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ginni thomas
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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Ocasio-Cortez Unveils Articles of Impeachment Against Alito, Thomas
"Congress has a legal, moral, and democratic obligation to impeach," said the New York Democrat.
Jul 10, 2024
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday introduced articles of impeachment against Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, citing "widely documented financial and personal entanglements" that have sparked a full-blown ethics crisis on the nation's highest judicial body.
"The unchecked corruption crisis on the Supreme Court has now spiraled into a constitutional crisis threatening American democracy writ large," Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said in a statement, arguing that their refusal to recuse from key cases in which they had glaring financial and personal conflicts of interest "constitutes 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."
The impeachment articles against Thomas accuse the justice of "failure to disclose financial income, gifts and reimbursements, property interests, liabilities, and transactions, among other information," as well as refusal to recuse from matters concerning his spouse's legal and financial interest in cases before the court.
The Alito articles accuse the justice of "refusal to recuse from cases in which he had a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party in cases before the court" and "failure to disclose financial income, gifts and reimbursements, property interests, liabilities, and transactions, among other information."
"Justice Thomas and Alito's repeated failure over decades to disclose that they received millions of dollars in gifts from individuals with business before the court is explicitly against the law," said the New York Democrat. "And their refusal to recuse from the specific matters and cases before the court in which their benefactors and spouses are implicated represents nothing less than a constitutional crisis. These failures alone would amount to a deep transgression worthy of standard removal in any lower court, and would disqualify any nominee to the highest court from confirmation in the first place."
Today, I introduced articles of impeachment against Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
Read my full statement: https://t.co/is5EiLXw56 pic.twitter.com/AGGZhuZUm4
— Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@RepAOC) July 10, 2024
Ocasio-Cortez argued that "Congress has a legal, moral, and democratic obligation to impeach," a statement that reflects widespread alarm over the Supreme Court's ruling last week that current and former U.S. presidents are entitled to sweeping immunity for actions that fall within the scope of their official capacities.
Both Thomas and Alito faced—and rejected—calls to recuse from the case, titled Trump v. United States.
Demands for Alito's recusal came in the wake of news that two flags associated with the January 6, 2021 insurrection were flown at his family's properties in Virginia and New Jersey. Alito blamed his wife for the flags and dismissed calls to step away from the case as baseless.
Thomas, for his part, faced calls to recuse due to his wife's role in efforts to overturn President Joe Biden's 2020 election win.
Additionally, Alito and Thomas have been the focus of recent ProPublicareporting detailing the extent to which both justices have accepted vacations and other undisclosed gifts from right-wing billionaires with interests before the court.
In response to the corruption crisis, the Supreme Court late last year unveiled an ethics code with no enforcement mechanisms—further showing to critics that the justices could not be trusted to police themselves.
"Given the court's demonstrated inability to preserve its own legitimate conduct," Ocasio-Cortez said Wednesday, "it is incumbent upon Congress to contain the threat this poses to our democracy and the hundreds of millions of Americans harmed by the crisis of corruption unfurling within the court."
Only one Supreme Court justice has been successfully impeached in U.S. history, and Ocasio-Cortez's articles have no chance of getting through the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
Advocates nevertheless celebrated the impeachment effort as a necessary step toward reining in the high court.
"The framers of our Constitution called on Congress specifically to hold judicial officers, including Supreme Court justices, accountable for high crimes and misdemeanors that compromise the integrity of the court," Courtney Hostetler, legal director at Free Speech For People, said in a statement. "We're proud to have worked with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's office to help draft these articles and further the process of restoring the Supreme Court to a nonpartisan branch of the federal government."
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A Few Words to Clarence and Ginni Thomas From Lady MacBeth in Hell
There is no day here, only night that never finds the light — without a glimmer to brighten our way, save for red. It is always dripping red for those like me, as it will be for you, Clarence Thomas, and you, too, Ginni, year after grisly year.
Jul 09, 2024
At least I had the courage to do the deed myself. That counts for something here on the other side of death, where I wait for you, Clarence Thomas, and your sharp-toothed wife Ginni, and someday the others whose decrees and rulings from afar have aided and abetted the mayhem and the massacres. Cowards all of you, and boring and petty to boot, at such a safe distance from the volleys, the salvos, the gunfire. Oh, the names I have had to learn — Sandy Hook and Columbine and Uvalde and so many hundreds more and even more after that, while you were careful to stay at a safe distance from the children as they fell.
Not me, not me.
In his play about treachery and murder in medieval Scotland, Shakespeare made sure that I would never be able to shirk facing my own ambition and malevolence. He never thought to spare me, just as I did not spare the lives of others — or, in the end, my own life for that matter.
When I egged on my husband to kill the king, the kinsman we were hosting at our castle, I was the one who had to clean up afterwards, smearing the guards who slept by their liege so they would be blamed, I was the one who covered up the crime and made my man Macbeth supreme in our land.
Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?
And yes, the blood flowed onto me, too — out damned spot! Out, I say! — each gripping finger knowing that the red of that blood was staining more than the surface and the flesh, that it was staining what the soul would never forget. At least I owned the deed, the deaths, the dead. Who would have thought the old king had so much blood in him?
Come to us, Clarence and Ginni, here on this side of death. Step into this fog and filthy air where no water will clear us of our deeds, where all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten your hands or raze the written troubles of your souls.
At least I was never petty or boring. And, of course, what’s done is done. I risked the haunting and the madness and the blotches that would never come out. Something dire in me must have known that I was risking damnation, too.
That counts in this place where I have been tasked with dealing, night after thick night — there is no day here, only night that never finds the light — without a glimmer to brighten our way, save for red. It is always dripping red for those like me, as it will be for you, Clarence Thomas, and you, too, Ginni, year after grisly year. Years here are no more than infinite stretches of redness in the dark of infinite night, trickling second by second from each of the smoking wounds we inflicted. I have been tasked here, I who was once a queen, with waiting for you and your wife to join me on this journey.
Ginni Thomas, Lobbyist for Donald Trump and Extreme Election Denier, Gets What’s Coming to Her
Oh, I know something about wives and accomplices, partners in bed and partners in crime. I know something, Ginni, about goading the man on, to bed, to bed, to bed. I know about denying reality — an election in your world, something different in mine — and calling for an insurrection. I know how a woman (like a man) can stop the access and passage to remorse, and the greed, greed, greed that never stops.
Clarence and Ginni, listen to what awaits you.
It starts with the stench.
That is how you will be greeted by each of those children cut down so early, so early.
There will, in due course, be women and men aplenty as well, shot down in a harsh crimson carnage in their homes and in shops, on spattered streets and on spattered lawns. There will be time enough for you to meet them, one by one by one.
But first the children, the corpses of the children. They will be there for you to smell when I open the portals of this afterlife for you — for you and, someday, the five others like you in their black (or do I now mean scarlet?) robes. The boys and girls have been waiting patiently, their limbs riddled with the bullets you allowed, the ones you celebrated, each child and all of them together forecasting your future henceforth. Hollowed-out eyes and amputated stumps, collapsed lungs and gouged lips. I know, I know, you will try to look away — as you did on Earth, Clarence, as you did, too, Ginni. You were such weaklings, unwilling to face what you had done, letting others bear the burden, the keen knife of your sanctimonious words, refusing to accept the wounds you made. This time, you will not be able to look away from what you have wrought. Do not think the immunity you granted to a high-ranking criminal, making him king, will extend to you.
Though what you should really fear is not the gore, but something smaller and more dangerously devouring, not that easily dismissed.
A bullet, just one bullet, that is enough to slice the thread of life.
Think, then, of the 98 bullets you allowed to be fired automatically in seven seconds, think of the bump stocks you made legal, think of the sound and the fury of those never-ending shots resonating in the toil and trouble of your mind.
Who Sows Bullets Reaps a Whirlwind of Death
You will be squeezed into each lethal projectile and then into a second, a third, a fourth, and on, and on, and on. You will be in the barrel and dart through the air. You will be the metal that severs the artery, punctures the heart, rips, and carves, and explodes, and cracks, dashes the brain like that of a newborn babe, over and over and over again. And then, from within that body as it twitches in its last moments, you will witness and experience the sudden death of a child never given the grace of being garlanded with goodbyes, and then… and then, yet another child, one more boy, one more girl, like babes strangled in the cradle. And then and then and then, you will be inside the grieving parents and sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, cousins and nephews, and inside those who were never born because the child who had done not the slightest harm, who would someday have been a father or a mother died too soon, way too soon. Yes, this is the endless sorrow you will inhabit from now on.
What you can no longer disavow, not in this place, not anymore is the life that girl or boy did not live, the one who wanted to plant trees, who wanted to dance, who dreamt of a world better than ours.
Clarence and Ginni, listen to what awaits you... It starts with the stench.
I know how you will feel because that is the sort of vision that drove me mad, that was what my hands forced me to see while I was still alive, the price I began to pay before I died. That is what broke my already broken heart, and that counts for something here.
I thought I could escape. I thought that, by turning the knife on myself, I could escape.
You will learn soon enough that no such escape is afforded us, not you, not me, to jump the life to come.
Not a trace of the milk of human kindness will be granted to those like you in this place where even lightning, thunder, and rain are clothed in red, where faces are torn to pieces that will drip on both of you in the bubbling cauldron of forever. No luxury trips this time around, Clarence, no weeks on a superyacht paid for by a corrupt billionaire, no immunity at all.
I can already hear you complaining, and you, too, Ginni. Of course, you will claim that you pulled no triggers, that the blood, spilled by others, had nothing to do with you, that guns don’t kill people, people do. Oh, such petty, boring platitudes.
Do not whine, Clarence. What’s done is done. What’s done cannot be undone. You are, in fact, lucky to have drawn me as your supervisor here in the halls of the hereafter.
Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall Join the Fray
You could have been assigned to Martin Luther King or Thurgood Marshall. There were others, so many others who had been damaged in such myriad ways by what you decreed, all of them so excited at the prospect of getting their hands (and more than their hands) on you, but it was those two, Thurgood and Martin, who petitioned the Supreme Law that rules this realm, asking to take charge of you when you crossed that river of justice — you who called yourself a Justice. They had plans for you. They had spent a rack of hours discussing each excruciating detail of what you deserved as a traitor to your kind. Even I shuddered when I listened to what they were concocting, those two men who had always shown such mercy while they were alive, who were forged in the winds of forgiveness. I dare not even mention what they wanted you to endure, you and your greedy Ginni, the doom they imagined for you.
So better you should stick with me, just as I am stuck with you, as we will be stuck with each other for all eternity. And do not think — not for a moment — that I am in any way fond of the thought of spending the eons ahead with you and your clawing spouse and the serpent under her tongue. And yet I refuse to be relieved of this task. This is my own punishment for my delinquencies, my horrors, my spots from hell — to devote every second from now on to you and Ginni, two cowards who did not themselves wield those guns from hell but let others do it for you, who did not taste the blood that would be shed, who feigned innocence with false hearts and false faces while wreaking havoc on so many people, including the voters of your land.
What Lies Ahead Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
So come to me.
Come to me and sleep no more.
They are waiting for you in this blanket of darkness, the lives unlived, the worlds never experienced. Come to us, Clarence and Ginni, here on this side of death. Step into this fog and filthy air where no water will clear us of our deeds, where all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten your hands or raze the written troubles of your souls.
This is what you will inhabit. This is your fate, and the fate of so many others like you on the other side of death, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, to the last syllable of recorded time.
Something wicked this way comes.
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