Legal analyst busts conservatives for deploying ‘snot-right-out-the-nostrils’ defenses of Ginni Thomas

One of America's top Supreme Court journalists poured cold water on efforts to claim it is "sexism" to complain about Clarence Thomas refusing to recuse himself from cases involving his wife, extremist activist Ginny Thomas.

"The most overwhelming aspect of news last week that Virginia 'Ginni' Thomas repeatedly texted Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff about efforts overturn the 2020 election results in the days after the vote was the shock of what it meant about what her husband, Justice Clarence Thomas, had done," Dahlia Lithwick wrote for Slate.

Lithwick explained that, "While we didn’t realize it until last week, the news means that Thomas has voted in cases in which his wife’s text messages would give him reason to attempt to protect her. This goes beyond the potential appearance of a conflict of interest for a sitting federal judge. As the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer explained last week, even though the justices are not bound by enforceable judicial ethics rules, they are subject to a federal law, 28 U.S.C. section 455, that bars them from hearing cases in which their spouses have “an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.” That Justice Thomas might have played a role in shielding potentially incriminating information about his wife from public scrutiny transcends even any unenforceable, squishy recusal standard that currently exists."

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Lithwick thoroughly destroyed the "sexism" allegation.

"Defenders of the Thomas’ conduct have offered up a raft of snot-right-out-the-nostrils defenses. The brashest of these has been the 'sexism' defense, which holds that women and their spouses are separate and distinct persons who can only be said to be invested in the work of the other through diminution of the woman’s agency and power," Lithwick explained. "Of course, nobody is suggesting that Ginni Thomas should be unemployed, or that she has to obtain permission from her spouse to engage in political activities, or that as a result of some protracted patriarchal Vulcan mind meld with all men, she is incapable of forming her own opinions. That’s a convenient cover to evade the reality that she is an interested party in litigation that is coming before her husband, and that both he and she now appear to have an improper interest in the outcomes of those cases. The cries of 'sexism' elide the reality that in a world in which women work, they can undermine their husbands’ appearance of objectivity as handily as a son, brother, or law partner once could."

Jane Mayer, who wrote a devastating profile on Ginni Thomas for the New Yorker in January, agreed with Lithwick's analysis.