Over the last several weeks, Clarence Thomas has found himself at the center of controversy following ProPublica’s report that he accepted gifts from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow. From luxury trips to Crow paying tuition for a child Thomas has raised, these revelations have prompted questions about ethics and disclosure requirements for Supreme Court justices. However, Thomas has proven for years that he ain’t sh*t. Here are just a few examples of his destructive behavior.
In 1991, attorney and law professor Anita Hill worked as a legal adviser to Thomas. During their time together at the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Hill claimed Thomas sexually harassed her and made inappropriate remarks.
Her claims were investigated by the FBI after George H.W. Bush nominated Thomas for the Supreme Court in 1991. Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about Thomas’ alleged behavior. However, Thomas was still confirmed on October 16, 1991. In 2016, lawyer Moira Smith said that Thomas groped her at a dinner party in 1999.
In response to Anita Hill’s 1991 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony, Thomas crudely victimized himself in order to shift the attention from the heinous behavior he was being accused of. During his confirmation hearings, Thomas infamously stated: “This is a circus. It is a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I am concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks...this is what will happen to you, you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.”
Thomas has been married to his conservative activist wife, Virginia, for decades. However, their union has proven to be quite nefarious. According to The Washington Post, from 2003-2007 Thomas didn’t report more than $686,000 in income that Ginni received while she worked at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
Virginia Thomas also repeatedly texted Donald Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. In the texts, she pushed the notion of election fraud. “Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back,” Thomas said. In addition, she and her husband, partook in luxury gifts from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow which was revealed just last month by Propublica.
For years, Thomas has shared his intense disdain for affirmative action. In an interview with ABC News, Thomas said he could not get rid of the stigmatizing effects of racial preference—even when he was nominated for the Supreme Court. “Once it is assumed that everything you do achieve is because of your race, there is no way out...it is irrebuttable and it is proved to be true. In everything now that someone like me does, there’s a backwash into your whole life is because of race.” He has also made it his mission to go after diversity initiatives in schools.
Thomas now serves as the senior member of a group of conservative justices who have enough votes to control how the court rules. Last year, Thomas and his peers were able to expand gun rights and overturn Roe v.Wade, the country’s nationwide protection for abortion.
After a draft of the abortion decision was leaked online, protests occurred at his house as well as the houses of other conservative justices. During an appearance, Thomas quipped: “You would never visit Supreme Court justices’ houses when things didn’t go our way. We didn’t throw temper tantrums.”
In his June 2022 opinion concurring with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Thomas wrote that the Supreme Court should revisit all cases that had the same legal reasoning per Politico. He pinpointed cases that guarantee the right to contraception, same-sex consensual sexual relationships and same-sex marriage.
“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas stated. “Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous’ … we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”
Last year, Thomas temporarily blocked a subpoena requesting testimony from South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham from a Georgia grand jury investigating election interference by former President Donald Trump. Lawyers who helped Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election also said an appeal to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was “key” to their chances of achieving it according to emails that were leaked to the public, per Associated Press.
In 2009, Virginia Thomas started Liberty Central, a political advocacy group associated with the Tea Party movement. She worked to repeal former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. In 2011, Thomas was asked to recuse himself from any cases pertaining to the healthcare legislation but he refused. The Supreme Court upheld the law even though he was one of its dissenters.
Following Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, Virginia Ginni repeatedly messaged Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows asking him to look into the election being rigged. She also reached out to a minimum of 29 Arizona lawmakers, according to The Washington Post, and asked them to overturn Biden’s victory in the state and select presidential electors that would support Trump. Thomas was asked to once again recuse himself from any cases pertaining to the 2o2o election as well as the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol—he refused.
Last month, it was revealed that GOP megadonor Harlan Crow paid for luxurious trips and private jet travel for the Thomas and his wife. Crow also bought Georgia properties from Thomas and his family; none of this information was reported on disclosure forms officials are obligated to file to give the public insight into their financial situations. In addition, Crow paid private boarding school tuition for Thomas’ grandnephew, which raises further questions about proper conduct for Supreme Court justices.