Dear John,

This week we found out about the newest Supreme Court scandal. Yet another undisclosed trip by Justice Clarence Thomas, on Harlan Crow’s private jet in 2010, this time from Hawaii to New Zealand and back.

It seems this steady drip, drip, drip of undisclosed gifts is never ending.

This is just one of multiple scandals of bias and undue influence involving Justices Clarence Thomas, but he’s not the only justice with issues. Samuel Alito’s conflicts of interest are numerous too. Both Thomas and Alito and their wives have shown public support for the January 6 insurrection, but both justices failed to recuse themselves from the related cases involving Trump, the 2020 election, and the insurrection.

This repeated failure to recuse themselves is the primary basis on which Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez filed articles of impeachment against both justices. Now we are calling on the House to follow through with the next step: impeachment.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez said impeachment is necessary due to the justices’ “pattern of refusal to recuse from consequential matters before the court in which they hold widely documented financial and personal entanglements” -- failures which, she writes, “constitute a grave threat to American rule of law, the integrity of our democracy, and one of the clearest cases for which the tool of impeachment was designed.”

This unchecked crisis of corruption on the Supreme Court has spiraled into a constitutional crisis threatening American democracy across the board, and Congress should not wait another day to take action.

Tell the House of Representatives: Open investigations into the actions of Justices Alito and Thomas, and follow through with impeachment proceedings based on their failure to recuse themselves from cases in which they held significant personal and financial entanglements now.

Inserting themselves and their families into the political activities of the “Stop the Steal” movement placed both Thomas and Alito on shaky constitutional ground. Their radical actions gave both justices a significant personal stake in Donald Trump’s claims of immunity, affecting the fate of the Georgia election interference, Mar-a-Lago stolen documents, and Washington DC insurrection cases.

Justice Alito showed a strong appearance of bias toward those who sought to prevent the peaceful transition of power on January 6 when he and his wife flew two insurrectionist flags outside their homes. Both the upside-down American flag and the White Christian Nationalist “Appeal to Heaven” flag were flown by rioters on January 6, before waving over the Alito family homes -- a seeming sign of the justice’s solidarity with violent criminals in the mob.

Justice Thomas’ impartiality too was called into serious doubt by the actions of his wife, Ginni Thomas, who pressed Arizona and Wisconsin lawmakers to appoint slates of fake electors after Trump lost those states in 2020. She also texted Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to “help this Great President stand firm” on January 6 as the mob violently assaulted Capitol Police with bear spray, tasers, and sharpened flagpoles.

The actions of both Justices Alito and Thomas have deeply eroded public confidence in the judiciary, and undermined their essential claims to impartiality, shattering the integrity of the Supreme Court.

The resulting decisions twist the Constitution into forms the Framers could never have intended, making the president, in the words of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s immunity dissent, a “king above the law.” So much for originalism and the primacy of historical intent!

If allowed to go unchecked, the actions of Alito and Thomas set a highly dangerous precedent, one in which the Constitution’s carefully balanced system of checks and balances breaks down, and an autocratic executive branch acts broadly outside of the law with the support of the Supreme Court’s oligarch pals.

This is a dangerous road on which we must reverse direction. Call on Congress to start impeachment investigations against Justices Alito and Thomas now.

Thank you for taking action in this unprecedented situation.

Robert Reich
Inequality Media Civic Action