One might be able to forgive many Congressional Democrats for practically sleeping for a year without much action done on an attempted coup that would have blocked a Democrat from the presidency, a seemingly top priority thing, right?

But Biden and Congress didn’t come on the scene during a normal time. There was a rush to get everyone vaccinated, get Biden’s shockingly progressive programs passed, and then block the shockingly aggressive voter suppression legislation happening in red states. These were all critical issues, and time was of the essence.

Of course, due to two holdouts, Democrats only got a fraction of what could have been an FDR-level paradigm shift for a New Century.

Now that it is fairly clear that the two Dems cannot be convinced to join the Democratic party, there is time to examine everything in its entirety, and what’s happened is almost a sense of shock as to what Congressional Democrats let go for so long. There is now a new sense of urgency, at least in Congress, to get to the very bottom as to who planned what on January 6th and get it fast for fear of losing all power to do anything on January 4th, 2023.

It should be mentioned, that Democrats are now pushing DOJ, hard, in part because of that deadline. DOJ is not limited to January 4th 2023. We already reported today on the Committee calling out Garland by name (so unusual), demanding he do his job.

It was amidst this new sense of urgency that the Ginni Thomas texts broke. Democrats saw both a new problem and new possibilities. The Thomas texts were so humiliating, so obviously cultish, and demonstrated that Ginni was so obviously in the middle of everything Trump (and had been for a while) that it was f’ing stunning that Clarence Thomas continued to sit on the bench and rule on cases that impacted Trump at all. (We wrote an article two years ago demanding he recuse himself from every case touching on the Trump administration because Ginni was working on the purge and was often in the Oval Office talking “plots” and gossip with Trump.)

The stars aligned in the timing. The SCOTUS had just issued an 8-1 ruling that would expose the very texts that Ginni wrote. Thomas voted against it. Alone. Thomas was also in the hospital, quite ill, and still does not seem recovered from an illness that “feels” purposefully vague. It felt like Thomas thought another shoe might drop, or the outrage would reach a point where a “totally understandable” medical issue would come up, he would resign for medical – not political, reasons, and Democrats would shut up about Ginni.

It is all on the table now, and Democrats know it. They know they are in the right. They know they’ve exposed the ugly underbelly of the MAGA movement and just how deep January 6th ran. They know that they might have the evidence on Trump. They also know that they likely have the evidence on Thomas. Now they just have to push it correctly and most effectively. Obviously, the goal is to get to the truth about Trump and get Thomas’s ass off the court. Democrats would at least get one seat back from the two stolen.

According to Vanity Fair, Democrats are hotly debating the best path forward.

Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin  have all called for Thomas to remove himself from January 6 cases. Meanwhile, two lawmakers — Senator Chris Murphy and Representative Hank Johnson, who has suggested Thomas resign — are renewing calls to pass the Supreme Court Ethics Act, which they reintroduced last year to “reverse some of the dangerous politicization of the Supreme Court that we’ve seen in the past, and build public trust in the independence and integrity” of the court. “Now is the time to pass it,” Murphy wrote.

AOC and a few others have brought up impeachment, which is a non-starter with respect to forcing Thomas out of his seat because they’d never get even 52 votes in the Senate, never mind 66. But impeachment could have value in the trial itself, putting pressure on Thomas to not have his wife’s dirty laundry hung out for all to see, and his integrity hit so hard. If one wants a resignation, perhaps the only way to bring it about is start with impeachment, which could likely pass the House.

Vanity Fair moves on:

But it isn’t clear what will come of the Democrats’ pressure on Thomas or their broader demands for ethics reforms on the nation’s high court. Republicans have dismissed Thomas’s conflicts of interest, framing it as an effort by Democrats to “delegitimize the Supreme Court” and attack one of its most conservative judges. “It’s a coordinated effort to nullify the presence of Justice Clarence Thomas on the court,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in floor remarks Wednesday, describing calls for his recusal as “inappropriate.”

Republicans have responded by dismissing conflicts of interest and saying it’s unfair to focus on family. They do this, of course, while they hunt down Hunter Biden, a family member whom, they say, has many business “conflicts of interest” with the president. Love them Republicans.

Ultimately, in this site’s opinion, Thomas’s fate is likely tied directly to Trump, Eastman and Meadows’s fate. If Eastman, Meadows, and Trump are charged or even very seriously criminally investigated through primetime Select Committee hearings this summer and DOJ search warrants. It may be enough that even the conservative justices go to Thomas and say “You have to go, the Court cannot take it anymore, and we have a majority anyway. We don’t want to lose our authority (through questions about integrity) while we have a majority.”

It is possible but only if Democrats continue to press the issue. HARD. While the Democrats sit and spin about what “plan” to put together, it’s possible they’ve lost sight of the old adage that “a good plan today is better than a perfect plan next week.” Exactly what the Democrats do is less important than that they’re seen continuing to do something, continue pounding the table, continue the outrage, continue reading the texts. Nothing will happen if they meet silently for two weeks and let the story fall out of the news cycle, never to return, because of the next Trump outrage.

Quit being such damned Democrats and just keep massive pressure on the Republicans to defend this. Defend Trump talking politics with Putin. Defend a judge saying Trump committed a crime. Defend a conflicted justice. Call Republicans out by name. “Defend this! Try it!” Worry about how it comes together when it comes together. Otherwise, it’s not coming. We learned that over a year, already.

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[email protected], @JasonMiciak with Nicole Hickman