Clarence Thomas has already been below scrutiny for months over his profitable friendship with Harlan Crow. However a brand new report suggests the justice’s relationship with the conservative billionaire is simply the tip of the iceberg: In line with the New York Instances, Thomas has additionally reaped the advantages of his membership within the Horatio Alger Affiliation, which he joined quickly after his 1991 affirmation to the Supreme Court docket and would later describe as a “residence” to he and his spouse, right-wing activist Ginni Thomas. The group “has allowed me to see my goals come true,” he mentioned in 2010.
These goals, the Instances studies, seem to have included shut entry to its rich members, who’ve gifted him “trip retreats, organized V.I.P. entry to sporting occasions and invited him to their lavish events”—together with a Montana birthday celebration for billionaire industrialist Dennis Washington, whose visitors included Oprah Winfrey and Ed McMahon.
Thomas additionally reportedly turned “shut private pals” by means of the group—named after the writer whose “rags-to-riches” tales stirred Gilded Age Individuals—with businessman David Sokol, who with different Horatio Alger members helped fund a documentary on Thomas to counter an HBO documentary recounting Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations towards him.
Lots of the items, the Instances studies, went undisclosed by Thomas. Certainly, because the paper notes, the conservative justice stopped reporting non-public flights and most different items and advantages after the Los Angeles Instances reported in 2004 on items he acquired from Crow.
Not solely did Thomas’s membership within the group deliver him right into a rarified house with the rich and highly effective; it has introduced the group’s members into shut proximity to the excessive court docket, the place Thomas holds an unique ceremony yearly to bestow medals on new lifetime members, which one entrepreneur advised the Instances was “the closest factor to being knighted in america.”
Thomas has not publicly responded to the Instances report, and the Supreme Court docket didn’t return Vainness Truthful’s request for remark.
The report provides to the ever-growing record of battle of curiosity and transparency scandals dogging the Supreme Court docket, whose legitimacy disaster has been compounded by a sequence of partisan rulings over the previous yr. “It’s clearer than ever that the Supreme Court docket has grabbed unprecedented energy, shattered long-standing precedents, ignored judicial norms, rejected fundamental ethics and transparency, and is implementing an excessive partisan agenda that Individuals have repeatedly rejected,” as Stasha Rhodes, the director of the United for Democracy marketing campaign, advised me final week.
That coalition of progressive and left-leaning situation teams on Monday renewed requires congressional investigation into “corruption” on the excessive court docket, demanding in a letter that lawmakers transfer to “restore a good and impartial judiciary.” However the court docket itself has resisted reform, as have the overwhelming majority of the GOP, which has defended Thomas and Samuel Alito—one other conservative justice below scrutiny for obvious moral violations—towards what they’ve described as smears from the left. This appears to have left Democrats with little recourse—for now—to substantively deal with the court docket’s moral impropriety, at the same time as celebration leaders argue that fixing the “MAGA-captured Supreme Court docket” is a high precedence. “Congress has clear authority to supervise the federal judiciary,” Senate Majority Chief Chuck Schumer wrote in a “pricey colleague” letter Sunday. “And we should discover each choice for restoring religion in our courts.”
