The revelations about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas failing to report financial favors given to him and his family by billionaire and Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow just keep coming.
Given how central Thomas has been to the right-wing effort to gain ideological dominance of the federal courts—and use that dominance to return the U.S. to a pre-New Deal constitutional order—it’s not surprising that right-wing legal and political groups have rallied around Thomas.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is the latest to ignore evidence of Thomas’s repeated lawbreaking and dismiss Pro Publica’s investigative reporting as a “high-tech lynching,” the phrase Thomas used to deflect allegations against him during his confirmation hearing years ago. In fundraising emails this week, Cruz slammed the calls for ethics reform that have spread in response to evidence that Thomas has violated disclosure laws with impunity for many years. Cruz’s emails did not substantively address the apparent repeated violations of disclosure laws by Thomas in ways that hid the scale of financial favors Crow has showered on Thomas and the justice’s right-wing activist wife Ginni; Cruz simply dismissed the well-documented allegations as “baseless.”
Claiming that Thomas is “unable to defend himself from political attacks,” the Cruz email told supporters that there is a way they can help: by sending cash to Cruz’s campaign committee.
Cruz and other Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are also the beneficiaries of Crow’s largesse. Crow, a founder of the right-wing anti-tax Club for Growth and a board member of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, refused this week to provide the Senate Judiciary Committee with a full list of the gifts and payments he has made to Thomas and his family.
“Clarence Thomas does not belong on the Supreme Court,” People For the American Way President Svante Myrick argued in a recent op ed. People For the American Way has asked its members and activists to sign a petition calling on the Department of Justice to investigate Thomas and hold him accountable.