There’s Finally a Clarence Thomas Ethics Inquiry Underway, but Will It Go Anywhere?
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Last week, the Campaign Legal Center, a voting rights and ethics advocacy group, disclosed what it considered a potentially promising—but extraordinarily opaque—one-sentence line in a newly released report from the Judicial Conference of the United States.
The Judicial Conference is, according to investigative journalists at ProPublica, a body of federal judges “led by the chief justice of the Supreme Court.” It “oversees the ethics and financial disclosures for more than 1,700 federal judges, including the nine justices of the high court.”
The noteworthy line that the Campaign Legal Center highlighted came from the Judicial Conference’s Financial Disclosure Committee. It stated that there “was an ongoing review of public written allegations of errors or omissions in a filer’s financial disclosure reports.”
The “filer” was presumed to be Justice Clarence Thomas.
For people concerned that codes of judicial ethics, like the one recently adopted by the Supreme Court, are meaningful, what the Financial Disclosure Committee said could be a promising moment—and bad news for Thomas, one of the most ethically challenged justices in Supreme Court history. But the Judicial Conference’s history of holding Supreme Court justices to account is not a proud one.
As ProPublica has reported, the conference has been less a toothy watchdog than a subservient arm of the court. Members of the conference’s staff—many of whom are temps—have hardly been relentless inquirers into court misconduct. By role and tradition, they’ve been less intimidating than chickens in charge of the fox den.
Indeed, their investigatory history appears to be one of whitewashing scandals at the court.
And they are not alone in this lethargy. An NBC News review of states’ judicial conduct commission data from 2016–2020 found that “thousands of complaints are filed across the country every year but that about 1 percent of them result in judges’ being publicly disciplined or stepping down after investigations are opened.”
So the jury is out on whether what Thomas has done will be enough to alter the usual pattern. That is why journalists, activists like those at the Campaign Legal Center, and the public must keep a vigilant eye on any potential follow-up.
Here’s the background on the current Thomas affair. In April and August, in the wake of ProPublica’s lengthy investigative news reporting about the justice’s apparent corruption, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and other congressional representatives sent two letters to the Judicial Conference.
They asked that body to refer to the attorney general Thomas’ repeated errors in filing his financial disclosure forms. The conference has the authority to do so.
And it should. The ProPublica articles had set out a list of undisclosed lavish gifts—including dozens of all-expenses-paid exotic travel—that went from here to Bora Bora.
That’s without even getting into the subsidies for Thomas’ wife, Ginni, orchestrated through Thomas’ close friend Leonard Leo, the onetime head of the Federalist Society and frequent matchmaker between Thomas and right-wing donors.
Meanwhile, what the Judicial Conference said in its oblique reference to Thomas is different from its past reactions to his ethical lapses. Indeed, according to the Campaign Legal Center, the last time it “received letters regarding Justice Thomas’ apparent willful violations of [the Ethics in Government Act] for failing to disclose private plane travel, back in 2011, the Judicial Conference completely ignored them.”
And last May, District Judge Mark Wolf, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, disclosed that as a member of the Judicial Conference in 2012, he did not even “receive notice of the complaints” submitted about Thomas at the time.
Those complaints arose from media reporting in 2011 that Thomas had not properly disclosed income that Ginni, as CNN chronicled, “had received between 1998 and 2003 from The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.”
Wolf hadn’t learned of the submitted complaints at the time because the staff kept them from the full conference membership. As he explained:
Pursuant to established conference policies and procedures, if the [financial disclosure] committee had considered the letters, my colleagues on the Judicial Conference and I should have been informed of them in its reports to the Conference, even if the committee was not recommending any action by the Conference.
Everyone concerned about Thomas’ conduct should worry that the past will be prologue and we will witness another cover-up. Indeed, in the decade that followed the Judicial Conference’s 2012 see-no-evil approach, Thomas, having gotten away with—metaphorically speaking—ethical manslaughter, became a one-man ethics crime spree.
It’s been a master class in corrupt governance: Choke transparency while surrounding yourself with subservient institutions that give the appearance of accountability while providing a fig leaf for those who use their power to line their pockets. We have had a court, ironically enough, that uses a self-policing system of subordinates to treat itself as above the law.
In the end, it will take brave journalists like those at ProPublica, committed activists like those at the Campaign Legal Center, and ordinary citizens speaking out if we want to return the court to an ethical center of the kind needed to restore its legitimacy.
