The best defense of the Supreme Court justice’s ethical lapses is that everyone already knows he’s just a conservative activist in a robe.
We all should have friends like Clarence Thomas’s. In recent weeks, we’ve learned that the Supreme Court justice’s “dear friend,” real-estate billionaire and GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, has:Bought Thomas’s mother’s home
All this has led to a lot of rather silly discourse. On the one hand, conservatives feel compelled to pretend that there is nothing wrong with a Supreme Court justice accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts from a partisan donor or his wife taking tens of thousands from groups with business before his court.
Purchasing the property — at market value — enabled Crow to renovate the structure so that it will be ready for conversion into a museum upon the death of Thomas’s mother. Until then, he has no intention of evicting a 94-year-old woman from her home. Perhaps Thomas should have disclosed the transaction. But he had made so many investments into the home’s upkeep that he actually took a capital loss on the sale and therefore believed it was not reportable.
In other words, conservative pundits have served up a dozen different flavors of weak tea. The claim that none of these payments actually influenced Thomas’s jurisprudence seems plausible. Thomas was a reactionary long before he met Harlan Crow. It is possible that Crow’s largesse was motivated by a desire to insure against the risk of Thomas converting to liberalism à la David Souter. But it is also possible that Crow might genuinely enjoy Thomas’s company.
The idea that other justices have secured gifts as lucrative as Thomas’s — and the media is simply failing to spotlight them — is unsubstantiated and, given the extremity of Thomas’s behavior, highly improbable. But the suggestion that liberals are more interested in using Thomas’s ethical violations to erode the Supreme Court’s legitimacy than they are in reforming that institution’s ethics rules is plausibly true.
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