Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is receiving hard questions about why the House of Representatives has not moved to impeach Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
"MSNBC anchor has a question for Nancy Pelosi: ‘Why haven’t you impeached Clarence Thomas yet?'" MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan asked this week.
"Today, we agree that a judge cannot, and should not, be removed simply because we disagree with their rulings," began Hasan. "But we should then also agree that if judges are violating ethics or subject to conflicts of interest, they should in theory be impeached and removed from the bench," he argued. "Which brings us back to Justice Clarence Thomas. In January, The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer profiled Thomas’ wife, Ginni, a longtime conservative operative and lobbyist, and revealed how her lobbying firm was on the payroll of far-right activist Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy."
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That was the only recent scandal involving the Thomas family.
"In February, The New York Times Magazine reported that Ginni Thomas served on the board of a secretive right-wing group called CNP Action. In November 2020, it circulated a 'November ‘action steps’ document' instructing its members in the days after the election 'to pressure Republican lawmakers into challenging the election results and appointing alternate slates of electors,' according to the report," Hasan wrote. "But when former President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court to block the House Jan. 6 committee from obtaining hundreds of pages of White House records from the National Archives, Thomas was the sole justice to vote against the House investigators. Then on Monday, in an interview with a conservative blog, Ginni Thomas admitted to having attended the "Stop the Steal" rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021."
He said Thomas has never recused himself from a case involving his wife's extremist activism.
"Plenty of House Democrats will say there is no point even considering an impeachment of Thomas, correctly — if defensively — pointing out that the current Senate would never vote to convict," he wrote. "But from a purely political point of view, Democrats should be loudly drawing attention to the fact that the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice supported Trump’s coup attempt. That justice then refused to recuse himself from a case involving the investigation of that coup attempt. There is a clear value in holding impeachment hearings to draw attention to Thomas and his wife and their inappropriate behavior, especially as an increasingly partisan, conservative-majority court guts voting and reproductive rights."
Read the full column.
