They pulled out all the stops to keep Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court three decades ago and failed. They went back to the well when Brett Kavanaugh was nominated and failed. So the Left tried to pack the court—and again, they failed.
With a conservative majority ensconced on the bench for a generation (inshallah!), a smear campaign tarnishing the institution—and one of its most admired members—is their next best option. Enter Ginni Thomas, wife of Clarence, whose strategically leaked text messages to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows have Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Dick Durbin eyeing an investigation. Others are calling for the justice’s recusal from all Jan. 6-related cases. And still others are demanding his impeachment. Again.
Democrats can’t change the Court’s composition, but they can try to moderate the conservative majority through relentless demagoguery, endless investigations, and by dragging their spouses through the gutter.
The leaked text messages are just the latest effort. Rewind a couple of months, and the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine ran longform investigative pieces in January and February that cast Mrs. Thomas as a prime mover behind the Ellipse rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol. That narrative crumbled when Mrs. Thomas told the Free Beacon she "played no role with those who were planning and leading the Jan. 6 events."
That brings us to the recent brouhaha over Mrs. Thomas’s text messages, which are much ado about nothing. They amount to little more than admonitions to Meadows to "stand firm" or links to YouTube videos hawking far-fetched theories of election fraud.
Knowing the texts were of no consequence, the Washington Post acknowledged Meadows did not even reply to many of Mrs. Thomas’s messages, and nowhere suggests she actually tried to help keep Donald Trump in power. The New York Times, for its part, got to the heart of the scandal, writing that the Thomases "have been a fiercely close couple for decades" and that Justice Thomas has referred to his wife as his "best friend." Stop the presses.
Since his confirmation, Justice Thomas has been among the most revered figures on the right. It is obvious to us why he remains a target for his political adversaries, and equally obvious that the Democrats’ ploy will end the same way as the ones that preceded it.
We are grateful that he adheres to the same judicial philosophy today as he did when he was nominated and hasn’t fallen prey to the ideological drift that has infected so many other Republican nominees—perhaps because he is both impervious to the attacks on him and his family and, conversely, to the praise he might elicit from the elites if he abandoned his friends. (This is the man who slapped a 15-cent price tag on his Yale law degree, after all.)
For all their efforts, Justice Thomas is a devoted husband and a happy man. We’ll be happier still six years from now, when he becomes the longest-serving justice in our history.