There is nothing to the Ginni Thomas text "scandal," other than baseless smears.

The Left's latest racist attack on Justice Thomas and his wife is yet another unfounded attack in its furtherance of destroying the rule of law.

At this point, you probably have heard about the latest Democrat and Mainstream Media hoax about Ginni Thomas’ text messages surrounding January 6 and the November, 2020 election. If you have not, you can read about it here and here. Essentially, Ginni Thomas is the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. In the lead up and aftermath of January 6, she texted several times with Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, encouraging him to continue to challenge what she believed was election fraud. Much later, the Supreme Court refused to reverse the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision not to honor President Trump’s claims of privilege with respect to documents requested by the January 6 Committee, including texts that would later include Ginni Thomas’ texts. The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 not to intervene and reverse the decision, with Justice Thomas the lone dissenter.

From this, Democrats and Mainstream Outlets, which now speak in near unanimity, claim that Justice Thomas has violated his judicial ethics. Their proposed punishment for this supposed violation range from recusal to impeachment. More radical Leftists like MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan want him to be impeached, while slightly saner voices on the left, such as Preet Bharara, desire recusal. Of course, neither is necessary or appropriate based on the Rule of Law or the ethical rules surrounding judges. Rather, it is an easily debunked hoax that the Left is pushing to smear their political opposition, suppress dissent from their views, and further erode the Rule of Law and our Constitutional Republic.

Before debunking the hoax, it is important to note a logistical fact with respect to Supreme Court justices. Unlike other Federal judges, under current law, Supreme Court justices are not subject to the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, which you can review for yourself here. Supreme Court justices alone decide whether they must recuse themselves from ruling on a particular case for ethical or conflict concerns. This being understood, it is important to note that no articles or commentary calling for Justice Thomas to recuse based on his wife’s conservative advocacy cites any portion of the Code of Conduct that would require recusal.

In fact, the calls for Justice Thomas to be sanctioned for his alleged failure to recuse himself from prior or future cases are baseless. This latest round of calls for his recusal are more baseless than prior ones, because they spring from the January 6 rally, which itself is inappropriately interpreted, without evidence, as a coup or “insurrection.” As is plain from her texts to Mr. Meadows, Ginni Thomas texted and attended the rally not to “overturn an election,” but as an advocate for using legal means to challenge the certification of the 2020 Election based upon the provisions of the Electoral Court Act of 1887 and other Constitutional means.

Ginni Thomas was not calling for a coup, but, in her view, trying to prevent one. For example, on November 10, 2020, she texted Mr. Meadows:

"Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!! ... You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America's constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”

Later, on January 10, 2021, apparently displeased with Vice President Mike Pence’s decision not to take action during the January 6 certification process, she wrote:

"We are living through what feels like the end of America. Most of us are disgusted with the VP and are in a listening mode to see where to fight with our teams. Those who attacked the Capitol are not representative of our great teams of patriots for DJT!! Amazing times. The end of Liberty."

The Left has used this trick extensively; suggesting that any challenge to the election irregularities of 2020 is some form of “insurrection.” One cannot help but notice that all suggestions by Democrats and the Mainstream Media are based on the unproven premise that January 6 was an “insurrection” or coup and, thus, any participation of any kind with it makes one culpable. Making the claim that January 6 was a coup even more baseless is the fact that they never bother to explain how the rioters (or others) were to take the levers of power had they taken the Capitol (but, as of late, the Left never bothers to plot their conspiracy theories and hoaxes past one step). You can learn more about the baseless nature of the January 6 hoax in one of our prior articles. In any event, because Ginni Thomas was not acting inappropriately in her encouraging perfectly legal political moves (again, the Left conveniently ignores the fact that the Department of Justice has not indicted anyone), there could not be any ethical conflict for her husband with respect to January 6.

Plainly these latests calls for Justice Thomas to recuse (or be sanctioned in some manner) are just more of a consistent pattern of those on the Left to erode the Rule of Law for political gain. Leftists groups have been making baseless calls for conservative justices, including Thomas, to recuse themselves to attempt to tilt the balance of the Court for quite some time. For example, some claimed he should have recused himself from the 5-4 ruling in Bush v. Gore because, at the time, Ginni Thomas worked at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that plainly favored Bush. There is no ethical cannon requiring recusal because your spouse may possess a political view. Similarly, baseless ethics attacks were raised of Thomas during the Supreme Court’s review in 2017 of Trump’s policy banning inbound travel from several Muslim-majority countries because Ginni Thomas’ consulting firm received more than $200,000 from the Center For Security Policy, whose president filed an amicus brief in the case. There is no law even suggesting that every Justice who’s spouse works for an entity that receives a donation from a party that files a brief recuse. By way of another example, there have been calls for Justice Gorsuch to recuse himself simply because he spoke at Federalist Society events, a staunchly conservative advocacy group. In addition to failing to note any ethical Canon from the Code of Conduct being breached, these advocates also conveniently fail to mention the many supposed conflicts of judges and justices on the Democrat side of the isle.

One such prominent example involves 2010 case of Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt, a well-known liberal. He refused to remove himself from a case over Proposition 8 because of ties his wife, Ramona Ripston, had to the litigation. She was executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which filed an amicus brief in the district court case under appeal. She had also reportedly consulted with lawyers challenging Prop. 8, an anti-same-sex-marriage referendum. Despite these facts and the fact that he was subject to the Code of Conduct, he chose not to recuse. He received no sanction and properly so because these types of connections are not legal ethical conflicts.

The Left is attempting to create a rule whereby the mere suggestion of impropriety requires recusal, a heckler’s veto. Hopefully, these attacks on Ginni and Clarence Thomas and the Rule of Law will go nowhere. However, even if they do not, the Left will have succeeded in raising the specter of using political smears to suppress the activity of their political opponents, and all without paying any notable price.

Over time, this erodes our Constitutional norms and brings our government more in line with banana republics where this type of tactic is commonplace. We must be mindful of Benjamin Franklin’s admonition that we have been given a Republic, “if we can keep it.”

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