After the most recent revelations, Thomas’s defenders have gone conspicuously silent. Organs like National Review and conservative legal apparatchik Ed Whelan, who loudly dismissed evidence of wrongdoing by Thomas, have had nothing to say about Thomas’s many billionaire patrons.
Now, finally, comes a defense (sort of): A total of 112 former Thomas law clerks have signed an open letter defending him against charges of impropriety. It is a revealing document.
By “defending,” I don’t mean detailing the charges against Thomas and explaining why they lack merit. Rather, their approach is simply to insist Thomas is a good person while pretending the exhaustive evidence of his unethical behavior does not exist at all.
In lieu of any engagement with the facts of Thomas’s misconduct, the letter is padded out with biographical detail, in the style of a book report written by a sixth grader. The authors explain that Thomas “descended from West African slaves, was “born to a young mother, not more than 20, in segregated Georgia.” We learn “His father left. And a fire took all he had and the shack where he lived,” and even receive details of major world events that took place during his life. (“Then came 1968. King was assassinated. Then Kennedy. It transformed him. He left behind hopes of the priesthood. He found Black Power. He wrote about revolution.”)
There is just one small passage in the letter that even acknowledges the evidence of misconduct:
Lately, the stories have questioned his integrity and his ethics for the friends he keeps. They bury the lede. These friends are not parties before him as a Justice of the Court. And these stories are malicious, perpetuating the ugly assumption that the Justice cannot think for himself.
So the main defense is that Thomas is allowed to accept millions of dollars’ worth of gifts as long as his patrons are not personally involved in Supreme Court litigation? (As far as we know, anyway — since Thomas refuses to disclose his gifts, the public is only aware of what the media has been able to figure out in the face of his secrecy.)
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Our owners and their paid managers in the Courts, in the Congress, and both major parties have reached the point where rhetorical defense is no longer relevant.
We’ve reached the “So what if I did? Want to cry about it?” stage of this collapse.
You see it everywhere. Corporations used to do damage control after mass layoffs, now they literally insult the employees on the way out the door and brag about their cruelty on the money shows.
The small sect of our society that are in the country club no longer fear consequences, and for good reason, as they’ve captured any governmental bodies that would earnestly seek or inflict them. And if that fails, they still have legions of deluded, self-hating peasants ready to protect their own oppressors out of the sunk cost fallacy.
Hollywood: we will starve them out.
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There is some delicious irony in 100+ Thomas clerks signing an opinion that ignores the actual issue, reaches a pre-determined conclusion based on their preexisting support for the guy, and gives no logical or objective reason why you should agree.
It’s not ironic. These actions are exactly why they got the job of clerk in the first place. They are responsible for holding up the appearance of propriety so people have faith in the rule of law. The whole court should be holding him to some kind of account.
So Thomas’s law clerks don’t know what ethics are?
…
Is anyone really surprised by that?
"The liberals made my life miserable for 43 years, and I’m going to make their lives miserable for 43 years.” — Clarence Thomas
They must use a different module for annual ethics training than my company uses. I wonder if we can switch and start using their provider?
I don’t have business before the supreme court but I sure as hell have an interest in their rulings. We all do! That’s such a BS defense they and others make.
They bury the lede. These friends are not parties before him as a Justice of the Court.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that some of his friends have been beneficiaries of some of Thomas’ rulings.
Please turn down the gaslight…I didn’t think to bring sunglasses.
One of the billionaires who owns Clarence Thomas did have business before the court and he didn’t recuse himself.
One of his clerks received 7 payments for thousands of dollars via venmo labelled “Clarence Thomas Christmas party” from conservative lawyers who have argued cases before the court.
The lawyers who made the Venmo transactions were: Patrick Strawbridge, a partner at Consovoy McCarthy who recently successfully argued that affirmative action violated the US constitution; Kate Todd, who served as White House deputy counsel under Donald Trump at the time of the payment and is now a managing party of Ellis George Cipollone’s law office; Elbert Lin, the former solicitor general of West Virginia who played a key role in a supreme court case that limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions; and Brian Schmalzbach, a partner at McGuire Woods who has argued multiple cases before the supreme court.
They don’t have to defend him. He’s unassailable as long as Congress remains infested with Republicans.
