Fatal flaws

Love and politics

The term “love is blind” can be used to explain numerous and different human behaviors. How lenient we are with an intimate partner versus someone we don’t know personally can be seen everyday in our own lives if we are even modestly observant and self-critical.

Have you ever known a happy couple, together for many years, where the partners have strongly divergent political views? I have, but not many. I think I can count them on a few fingers.

The most senior member of the US Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, was the only member of our conservative court to have voted to uphold former president Trump’s claim that he need not release presidential records pertinent to the January 6th attack on the US Capitol. Thomas gave no written explanation. Not one sentence. We now know that Thomas’s wife Ginni was involved in the effort to influence senior White House officials after the 2020 election and bring about its nullification. This included some labored legal reasoning and strategy. The texts prove it.

What is the remedy to force recusal in cases of conflict of interest on the high court? Apparently we don’t have one. The Chief Justice holds a procedural role and I find only one reference to the position in Article 1 of the constitution. Extremism has exposed numerous holes in our system of government. 

Imagine if such a case came about differently. Imagine it involved the spouse of a “liberal” justice intervening in the high offices of some state government with regard to abortion rights, gun control, the teaching of Black history, the appointment of a Black Lives Matter activist to a high-office position? How long would it take for House Republicans to react and call for the impeachment of the sitting justice?

Love is blind and so is political extremism.  

Recommended reading: 
Is Ginni Thomas a Threat to the Supreme Court?, The New Yorker. This is a good piece of investigative journalism. Some of its findings are quite disturbing.

The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas, The New York Times. Another investigative piece exposing the role Ginni Thomas played in high-office appointments in the Trump Administration and the internal opposition to it by White House aids who referred to her as "the wrecking ball." Also, reporting on the judge's flouting of ethics by attending public, far-right political gatherings with his wife.

The judge should be given an opportunity to explain and defend himself. But as in the case of so many spirited oral arguments before the court over decades, we are getting inscrutable silence.