UPDATE (March 25, 2022 11:15 am ET): The House Jan. 6 Committee has texts between Ginni Thomas and then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about overturning the 2020 presidential election’s results, NBC News reported on Friday.
I have a question for Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats: Why haven’t you impeached Clarence Thomas yet?
It’s become conventional wisdom that there’s nothing that can be done to pry a Supreme Court justice, like Thomas, from the bench after they receive what is more often than not a lifetime appointment. But every Democratic member of the House of Representatives should be Googling the name “Samuel Chase” right now.
The oft-forgotten Chase, in addition to being a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, was a member of the Maryland General Assembly, a member of the Continental Congress and the eighth justice to be appointed to the United States Supreme Court.
Still, his long and distinguished résumé didn’t win him many fans. The conservative mayor of Annapolis called him a “busy, restless incendiary, a ringleader of mobs, a foul-mouthed and inflaming son of discord and faction,” noted a 1974 retrospective that ran in Maryland’s Evening Capital newspaper. Chase didn’t hold back against his critics either, calling them “despicable tools of power, emerged from obscurity and basking in proprietary sunshine.”
Every Democratic member of the House of Representatives should be Googling the name “Samuel Chase” right now.
His enemies included President Thomas Jefferson, who saw the judge as an extreme partisan, with a biased attitude toward defense lawyers and jurors. In 1804, nine years into Chase’s term on the court, Jefferson and his allies turned to what is still the only way to force a justice out: impeachment. In recent years, we have become all too familiar with the process for impeaching a U.S. president. Chase is a reminder that the Constitution contains the same rules for impeaching federal judges as it does for presidents.
While the associate justice was impeached on eight charges in the House, the Senate — despite being dominated by Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans — didn’t reach the two-thirds majority required to force him out on any of them.
Nevertheless, convicted or not, Chase remains the only Supreme Court justice in American history to be impeached. And it was not for some conflict of interest or violation of judicial ethics. It was because his political opponents, including the then-president, thought he was too partisan to rule in a fair or impartial manner.
Today, we agree that a judge cannot, and should not, be removed simply because we disagree with their rulings. But we should then also agree that if judges are violating ethics or subject to conflicts of interest, they should in theory be impeached and removed from the bench.
Which brings us back to Justice Clarence Thomas. In January, The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer profiled Thomas’ wife, Ginni, a longtime conservative operative and lobbyist, and revealed how her lobbying firm was on the payroll of far-right activist Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy. Gaffney and others submitted an amicus brief to the court in 2017 in support of the Trump administration’s travel ban, arguing that “the challenge of Islam must be confronted.”
Shockingly, Thomas did not recuse himself from the case given the clear financial conflict. He never even disclosed the $200,000 paid to his wife despite being required to report the source of a spouse’s income as part of his annual financial disclosures, according to The New Yorker. Thomas would later join his fellow four conservative justices in voting to uphold Trump’s shameful Muslim ban.
In February, The New York Times Magazine reported that Ginni Thomas served on the board of a secretive right-wing group called CNP Action. In November 2020, it circulated a “November ‘action steps’ document” instructing its members in the days after the election “to pressure Republican lawmakers into challenging the election results and appointing alternate slates of electors,” according to the report.
But when former President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court to block the House Jan. 6 committee from obtaining hundreds of pages of White House records from the National Archives, Thomas was the sole justice to vote against the House investigators.








