Clarence Thomas Is How the Conservative Legal Movement Works [View all]

[Nevilledog]

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/05/clarence-thomas-conservative-legal-movement-rich-ginni-thomas-federalist-society/


On Thursday, ProPublica dropped a major new story about Clarence Thomas’ relationship with Texas conservative megadonor Harlan Crow. In addition to inviting the Supreme Court justice on expensive vacations on his superyacht, buying Thomas’ mother’s house, and letting her live there rent-free, Crow also spent roughly $100,000 on private-school tuition for Thomas’ great nephew—for whom the justice and his wife, Ginni, served as legal guardians.

The half-baked justifications, and the people who rally around them, are a kind of blueprint for the way this whole world operates.

Thomas himself did not respond to ProPublica’s queries. But for a sense of what a defense of his failure to disclose these gifts might sound like, look no further than a statement issued by his friend Mark Paoletta, a conservative lawyer who has worked in multiple Republican presidential administrations and is literally the man sitting next to Thomas in the center of a painting Crow once commissioned.

The statement walks a tightrope, but not well. It emphasizes that “Justice Thomas and his wife devoted twelve years of their lives to taking in and caring for a beloved child” in the same breath that it emphasizes that the child “was not their own.” It asserts that the tuition “did not constitute a reportable gift” to a dependent, because the Ethics in Government Act “does not include ‘great nephew’” in its list of possible dependents—though, as ProPublica notes, the tuition might more accurately be characterized as a gift to the legal guardians who would otherwise have paid for the child’s education. Paoletta refers to the “personal and financial sacrifices” the Supreme Court justice made to help a relative he was raising, to use Thomas’ words, “as a son,” which only underscores the significance of the favor Crow did for him.

There is a tendency, which is understandable, to view these disclosure stories through the lens of the corruption they lay bare. It is all very corrupt, if not in the legal sense—the Supreme Court essentially ended public corruption as a concept already and effectively polices itself—than as a matter of common sense. Thomas treated a basic requirement of his job with the good-faith and rigor of a Trump Organization accountant trying to justify a deduction.

*snip*