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Ginni Thomas Thanked Group Fighting Ethics Reforms Spurred by Her Husband's Scandals
Leaked audio reveals that the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas praised a far-right group whose president later attacked Justice Elena Kagan as "treasonous."
Sep 04, 2024
Leaked audio published Wednesday by the investigative outlets ProPublica and Documented reveals that the wife of U.S. Supreme Court Clarence Thomas effusively thanked a far-right group fighting judicial ethics reform effort spurred in large part by revelations about her husband's undisclosed gifts from Republican billionaires.
During a private July 31 call with the organization's top donors, First Liberty Institute president and CEO Kelly Shackelford read aloud an email—some of it in all-caps—from Ginni Thomas hailing the group's opposition to court reforms that are broadly popular with the U.S. public.
"YOU GUYS HAVE FILLED THE SAILS OF MANY JUDGES. CAN I JUST TELL YOU, THANK YOU SO, SO, SO MUCH," Ginni Thomas, who was closely involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, wrote to the group, according to Shackelford.
"I cannot adequately express enough appreciation for you guys pulling into reacting to the Biden effort on the Supreme Court," Thomas wrote.
Later in the call, First Liberty's president attacked liberal Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan as "treasonous" and "disloyal" for supporting an enforcement mechanism for the toothless ethics code that the high court unveiled under immense public pressure late last year.
Listen to the audio released by ProPublica and Documented:
The First Liberty Institute's donor call came days after Senate Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) uncovered additional billionaire-funded private travel that Justice Thomas failed to disclose, the latest in a string of scandalous revelations that began with ProPublicareporting last year.
ProPublicaestimates that Thomas—part of a right-wing Supreme Court supermajority that has overturned the constitutional right to abortion care and dramatically curtailed the power of federal regulatory agencies—has over the past three decades taken dozens of luxury vacations bankrolled by billionaire Harlan Crow and other GOP megadonors with interests before the court.
Survey data released shortly after ProPublica's first bombshell report in April 2023 found that a majority of U.S. voters at the time backed Supreme Court ethics reforms and wanted Thomas to resign from the nation's most powerful judicial body.
"Ginni Thomas isn't protecting the court. She's protecting her and her husband's bribes."
ProPublica noted that Shackelford held the First Liberty donor call "shortly after President Joe Biden had announced support for a slate of far-reaching Supreme Court changes," including term limits and a binding ethics code for justices.
"On the donor call, Shackelford voiced strong opposition to various court reform proposals, including the ones floated by Biden, as well as expanding the size of the court," the investigative outlets noted. "All of these proposals, Shackelford said, were part of 'a dangerous attempt to really destroy the court, the Supreme Court.' This effort was led by 'people in the progressive, extreme left' who were 'upset by just a few cases,' he said."
News of Ginni Thomas' support for First Liberty's efforts to combat Supreme Court ethics reforms was seen as further confirmation of the urgent need to overhaul the judicial body, whose favorability ratings are near historic lows.
"Ginni Thomas isn't protecting the court," progressive activist Melanie D'Arrigo wrote on social media. "She's protecting her and her husband's bribes."
Brett Edkins, managing director of policy and political affairs at Stand Up America, said in a statement Wednesday that "the First Couple of the Supreme Court—Clarence and Ginni Thomas—have once again reminded us why we need term limits and a binding code of ethics to restore faith in our nation’s highest court."
"In a brazen political move, Ginni Thomas praised right-wing advocates working to quash commonsense Supreme Court reforms," said Edkins. "Having spent countless hours on all-expense-paid vacations on superyachts paid for by right-wing billionaires with interests before the court, it's almost too on the nose that Ginni thanked these advocates."
"It's a shameless reminder that the First Couple, and the Supreme Court broadly, must be held accountable," he added. "Congress must act by passing term limits and a binding code of ethics. The American people deserve a Supreme Court free from corruption and political bias."
This story has been updated to include a statement from Stand Up America.
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Justice Jackson Warns New Ruling Could 'Devastate' Federal Regulators
The liberal justice said Congress can remedy the "profoundly destabilizing" decision by passing legislation to strengthen the federal regulatory regime.
Jul 01, 2024
As the U.S. Supreme Court dealt yet another blow to the federal government's regulatory authority, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Monday stressed that "the ball is in Congress' court" to enact legislation to "forestall the coming chaos" wrought by the right-wing supermajority's decision.
The justices ruled 6-3 in Corner Post Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System that the Administrative Procedures Act's (APA) statute of limitations period does not begin until a plaintiff is adversely affected by a regulation. The ruling reverses a lower court's dismissal of a lawsuit filed by Corner Post—a North Dakota truck stop that challenged a U.S. Federal Reserve rule capping debit card swipe fees—because the six-year statute of limitations on such challenges had passed.
Monday's ruling makes it much easier to sue government agencies. As Sydney Bryant and Devon Ombres at the Center for American Progress explained, the decision "is intended to allow a swarm of legal challenges to rules that have protected the American people from bad actors and corporate malfeasance for decades."
"Corner Post is not the story of David versus Goliath but rather the Trojan Horse, where moneyed interests attempt to sneak in their anti-regulation politics under the guise of altruism."
In a dissent joined by fellow liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, Jackson wrote that "today, the majority throws... caution to the wind and engages in the same kind of misguided reasoning about statutory limitations periods that we have previously admonished."
"The court's baseless conclusion means that there is effectively no longer any limitations period for lawsuits that challenge agency regulations on their face," she continued. "Allowing every new commercial entity to bring fresh facial challenges to long-existing regulations is profoundly destabilizing for both government and businesses. It also allows well-heeled litigants to game the system by creating new entities or finding new plaintiffs whenever they blow past the statutory deadline."
"At the end of a momentous term, this much is clear: The tsunami of lawsuits against agencies that the court's holdings in this case and Loper Bright have authorized has the potential to devastate the functioning of the federal government," Jackson added, referring to last week's 6-3 overturning of the so-called Chevron doctrine, the legal principle under which courts deferred to federal agencies' interpretations of ambiguous laws passed by Congress.
While numerous business advocates welcomed Monday's ruling, a broad range of consumer, labor, and other groups echoed the alarm in Jackson's dissent.
"Americans expect that safeguards will protect us and our families from unsafe food, products, polluted air and water, and dangerous and unfair working conditions. This decision provides special interests, opposed to the safeguards that people rely upon, with more opportunities to challenge and seek to overturn these important protections," said Rachel Weintraub, executive director of the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards.
Weintraub added that the ruling "undermines federal agencies' ability to use administrative courts to impose civil penalties for violating regulatory protections" and "starkly impedes agencies' ability to protect the public."
Bryant and Ombres wrote that "Corner Post is not the story of David versus Goliath but rather the Trojan Horse, where moneyed interests attempt to sneak in their anti-regulation politics under the guise of altruism."
Jackson's dissent states that "Congress still has a chance to address this absurdity and forestall the coming chaos" by "clarifying that the statutes it enacts are designed to facilitate the functioning of agencies, not to hobble them."
"In particular, Congress can amend §2401(a)," Jackson offered, referring to the default six-year statute of limitations, "or enact a specific review provision for APA claims, to state explicitly what any such rule must mean if it is to operate as a limitations period in this context: Regulated entities have six years from the date of the agency action to bring a lawsuit seeking to have it changed or invalidated; after that, facial challenges must end."
"By doing this," she added, "Congress can make clear that lawsuits bringing facial claims against agencies are not personal attack vehicles for new entities created just for that purpose."
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US Supreme Court Accused of 'Full-On Gutting of the Equal Protection Clause'
The right-wing majority's ruling in South Carolina case will make it "nearly impossible for any plaintiff to prove racial gerrymandering in court," said one legal expert.
May 23, 2024
Upholding a district map that was previously found by a lower court to be unconstitutional due to its racially gerrymandered boundaries, the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing majority demonstrated on Thursday that it is "a MAGA Court," according to one advocate for judicial reform.
In a 6-3 decision along partisan lines, with Justice Samuel Alito writing the majority opinion, the court ruled in favor of a South Carolina district map which was drawn by the GOP-controlled state legislature and moved 30,000 Black voters from the state's 1st District to the 6th District.
Under the map, 62% of Black voters in Charleston County were moved to the district represented by Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), making the new 1st District a Republican stronghold where Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) later won reelection in 2022 by 14 percentage points—having won by a far smaller margin two years earlier.
The court reversed a ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for South Carolina last summer, which had ruled that "race was the predominant motivating factor" in the redistricting decision.
Alito wrote in the Alexander v. the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP ruling that since Black voters frequently support Democratic candidates, the fact that predominantly Black voting precincts in Charleston County were moved to a new district "does little to show that race, not politics drove the legislature's choice."
"Without an alternative map, it is difficult for plaintiffs to defeat our starting presumption that the legislature acted in good faith," Alito wrote, despite the lower court's finding that the GOP had unlawfully "exiled" Black voters.
Sarah Lipton-Lubet, president of Take Back the Court, said the decision—combined with reporting that Alito displayed flags that have been adopted by the "Stop the Steal" movement—shows when the right-wing supermajority "thought America was greatest: before the Constitution was amended to prevent voter discrimination based on race."
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), which joined the ACLU and ACLU of South Carolina in challenging the maps, said the ruling was "a rejection of the historical deference given to the trial court's factual findings and adds to the already difficult evidentiary burden that plaintiffs must demonstrate to remedy racial discrimination in voting."
"The highest court in our land greenlit racial discrimination in South Carolina's redistricting process, denied Black voters the right to be free from the race-based sorting and sent a message that facts, process, and precedent will not protect the Black vote," said Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of LDF. "Today the voices of Black South Carolinians were muted, and if we are not careful the next set of votes denied could be those in your state."
"The voting rights of Black communities remain under attack and the LDF will continue to meet moments like these with the resolve and determination necessary to protect voting rights and enforce key protections of the 14th and 15th Amendments," added Nelson.
The LDF and its allies argued their case with testimonies from 24 witnesses including six experts, as well as 652 pieces of evidence "demonstrating the hallmarks of racial discrimination in the design of the 2022 congressional map."
Writing the dissent for the court's three liberal justices, Justice Elena Kagan said the right-wing majority sent a "dispiriting" message in its ruling, which she said would "specifically disadvantage suits to remedy race-based redistricting."
"And so this 'odious' practice of sorting citizens, built on racial generalizations and exploiting racial divisions, will continue," Kagan wrote. "In the electoral sphere especially, where 'ugly patterns of pervasive racial discrimination' have so long governed, we should demand better—of ourselves, of our political representatives, and most of all of this Court."
Adriel Cepeda Derieux, deputy director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, concurred with Kagan's finding that the right-wing majority came to its conclusion by "'ignoring and minimizing' clear evidence that South Carolina racially gerrymandered its map."
"The Supreme Court’s ruling is an affront to Black voters, democracy, and precedent. South Carolina's legislature carved Black voters out of Congressional District 1 for the sake of partisan advantage and weakening their voting power," said Derieux. "And the proof that the court now asks of plaintiffs fighting discrimination is 'unheard of in constitutional litigation.' We continue to stand with our brave clients in this ongoing fight for voting rights."
By making it "nearly impossible for any plaintiff to prove racial gerrymandering in court," said Slate journalist and legal expert Mark Joseph Stern, Alito's opinion amounts to "a full-on gutting of the equal protection clause."
Taiwan Scott, a resident of Hilton Head, South Carolina who was a plaintiff in the case brought by LDF, said advocates for fair voting maps in South Carolina will "journey onward towards justice."
"We are deeply disappointed in the Supreme Court's decision to allow South Carolina's proposed congressional map to stand for yet another election after a unanimous federal three-judge panel recognized the racial discrimination in that map and ordered that a remedial map be used in upcoming elections beginning this year," said Scott. "Our battle to fairly represent and account for everyone in our beautiful state doesn't stop here."
Leah Aden, senior counsel at LDF, noted that the majority returned the plaintiffs' claim that the legislature aimed to dilute voters' power to the district court for further proceedings.
"Despite this unfortunate decision," said Aden, "we will continue, including on remand on a surviving claim from this decision, to create fair redistricting maps and advocate for Black South Carolinian voters."
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