A petition [1] calling for Supreme Court Justice Clarence to resign or face impeachment is galloping right along, with over 1,000,000 signatures and it stems from the fact that Thomas refused to recuse himself from a case that was a clear conflict of interest all because of his wingnut wife’s right-wing activism.
Truthout [2] reports that Ginni Thomas, fervent advocate for far-right causes went on a texting spree, sending Donald Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows a whopping 24 texts because she was freaked out about the 2020 election. She pressed him repeatedly to seek ways to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The issue became a conflict of interest when a case involving documents and communications connected to Meadows during his time in the White House wended its way to the Supreme Court, with eight of the justices giving the go-ahead for the January 6 House Select committee investigating the Capitol attack to obtain the information. And if you guessed that Clarence Thomas was the only one to vote against allowing the documents to be handed over, you’re completely 100 percent correct.
Truthout notes:
“Critics of the justice’s dissenting opinion said that he should not have been involved in the case at all, as the documents likely included the texts his wife sent to Meadows, implicating her in the plot by Trump loyalists to overturn President Joe Biden’s win — making the case a clear conflict of interest.”
According to Truthout, while High Court justices are encouraged [3] to recuse themselves from “any proceeding in which his [or her] impartiality might be questioned,” it’s something that apparently isn’t required.
And because of Thomas’s stubborn refusal to recuse himself from this case and others involving his wife, it hasn’t sat well with the progressive advocacy group MoveOn.org, which is now calling for his resignation. If he refuses, then he should be impeached by Congress, the organization says in its petition.
While their complaint isn’t binding, MoveOn also focused on Thomas’s involvement in the SCOTUS case Dobbs v. Jackson, the case which effectively overturned Roe v. Wade, thus effectively destroying 50 years of abortion rights for women.
Ginni Thomas’s role in the attack on the Capitol building cannot be emphasized enough, and the fact that her husband, while being a Supreme Court justice apparently backs her on this, while at the same time taking away bodily autonomy from millions of American women means it’s way past time for Thomas to resign or face the consequences.