Ginni Thomas is a problem for American democracy
Clarence and Ginni Thomas don’t discuss their dueling efforts to destroy our democracy when they come home from a day of wreaking havoc. That’s what Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist and an adherent to the lie that Donald Trump won the last election, wants us to believe. That’s essentially what she told the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol when committee members interviewed her last week.
I don’t believe that any more than I believe Trump can declassify documents with his mind.
Why does this matter? Because Ginni Thomas pressed the White House and various state legislators to overturn the 2020 election, and her husband has refused to recuse himself from election-related cases. In fact, Clarence Thomas was the Supreme Court’s lone dissent when it rejected Trump’s efforts to withhold documents from the Jan. 6 committee.
In March, The National Law Journal spoke with several experts who agreed that Clarence Thomas should have recused himself from the case. One called his refusal to do so “arguably unprecedented.”
Ginni Thomas didn’t just encourage people to overturn the election; she was at the Stop the Steal rally from which the insurrection sprang Jan. 6, although she told The Washington Free Beacon that she returned home before Trump took the stage.
In other words, Ginni Thomas is a one-woman constitutional crisis.
According to The New York Times, during her testimony before the committee, she repeated her assertion that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. That is a lie. She knows it, and we know it.
Because she is repeating this lie, I can’t believe anything she says without proof.
Therefore, her claim that she never discussed her election subversion activities with her husband rings hollow.
Did she also not share with him her seemingly deranged Facebook posts framing the teenage survivors of the Parkland shooting as “dangerous to the survival of our nation” or espousing the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton wiretapped Trump?
Is the Thomas household just silent, filled only with the hum of grievance and betrayal? Or do these two spend their time talking in trivialities, reminiscing about their polar opposite upbringings — him born in the predominantly Black, Gullah community of Pin Point, Ga., her born in predominantly white Omaha, Neb., which at the time was facing its own racial tensions?
Maybe they share maleficent chuckles recalling how he rebuffed questions at his confirmation hearing in 1991 over the allegations that he sexually harassed Anita Hill, calling it, absurdly, a “high-tech lynching,” or how Ginni Thomas in 2010 left a voicemail message for Hill, demanding that she apologize to her husband.
According to The New York Times, the message was: “Good morning, Anita Hill. It’s Ginni Thomas. I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.”
What?! Ma’am, if you don’t stop playing on that lady’s phone!
The ask was brazen. It was disrespectful. It was delusional. But that’s Ginni Thomas.
Sure, maybe the woman with the audacity to call her husband’s accuser and ask that person to apologize to the man she says abused her is too bashful at home to raise her most recent antics with her husband. But it seems unlikely; for years, journalists have documented how close and forthright the two are with each other. As early as 1991, the year he was confirmed, one of his longtime friends, Evan Kemp, told The Washington Post that she was the one person he really listened to.
In the same article, one of Ginni Thomas’ aunts is quoted as saying Clarence Thomas “was so nice, we forgot he was Black.” She added, “And he treated her so well, all of his other qualities made up for his being Black.”
Can you imagine? How must it feel to marry into a family where people think of your Blackness as a weight on the wrong side of the scales and you have to achieve at the highest level to balance it out? Of course, Clarence Thomas may not object to that characterization. But he and his wife may still spend their quiet time unpacking it.
Ginni Thomas is not a minor player and outside agitator. She is connected and influential. According to the Times, she led a group of hard-right activists in a White House meeting with Trump where “members of the group denounced transgender people and women serving in the military.”
According to the paper, one of the people the group asked to have at the meeting was an assistant Ginni Thomas hired after the conservative group Turning Point USA fired the person for texting a colleague, “I hate Black people.”
Since Ginni Thomas is married to a Black man, I can’t make any of that make sense. Maybe, like her aunt, she forgot he was Black.
But the major issue remains: The wife of a Supreme Court justice has been actively engaged in trying to overturn an election, and the justice won’t recuse himself from any cases related to that issue. They are Mr. and Mrs. Mutiny.