Dear John,

We’ve heard a lot about the role Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's wife, Ginni Thomas, played in efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

She sent at least 21 text messages to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, contacted 29 Arizona state lawmakers (some of them twice), and pressured several top Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin demanding Biden’s popular-vote victory be set aside to “choose” new presidential electors that would vote for Trump.^[1]

Perhaps even more alarming is that Ginni Thomas used the “independent state legislature theory” as the basis for her argument. This is the same debunked argument at the core of Moore v. Harper, the case that could hand state legislators potentially limitless power to manipulate rules for federal elections, currently scheduled for oral arguments to begin in the Supreme Court on December 7.

Ginni Thomas’s actions alone present significant questions of conflicts of interest for Justice Thomas. That’s one of the reasons we’ve called for Justice Thomas to recuse from Moore v. Harper, but there is no sign that he will.

We need to increase the pressure -- and the potential for long term accountability -- by demanding Congress take the next step and investigate Clarence Thomas’s conflicts of interest immediately.

Moore v. Harper is a serious threat to our democracy. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the plaintiffs, Republican-controlled state legislatures could overrule the will of the people and pick the next president of the United States without you.

It really is that simple.

It all hinges on the independent state legislature theory, an idea pushed by right-wing think tanks for years that reinterprets the Elections Clause of the Constitution and gives state legislatures the power to substitute their own slate of electors pledged to whomever they wish.

They would be ruling against more than a century of judicial precedent, but as we saw with the Dobbs decision last year, settled precedent won’t stop them.

When you consider the actions of Ginni Thomas and that Justice Thomas was the lone dissenter in the Supreme Court's January order rejecting Trump's bid to withhold documents from the January 6 committee, it is impossible not to see the obvious conflicts of interest.

Our democracy is at stake. Demand that Congress investigate Clarence Thomas’s conflicts of interest now.

Thank you for standing up and fighting to save our democracy by taking action today.

Robert Reich
Inequality Media Civic Action

^{[1] Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice, pressed Ariz. lawmakers to help reverse Trump’s loss, emails show}