Every day it seems Justice Clarence Thomas’ refusals to recuse himself from cases his wife is up to her neck in look more corrupt.
September 10, 2022

The Guardian reported Friday, based on research by the non-partisan Advance Democracy Inc., that Ginni Thomas is connected to 38 of the 74 anti-abortion groups that filed “amicus briefs” successfully urging the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

These are no casual connections:

[The findings] show an intricate web of connections between many of the most influential groups and figures on the conservative hard right, with Ginni Thomas at the centre of it. Several of the links run through her consultancy, Liberty Consulting, which she set up in 2010 and which brags that it can “give access to any door in Washington”.

Another major route is through the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive Christian conservative networking group that the New York Times described as a “little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country”. The binding mission of the members is “limited government, strong national defense, and support for traditional western values”.

Ginni Thomas is listed as a board director of the lobbying arm of the group, CNP Action, in a 2020 tax filing obtained by the investigative watchdog Documented. In a speech to a CNP event in 2019 she described her role within the conservative movement as that of “a convenor – I find the talent and I put them in the room and have them talk to one another".

And that’s only part of the picture.

The Guardian notes that Ginni Thomas denies any conflict of interest saying, “Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.” That is very much not a claim that she doesn’t discuss her work with him.

This is not water under the bridge, either. The Guardian points out that many of Ginni Thomas' anti-abortion pals are also anti-LGBT activists. In his concurring opinion overturning Roe, Clarence Thomas made it clear “he intends to use exactly the same arguments” to overturn the right to same-sex marriage, same-sex relations and contraception.

There’s also the very real possibility that more cases involving the 2020 election will come before the Supreme Court. We know that Ginni Thomas was also up to her eyeballs in efforts to overturn the election. Yet instead of recusing himself from Donald Trump’s request that the Supreme Court allow him to withhold documents from the January 6th committee, Thomas was the lone dissenter in the court's denial.

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