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Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

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Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

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Technically true, but collectively nonsense

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You cannot shame the shameless.

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Celebrate the fucking wins.

You are here: Home / Politics / Republican Venality / Open Thread: Ginni Thomas, ‘the Wind in Their Sales’… & the Cash in Their Pockets

Open Thread: Ginni Thomas, ‘the Wind in Their Sales’… & the Cash in Their Pockets

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Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, privately heaped praise on a major religious-rights group for fighting efforts to reform the nation’s highest court — efforts sparked, in large part, by her husband’s ethical lapses.

Thomas expressed her appreciation in an email sent to Kelly Shackelford, an influential litigator whose clients have won cases at the Supreme Court. Shackelford runs the First Liberty Institute, a $25 million-a-year organization that describes itself as “the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated exclusively to defending religious liberty for all Americans.”

Shackelford read Thomas’ email aloud on a July 31 private call with his group’s top donors.

Thomas wrote that First Liberty’s opposition to court-reform proposals gave a boost to certain judges. According to Shackelford, Thomas wrote in all caps: “YOU GUYS HAVE FILLED THE SAILS OF MANY JUDGES. CAN I JUST TELL YOU, THANK YOU SO, SO, SO MUCH.”

Shackelford said he saw Thomas’ support as evidence that judges, who “can’t go out into the political sphere and fight,” were thankful for First Liberty’s work to block Supreme Court reform. “It’s neat that, you know, those of you on the call are a part of protecing the future of our court, and they really appreciate it,” he said.

On the same call, Shackelford attacked Justice Elena Kagan as “treasonous” and “disloyal” after she endorsed an enforcement mechanism for the court’s newly adopted ethics code in a recent public appearance. He said that such an ethics code would “destroy the independence of the judiciary.” (This past weekend, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she too was open to an enforceable ethics code for the Supreme Court.)…

The July 31 call led by Shackelford came shortly after President Joe Biden had announced support for a slate of far-reaching Supreme Court changes. Biden endorsed term limits for justices, a constitutional amendment reversing the court’s recent presidential immunity decision and a binding ethics code for the court’s nine members. Kagan’s comments came before Biden’s. She did not mention any of the structural proposals Biden endorsed…

To recap: Bribing judges? Freedom! Enforcing ethics? Treason!

Ruth Marcus is angry that Ginni is scaring the normies again — “One urgent reason the justices need a credible ethics code? Ginni Thomas”:

Just when you think Virginia “Ginni” Thomas can’t do any more to cast disrepute on the institution where her husband has served as a justice for more than three decades, just when you think that perhaps, just perhaps, the justices and their spouses have been chastened by the torrent of bad publicity — there she goes again.

The latest bombshell, from ProPublica and Documented, involves Thomas’s gushing, all-caps thank-you email to the conservative First Liberty Institute. This is not just any conservative organization — it’s one that litigates extensively before the Supreme Court, on some of its most contested cases involving religious liberty and LGBTQ+ rights.

​And Thomas’s email was not just some generic note of appreciation. It was to praise First Liberty for its fierce, and deep-pocketed, fight against … wait for it … proposals to reform the Supreme Court and strengthen ethics enforcement against the justices…

The impropriety here is multilayered — and staggering.

Ginni Thomas is a political activist by vocation, and, as I’ve written before, that’s her prerogative. It’s her constitutional right. And justices’ spouses have every right to pursue separate careers, including in politics and advocacy. “We have our own separate careers and our own ideas and opinions too,” she told the Washington Free Beacon. “Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.”

Now Ginni Thomas’s isn’t just lobbying to “Stop the Steal” — she’s trying to Stop the Reform of her husband’s own institution. So much for separate careers. Ginni Thomas’s own behavior around the 2020 election, and Clarence Thomas’s conduct in accepting, and failing to disclose, thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts from wealthy conservatives helped trigger the push for court reform in the first place. Now, we know, Ginni Thomas is a behind-the-scenes player seeking to frustrate any changes — and a grateful (“THANK YOU SO, SO, SO MUCH”) beneficiary of First Liberty’s efforts on the Thomases’ behalf…

Remember the praying football coach? He’s a First Liberty client; Clarence Thomas voted that his constitutional rights had been violated when he lost his job. The Maine families who said they were entitled to state funding to send their children to religious schools? First Liberty clients, too, and also beneficiaries of Thomas’s vote.

It was clear, or so I thought, that Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from deciding Jan. 6-related cases after Ginni Thomas called the election a “heist.”

There isn’t merely an ethics code to which the justices have voluntarily subjected themselves, albeit under duress. There’s a federal law that requires justices, like all other judges, to recuse themselves in situations in which their impartiality might reasonably be questioned…

… As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell in remarks broadcast this week, “a binding code of ethics is pretty standard for judges. And so I guess the question is, ‘Is the Supreme Court any different?’ And I guess I have not seen a persuasive reason as to why the court is different than the other courts.”

But there is a persuasive reason the high court does need an enforcement mechanism. Her name is Ginni Thomas.

Reader Interactions

32Comments

  2. 2.

    Trivia Man

    Another question to ask both candidates Should Thomas recuse  from all Jan 6 cases due to his wife’s involvement? Name and shame.

  3. 3.

    karen marie

    @BR: YES BUT HE ONLY LOST BY A LITTLE BIT!  AND IT WAS PROBABLY FROM CHEATING!

    Trump’s cult members aren’t going to be in the least affected by his “slip of the tongue.”

  4. 4.

    BR

    @karen marie:

    They seem to be, to my surprise — there are a bunch of them screaming at Trump about it. I’m sure most will get back on board with him, but demoralizing them is always good.

  6. 6.

    karen marie

    @BR:   It’s a heartening that it’s had some impact, although my guess is most of his cult members will never hear about his apostasy.

  8. 8.

    Marleedog

    Hoping that the Democrats can flip the House, one of the first orders of business should be to impeach Clarence Thomas.

  9. 9.

    Chet Murthy

    @Marleedog: I must demur.  Unless we have 67 votes in the Senate, any such  impeachment would be DOA.  Better to spend the energy/time on packing the court.  Render the bastard powerless.

  10. 10.

    Betty Cracker

    Every time I read another exposé about right-wing nut Ginni Thomas, I’m struck anew by how stupid she sounds in all her communications. I know that’s not the primary issue here. The galloping corruption on the court is the point.

    But Ginni is dumber than a bag of toenail clippings, and I hope her big mouth and constant idiocy are an endless source of irritation and embarrassment for her evil crook of a husband. He deserves to suffer.

  12. 12.

    John Revolta

    @BR: Hilarious!

    He (Nick Fuentes) went on to declare that Special Counsel Jack Smith was right in bringing charges against Trump before announcing that his support for Trump all these years has been a “ripoff.” A snapshot of his meltdown:

    “So, why did we do Stop the Steal? … Why did anyone go to Jan. 6? Why is anyone sitting in jail? Why did anything bad happen to anybody? Why did everyone get censored? Why is everything bad that has happened to the people that were involved, why did that need to happen if you’re just going to walk it all back and say, ‘Oh, I lost’?”

    “Well, it would have been good to know that before 1,600 people got charged. It would have been good to know that before I had all my money frozen, [was] put on the No Fly List, [got] banned from everything, lost all banking and payment processing. It would have been good to know that before I, in 2017, dedicated my life to this as an 18 year-old in college. It just feels like a big ripoff.”

  14. 14.

    karen marie

    @Trivia Man:   Jane Sullivan Roberts doesn’t work for a law firm.  She’s a recruiter.

    “Jane is the Managing Partner of the Washington, DC office of Macrae. One of Washington’s most insightful and experienced legal recruiters, Jane advises high-profile law firm partners and groups on lateral moves, and senior government attorneys transitioning to the private sector. She works with clients, primarily established law firms, on business-critical recruiting assignments such as succession planning in key practice areas.”

    At the recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa, she made over $10 million between 2007 and 2014 “[placing] attorneys with law firms—including at least one that argued a case before the Supreme Court after the placement was made.”

    She left Major, Lindsey & Africa to become a managing partner at Macrae in 2019.  Presumably she’s making a fuckton more in her current job.

    @John Revolta:  Wait, let me look for my tiny fucking violin.

  16. 16.

    Scout211

    From the  ProPublica article:

    Shackelford said he saw Thomas’ support as evidence that judges, who “can’t go out into the political sphere and fight,” were thankful for First Liberty’s work to block Supreme Court reform. “It’s neat that, you know, those of you on the call are a part of protecting the future of our court, and they really appreciate it,” he said.

    On the same call, Shackelford attacked Justice Elena Kagan as “treasonous” and “disloyal” after she endorsed an enforcement mechanism for the court’s newly adopted ethics code in a recent public appearance. He said that such an ethics code would “destroy the independence of the judiciary.”

    It’s a very good read, especially for the details on slimy Shackelford.

  19. 19.

    scav

    Expecting a religious rights group to be at all in favor of ethics.  One with Liberty in the title? Enough to make a cat laugh.  Filled sails?  Ginni’s clearly angling for a yacht to go with the motor home.

  21. 21.

    Betty Cracker

    @HumboldtBlue: Good. Maybe Michigan set a precedent by throwing the parents of egregiously negligent school shooters in jail. I’m all for anything that moves the goddamn needle. A generation traumatized, and for what? So dickless neck-beards can fondle their penis substitutes? Fuck all that noise!

  22. 22.

    Jay C

    @HumboldtBlue:

    according to reports, Colin Gray bought his son the gun AFTER the family had been visited by the FBI over the online threats they had traced back to Colt.
    so NOT a case of “we weren’t warned” ….

  23. 23.

    Jay

    @Almost Retired:

    Not really, he knew what kind of snakes and grifters, (not actual snakes) he was lying down with for years, after all, he is a snake and a grifter, and game, admires game.

  25. 25.

    Chet Murthy

    @Jay: haha, now that you put it that way, yeah, it’s a little rich to hear a guy who worked with a movement -known- for its hypocrisy, its grifting, its shameless theft of anything not-nailed-down, to complain about his colleague’s hypcriisty, grifting, and thieving.

  30. 30.

    lowtechcyclist

    It’s good to know that an allegedly Christian group is openly siding with the money changers in the temple.  Can’t ask for a better anti-witness than that.

  31. 31.

    Geminid

    @Scout211: Nick Fuentes has been slamming Trump for months now. This is an excuse to slam Trump some more. Fuentes’ general line of attack is that Trump no is longer a credible leader of the America First movement, that Trump has been captured by the RINOs and their Globalist masters.

  32. 32.

    RaflW

    Harris taped a radio interview with Univision-owned Phoenix radio station Uforia 106.3 FM. I saw it mentioned on Bsky. Web searching for that, and mainly Fox News of all places has info on the interview. The fucking big papers like WaPo and NYT? Not sure, but not coming up in search.

    They’re so g.d. self-absorbed. It’s not OUR paper she chose, or our target audience, so it doesn’t count?

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