With his wife moving and shaking in MAGA causes, SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas, who always just happens to vote the conservative line, had the nerve to accuse other judges of “asking for trouble” when they venture out of their lanes.
"When we begin to venture into the legislative or executive branch lanes, those of us, particularly in the federal judiciary with lifetime appointments, are asking for trouble," he said during a sweeping lecture at the University of Notre Dame that also touched on themes of equality, race and the state of the country.
…"We have lost the capacity" as leaders "to not allow others to manipulate our institutions when we don't get the outcomes that we like," he said.
It’s a good thing he didn’t say anything about wives because his own wife is a poster child for exactly what he warned against. When Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to block Congress from certifying the election, Ginni Thomas tweeted her “love” and blessings for the January 6th insurrectionists. Last year, C&L reported on her role in purging anti-Trumpers from the federal government and installing loyalists in their places. The year before, she harangued Donald Trump with a list of demands. Her Groundswell group is also part of the right-wing push for voter suppression. Talk about manipulating institutions!
In the same speech, Justice Thomas wasn’t above using politics to play the right-wing victim. He insisted that the opposition to his nomination after Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment was really about abortion:
"I think [the politicization] is problematic and hence the craziness during my confirmation was one of the results of that," Thomas said, adding that "it was absolutely about abortion -- a matter I had not thought deeply about at the time."
Coincidentally, nearly 20 years after Thomas was confirmed, Ginni Thomas left a voice mail for Hill asking her to apologize and provide “some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.”
It’s alarming that Thomas is the second ultra-conservative Supreme Court Justice this week trying to gaslight us into thinking that their upcoming, entirely predictable decisions on abortion and gun control and, in all likelihood voting rights, will arise only from the recesses of their impeccable consciences. It would be laughable if their decisions were not so consequential.
Fortunately, Twitter saw right through Thomas’ BS:
Clarence Thomas, whose rulings in key cases mysteriously always conform with his political and partisan preferences, says the justices do not make decisions based on politics. Hahahahaha https://t.co/Sxk1VVh0v2
— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) September 17, 2021
Ginni just cashed a fat CNP check on that laugh track, Norm.https://t.co/8QJv9v189Z
— brian pillion (@anaphoristand) September 17, 2021
Dear Justice Clarence Thomas: Stop gaslighting the American people. You just voted to allow an extreme Texas anti-abortion, anti-freedom law to go into effect even though it violates the law of the land, Roe v. Wade. And you did it by hiding behind your cowardly shadow docket. https://t.co/Jm6EHdp5h4
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) September 17, 2021
Clarence Thomas, whose rulings always conform with his politics, says justices don’t make decisions based on politics.
The statisticians here have computed the odds of that happening by chance to be .00001%
Higher probability: He’s lying.— Duty To Warn 🔉 (@duty2warn) September 17, 2021
Clarence Thomas didn’t seem too worried about “destroying our institutions” when he cast the deciding vote to make Bush president in 2000 or to gut the Voting Rights Act in 2013 or when he sat silently from 2017-2021 as Trump trashed our institutions. https://t.co/wn8ZOMx5y0
— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) September 17, 2021
