Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is certainly aware of the controversy surrounding Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Ginni Thomas’ radical activism. As Axios reported, however, the Kentucky Republican just can’t bring himself to care about it.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Wednesday condemned calls by some Democrats for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself amid revelations about his wife’s activism, calling it a “new and inappropriate pressure campaign.”
The GOP leader derided “spurious accusations about fake ethical problems or partiality,” adding that Thomas and his colleagues “should feel free to completely ignore all this.”
McConnell proceeded to condemn “clumsy bullying” from the left, describing criticisms of Thomas as “a political hit.” The Republican felt the need to speak up, he said, because “judicial independence is essential to our republic,” and the left has initiated a “quest to delegitimize the Supreme Court.”
It was notable that McConnell even felt the need to make these comments in the first place. It suggests the recent controversy over Thomas has reached a level serious enough to warrant the minority leader’s public defense.
But whether the defense had merit is a separate question.
Right off the bat, it’s worth re-emphasizing that McConnell’s credibility on this issue couldn’t be much worse. No one alive has been more responsible for politicizing the federal judiciary than the senior senator from Kentucky.
The principles of judicial independence and the legitimacy of the courts are clearly important, but given McConnell’s record, it’s difficult to think of a worse messenger for this message.
What’s more, to hear the minority leader tell it, the Thomas controversy is effectively meaningless. Reality tells a different story.
Ginni Thomas’ role as a right-wing activist was already controversial, given that she’s worked with political organizations that have a stake in decisions before the Supreme Court, but as we’ve discussed, recent revelations have taken this dynamic to an unprecedented new level.
Ginni Thomas, for example, attended the pre-riot “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6. Separate reports in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine added that she also played an organizing role in the pro-Trump gathering just south of the White House.
She also had extensive communications with then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, with whom Thomas discussed strategies to overturn the election results, and pressured congressional Republicans to do more to overturn the election, including calling on lawmakers to go “out in the streets.” By some accounts, she even reached out to Jared Kushner about legal options surrounding the larger offensive.
This is not a situation in which the spouse of a sitting justice simply expressed political opinions. As The New York Times recently explained, the text messages between Thomas and Meadows “demonstrated that she was an active participant in shaping the legal effort to overturn the election.”
And then her husband heard arguments in election-related cases, siding with Team Trump on matters related to disclosing important information to Congress. One need not be a liberal ideologue to recognize that this is a legitimate ethics controversy. If the political dynamic were reversed, and the matter involved a left-wing justice and the jurist’s radicalized spouse, it’s a safe bet many of McConnell’s Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill would be calling for that justice’s impeachment. So why is the Senate minority leader pretending this dynamic is benign? McConnell has already effectively told us why. In fact, as we discussed in October, the GOP lawmaker appeared with the sitting justice at the Heritage Foundation and celebrated Thomas’ “jurisprudence on unborn life.” These were difficult circumstances to defend. A conservative political group hosted an event for a conservative Supreme Court justice, who was in attendance for the celebration of himself. Congress’ most powerful Republican official — a man who has personally spearheaded a years-long campaign to politicize the federal judiciary — not only delivered a keynote address, he also specifically praised the justice’s work on a controversial issue that the Supreme Court will be considering this term. Every time the high court considers abortion cases, McConnell said, “Justice Thomas writes a separate, concise opinion to cut through the 50-year tangle of made-up tests and shifting standards and calmly reminds everybody that the whole house of cards lacks a constitutional foundation.” The audience at the Heritage Foundation applauded in approval. With this in mind, why is McConnell so eager to defend Thomas? It’s not because the senator sees the far-right justice as a neutral arbiter of unimpeachable integrity; it’s because McConnell sees Thomas as an ally. Related:
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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