomas even acknowledged this in his statement responding to ProPublica’s report, saying, “Harlan and Kathy Crow are among our dearest friends, and we have been friends for over twenty-five years. As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them.”
“Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable,” he continued. “These guidelines are now being changed, as the committee of the Judicial Conference responsible for financial disclosure for the entire federal judiciary just this past month announced new guidance. And, it is, of course, my intent to follow this guidance in the future.”
It is as simple as that: The rules did not require reporting of trips in the past, but now, they do, and Thomas will report them.
It would be one thing if Crow had business before the Supreme Court and Thomas failed to recuse himself because of their friendship. But neither ProPublica nor Ocasio-Cortez has identified any case in Thomas’s tenure on the Supreme Court in which Crow was involved in the litigation. There simply is no corruption here.
In the days following ProPublica’s attack on Thomas, other left-wing outlets have published separate stories to smear Crow, and Thomas by association, implying that they are Nazis because the former has a collection of historical items relating to the world’s most renowned tyrants. The collection includes items linked to Napoleon Bonaparte, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Adolf Hitler. The timing of these stories suggests strongly that they are part of a coordinated campaign to push Thomas out and intimidate conservatives such as Crow from donating to conservative causes such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution, which he does.
Luckily, Thomas is a consistent and incorruptible thinker. That is why he has remained a conservative stalwart on the Supreme Court for so many years, and it is why any suggestion that he would change his judicial thinking because of a few vacations is so laughable.
Senate Democrats will doubtless put on a show-trial investigation of Thomas’s friendship with Crow, but if they do so, they will once again demonstrate their own turpitude and what a steady and principled intellectual Thomas really is.