In May, the Washington Post reported that Ginni Thomas, the truly deranged wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, asked two Arizona state lawmakers to ignore Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential win. She wanted them to instead vote for President Donald Trump in the Electoral College, which would have set off a wave of legal challenges that could have ended up before her dear husband at the high court. That’s pretty fucking damning, but it gets worse: On Friday, the Post reported that Ginni actually contacted 29 Arizona lawmakers to urge them to change the election results.
We knew that Ginni contacted the lawmakers using a tool called FreeRoots, which streamlines the process of sending pre-written emails to multiple elected officials. The Post previously reported that in November and December 2020, Ginni emailed two members of the Arizona House, but now they report that she sent messages to 20 more House members and seven members of the state Senate. In total, she contacted “more than half of the Republican members of the state legislature at the time.”
It will never not be funny that Clarence said in a speech after the Roe v. Wade leak that society is “becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like.”
These emails are in addition to the dozens of text messages Ginni sent to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows asking him to help overturn the election. One such text sent on November 19, 2020: “Sounds like Sidney [Powell] and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud. Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.”
Spouses of Supreme Court Justices are allowed to have jobs and opinions, but they should not be allowed to engage in activism on matters that could very likely end up in front of the court. What’s more, Ginni and Clarence seem to be doing a tag-team routine, as Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern wrote last month:
The symmetry between Ginni and Clarence Thomas’ work has never been more obvious. While Clarence fought to give state legislatures the constitutional authority to reject election results, Ginni lobbied state legislators to do exactly that. A casual observer might assume they were working in tandem, with Clarence handling the law and Ginni working on the political side.
If Congress doesn’t do anything to shore up the Electoral Count Act or Supreme Court ethics reform, it seems likely that this duo could replicate their strategy in 2024.
Once again: Justice Thomas, resign bitch.