The Clarence and Ginni Thomas scandal just got even more explosive and dangerous.
A blockbuster news report dropped this week revealing that
Ginni Thomas, the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice, attended the January 6, 2021 Trump rally that turned into a violent insurrection at our nation’s Capital. Obviously, this is bad — but it only gets worse when you take into account that Clarence Thomas was the only justice who dissented from the Supreme Court decision requiring Trump White House documents be turned over to the congressional committee investigating the insurrection.
This is unacceptable. The American people cannot trust Clarence Thomas to be an impartial jurist on cases involving the right-wing insurrection or any other matter in which Ginni Thomas is involved.
I’m going to be honest with you. I would love to be able to tell you that if just 12 people from your zip code give us $3 by midnight, we’ll be able to crush Mitch McConnell’s dreams by impeaching Clarence Thomas. I know you probably get emails like that all the time. But I can’t make those kinds of promises – and nobody else can, either. Impeaching a Supreme Court Justice requires two-thirds of the Senate, and the Senate Republicans who refused to remove Donald Trump from office after he incited the deadly insurrection at the Capitol aren’t likely to remove Clarence Thomas from the Supreme Court. (And certainly not for doing what they put him there to do: Rule in favor of Republicans.)
So that’s the truth. To say impeaching Clarence Thomas would be an uphill climb is an understatement.
But we can use Thomas’s long list of ethical failings — and, yes, the fact that he should be impeached and should recuse himself when appropriate — to highlight the need for the only structural reform that will rebalance the Court and wrest power from Thomas and his fellow right-wing ideologues: Supreme Court expansion.
We should expect more, not less from the justices that sit on the highest Court in the land. The more people see what Thomas and this right-wing supermajority are up to, the more they will demand reform.
We don’t have to accept this awful system where six right-wing judges feel comfortable erasing decades of settled law safeguarding our most fundamental rights with impunity. The Supreme Court should be the defender against attacks on our rights and values, not the institution legitimizing them, but we can make that a reality by adding four new seats to the bench.
This is not going to be easy. We will not succeed as soon as we would like. But we have to try — and with your help, I believe that we might just be able to pull this off.
You have already helped us come this far: Together we’ve put Court expansion into the national conversation, and we’ve helped recruit more than 100 advocacy organizations and 50+ congressional cosponsors for expansion — with more joining the fight every day.
Your support has been essential, and you deserve the truth, not empty promises. So I’m asking you to help support this important work — to enact the only solution that truly meets this moment.
I can’t promise you easy fixes, but I can promise that every one of us will never stop fighting to Take Back The Court.
Sarah Lipton-Lubet
Executive Director, Take Back the Court Action Fund
