About
Associate Justice Clarence Thomas has served on the Supreme Court since 1991, narrowly winning Senate confirmation (by a margin of 52–48) after fraught hearings featuring accusations of sexual harassment from Anita Hill. (As an attorney, she had worked with Thomas at two federal agencies, and even though her warnings about him went unheeded, she is still speaking out against injustice today.) In his three decades on the bench, Thomas has developed a reputation for being close-minded and tight-lipped, rarely speaking in court but reliably delivering the most extreme opinions of any justice.
Thomas is only the second Black man to sit on the court and has kept his signature silence since the insurrection, refusing to acknowledge the significant role his wife Ginni Thomas played in helping Trump attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The couple is notoriously in sync, working towards the same far-right goals from both political and judicial vantage points, as noted in an extensive New York Times article titled “The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas.”
In 2023 Thomas gained renewed notoriety for having accepted inappropriate gifts that went unreported over the course of decades from billionaire Harlan Crow and a handful of other wealthy “benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence,” as ProPublica first revealed. These included dozens of vacations, travel on private jets and yachts, and other luxury vacations. Since grumbling about his insufficient salary as far back as 2000, Thomas has “accepted a stream of gifts” apparently “unparalleled in the modern history of the Supreme Court,” as ProPublica reported in another investigative piece. Still, despite this brazenly unethical behavior and his profoundly partisan actions on the bench, the justice has faced no disciplinary action or repercussions of any kind.
Once Trump’s three SCOTUS appointments “tipped the balance of the Supreme Court toward Thomas and his originalist philosophy,” he has become what The New York Times and others call “a shadow chief justice.” In 2024 he refused to recuse himself from ruling on Trump-related cases before the court despite abundant evidence of clear conflicts of interest.
In terms of the ongoing interplay between the Thomases, the “symmetry” between their work “has never been more obvious,” according to Slate. “While Clarence fought to give state legislatures the constitutional authority to reject election results [in 2020], Ginni lobbied state legislators to do exactly that. A casual observer might assume they were working in tandem, with Clarence handling the law and Ginni working on the political side. They aren’t particularly subtle about it.”
January 6, 2021
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- In October 2020—just a week before the election—Thomas joined fellow conservatives on the bench (justices Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh) in an unsuccessful effort to invalidate thousands of mail-in ballots (which were disproportionately Democratic in that election) in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
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- In January 2022, Thomas was the only justice to dissent when the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s request to block the release of White House records sought by the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the Capitol.
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- In December 2023, several House Democrats sent a letter to Thomas imploring him to recuse himself from ruling on presidential immunity in the United States v. Trump case the Department of Justice had filed to hold Trump accountable for the insurrection. Senate Democrats sent a similar letter urging Thomas to remove himself from hearing the case but he refused to do so and the court ultimately ruled in Trump’s favor, granting him “absolute immunity” from prosecution for actions taken as part of his official presidential role. It’s a decision with profound implications for a presidential power grab as Trump begins a second term.
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- In July 2024, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–NY) introduced articles of impeachment against Thomas and fellow Associate Justice Samuel Alito, accusing them of improperly failing to both recuse themselves from the January 6 case before the Supreme Court and disclose gifts from wealthy benefactors.
The Big Lie
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- In the wake of Trump’s 2020 election loss, Ginni Thomas exchanged multiple text messages with his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, urging the then-president not to concede to President-elect Biden, according to materials obtained by the House Select Committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol.
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- In 2024, Clarence Thomas again came to Trump’s aid by successfully upending the Justice Department’s classified documents case against him and helping to pave the way for his reelection. When Thomas issued “a legal roadmap” for how to dismiss the case, the presiding lower court judge Aileen Cannon wasted no time in ruling that Attorney General Merrick Garland did not actually have the legal authority to appoint special counsel Jack Smith to investigate and prosecute the case. “Cannon obediently adopted Thomas’ radical thinking,” according to The Guardian, “subsuming it into her 93-page judgment almost to the letter,” leaving legal observers dumbfounded by a ruling that “flies in the face of decades of legal precedent.”