House Democrats postpone closed-door meeting on 'conflict-of-interest accusations' against Clarence Thomas

Veteran GOP activist Ginni Thomas is hardly the only far-right MAGA insurrectionist who wanted to overturn the 2020 election results, but she is the only one who is married to a U.S. Supreme Court justice: Clarence Thomas. Some progressive Democrats, including Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, are calling for Justice Thomas to be impeached; other Democrats, both progressives and centrists, aren’t going that far but are arguing that he must recuse himself from any cases pertaining to the January 6, 2021 insurrection. And the House Judiciary Committee, according to NBC News, is examining “conflict-of-interest accusations” against Thomas and his wife.

Scott Wong and Haley Talbot of NBC News report that according to three House Judiciary Democrats, the Committee was planning to hold a closed-door meeting on Thursday, April 7 to discuss these accusations. But the meeting has been postponed and probably won’t take place until after House members return from a congressional recess on April 26.

“Some Democrats have already suggested drafting legislation to create a code of ethics for Supreme Court justices, which the Court would likely see as not being up to constitutional muster,” Wong and Talbot explain. “Others have floated the idea of launching investigations or holding hearings to generate public pressure on the justices to enact their own code.”

On April 5, one of the House Judiciary Democrats, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told NBC News, “There will be a conversation on how to proceed. Some of us are eager to perform some kind of oversight. We totally understand the separation-of-power issues. There are major limitations, obviously, but we can’t just sit on our hands.”

That Democrat described the postponed meeting as a “pretty specific response to many of us clamoring for some kind of action, or at least a conversation on a path forward.”

In March, CBS News and Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa revealed that after the 2020 election, Ginni Thomas and then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows exchanged a series of text messages in which Justice Thomas’ wife promoted the Big Lie and encouraged Meadows to aggressively pursue efforts to throw out the election results. President Joe Biden was the clear winner, picking up 306 electoral votes and defeating then-President Donald Trump by more than 7 million in the popular vote. Regardless, Ginni Thomas believed that Trump had a right to remain in the White House for four more years, and she wanted attorney Sidney Powell — another far-right conspiracy theorist — to become Trump’s main post-election lawyer.

Democrats, in light of Ginni Thomas’ text messages to Meadows, are troubled by the fact Justice Thomas has ruled on a case pertaining to January 6, 2021. Dominion Voting Systems has filed a defamation lawsuit against Powell for making the false, totally debunked claim that Dominion’s voting equipment was used to help Biden steal the election.

“This past January,” Wong and Talbot note, “the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s argument that executive privilege prevented the January 6 committee from having access to a trove of records from his time in office. (Clarence) Thomas was the only justice who indicated that the Court should grant Trump’s motion to block the National Archives from handing over the material.”