Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has shown no inclination to heed calls for his recusal on Capitol riot and 2020 election cases -- despite the activist involvement of his wife Virginia Thomas in support of overturning President Joe Biden’s victory.
But if Thomas becomes afflicted with an unexpected case of conscience, there’s one noted judicial philosopher to whom he can turn for advice: former President Donald Trump.
In February 2020, Trump suggested that pretty much any adversarial position taken against him by a Supreme Court justice -- or his appointees -- was cause for recusal from all cases. And the principle, it appeared, applied to affronts not actually stated, but which were interpreted by a Fox News host to be biased.
Here’s how Business Insider reported the philosophical decree at the time:
“President Donald Trump has stepped up his fight with the US judiciary, suggesting in a tweet Tuesday that two liberal justices on the Supreme Court should recuse themselves from cases involving him."
In the tweet from India, where he is on a state visit, Trump quoted the Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who claimed that Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor had accused justices appointed by the Trump administration of pro-Trump bias.
"’Sotomayor accuses GOP appointed Justices of being biased in favor of Trump,'" Trump tweeted, quoting the host, then added in his own words: ‘This is a terrible thing to say. Trying to 'shame' some into voting her way? She never criticized Justice Ginsburg when she called me a 'faker'. Both should recuse themselves on all Trump, or Trump related, matters!’"
Trump’s tweet had omitted that it was Fox News host Laura Ingraham -- not Sotomayor -- who had made the reference to justices having been biased toward Trump, Business Insider had reported. Here’s more:
“Sotomayor said the court had "been all too quick" to grant the government's requests and that "such a shift in the Court's own behavior comes at a cost."
“Though she did not say Trump-appointed judges were biased in favor of the president, she did criticize the court for acceding to government requests to fast-track cases such as Friday's and hear them before lower appeals courts had the chance to make a ruling.”
So that, in Trump’s view constituted grounds for permanent dismissal of any case even related to him. And the same applied to Ginsburg for having made -- and apologized for -- a critical comment about him during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Imagine how that low bar might apply to Thomas today. For more than 30 years, it has been known that Thomas regards his wife Ginny as a soulmate with the same political philosophy. In the past month, their “long crusade” in that respect has been painstakingly documented in pieces like this one in the New York Times.
So Ginny Thomas’ active role in trying to overturn the 2020 election -- documented here and here and here and here, among many other places -- just might meet the Trump Test for recusal.
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