{"id":21879,"date":"2022-03-30T15:42:19","date_gmt":"2022-03-30T22:42:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=21879"},"modified":"2022-03-30T15:42:21","modified_gmt":"2022-03-30T22:42:21","slug":"clarence-thomas-should-resign-and-ginni-thomas-should-be-prosecuted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2022\/03\/30\/clarence-thomas-should-resign-and-ginni-thomas-should-be-prosecuted\/","title":{"rendered":"Clarence Thomas Should Resign and Ginni Thomas Should Be Prosecuted"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Supreme<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sits with his wife and conservative activist Virginia Thomas while he waits to speak at the Heritage Foundation on October 21, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo: Drew Angerer\/Getty Images)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Forget recusal. This behavior demands far graver consequences.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

THOM HARTMANN<\/a> March 29, 2022 (CommonDreams.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1969, Richard Nixon<\/strong> and congressional Republicans took down the Supreme Court\u2019s most liberal member, Abe Fortas, threatening to send his wife to prison. There\u2019s a lesson here for today\u2019s Democrats and Clarence Thomas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some Democrats are calling on Clarence Thomas to recuse<\/a> himself from decisions involving Trump\u2019s conspiracy to overthrow our government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They should be calling on him to resign and his wife to be prosecuted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It appears that Ginny Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, participated in a plot to overthrow the government of the United States. Which is astonishing in and of itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But then her husband was the sole vote<\/a> on the Court to help that same seditious conspiracy:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Donald Trump sued to block President Joe Biden from passing presidential papers to the January 6th Committee, the only vote on the Court to support Trump\u2019s efforts to hide his crime was that of Clarence Thomas.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Which raises the question: what will Congress and the Justice Department do about these crimes?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fifty-four years ago, Republicans went nuts over an \u201cethics scandal\u201d involving a Democratic-appointed member of the Court, and their effort produced so much pressure that he resigned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Will Democrats similarly force a Thomas resignation, giving Biden another SCOTUS nominee?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is that possibility the reason why Lindsey Graham just \u201chinted<\/a>\u201d that if the Senate flips Republican in this fall\u2019s 2022 election the GOP will block all <\/em>Biden appointees to the Court up to and through the 2024 election?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To understand the possibilities, it\u2019s essential to know the precedent, how Republicans pulled it off back in 1968\/69:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas didn\u2019t resign until President Richard Nixon\u2019s campaign manager and Attorney General, John Mitchell, threatened to bring felony corruption charges against Fortas\u2019 wife. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

But I get ahead of myself. It\u2019s a truly amazing story that most people alive today know nothing about. It started with \u201cdirty movies\u201d being shown in the US Capitol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember the \u201cFortas Film Festival\u201d because, when it started in the summer of 1968, I was a teenage boy and curious about the movies that Senator Strom Thurmond was showing to his male peers in that meeting room in the Capitol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most people in America were probably also curious; the Supreme Court had recently legalized pornography, but watching it back then meant sitting in a sleazy theater in a sleazy part of town with a bunch of sleazy characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the infamous segregationist Senator Thurmond was on a roll in 1968, playing dirty movies back-to-back for any Senator or aide who wanted to show up.  TIME Magazine<\/a> did a feature on it, noting:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDay after day last week, Thurmond buttonholed his colleagues to watch the films in darkened Senate offices. One aide of Richard Nixon called it \u2018the Fortas Film Festival.\u2019 The Senators were not titillated but shocked, and they left the showings in a grim mood. The screenings apparently swayed some votes away from Fortas. Senators know that middle-class opposition to pornography is rising, and the subject\u2014like the Supreme Court itself\u2014has become a symbol of what is wrong in the U.S.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The newspapers loved it, as similar \u201cfilm festivals\u201d popped up on campuses across the country.  Yale, for example, got into the act, holding their own \u201cFortas Film Festival\u201d featuring the same movies Thurmond had shown to the Senate. As The New York Times<\/em> noted<\/a> at the time:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe main feature of the night was \u2018Flaming Creatures,\u2019 seen [months earlier] by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee during their debate on Justice Fortas\u2019 nomination as Chief Justice. \u2026 In the audience was John T. Rich, editor of the Yale Law Journal. \u2018I figured if Senator Strom Thurmond could see this movie, so could I,\u2019 he said.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

So\u2026what provoked the Fortas Film Festivals<\/em>? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was, purely, a burning desire by conservatives to shift the Supreme Court to the right, amplified by Richard Nixon\u2019s vigorous campaign that year to become president in the November election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It started in the last year of LBJ\u2019s presidency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In June of 1968, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren \u2014 a liberal who\u2019d been appointed by Dwight Eisenhower \u2014 decided to resign from the Court so that President Lyndon Johnson would have a full six months to replace him with another liberal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LBJ proposed elevating the only Jewish member of the US Supreme Court to become the new Chief Justice (and Homer Thornberry to fill Warren\u2019s empty seat), but racist and antisemitic \u201cconservatives\u201d like Thurmond \u2014 and presidential candidate Richard Nixon \u2014 saw the upcoming hearings as a grand opportunity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They postponed Thornberry\u2019s nomination, front-loading the hearings about putting Fortas in charge of the Court, and then ran an inquisition into Fortas over a $15,000 speaking fee he\u2019d taken to address a college group.  (Clarence Thomas has also<\/a> taken $15,000 speaking fees, for the record.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With that \u201cscandalous\u201d payment \u2014 and his vote on the Court to legalize pornography \u2014 as the excuses, Republicans and Southern \u201cconservative\u201d Democrats like Thurmond arrayed a Senate filibuster to block the liberal Fortas\u2019 elevation to Chief Justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It dragged out for months; on October 2, 1968 it became obvious the filibuster couldn\u2019t be broken and Fortas withdrew<\/a> his name from consideration for Chief Justice, although he planned to remain on the Court as an Associate Justice like his peers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By then it was too late for LBJ to elevate another liberal to Chief Justice (Warren stayed on the Court for another half-year to provide continuity) and also too late for LBJ\u2019s nominee Thornberry to even be considered to replace Warren\u2019s empty seat before the presidential election four weeks later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that was just the beginning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once Nixon came into office on January 20, 1969 he put ending the Court\u2019s \u201cliberal\u201d bent at the top of his agenda.  That meant not only replacing Warren (who stayed on until June 23, 1969), but, to tip the Court conservative, getting rid of it\u2019s most liberal member, Abe Fortas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Attorney General John Mitchell ordered the Justice Department to begin an investigation into Fortas\u2019 wife, Carolyn Agger, who was a lawyer with the DC firm that had previously employed Fortas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rightwing media had claimed \u2014 without evidence \u2014 that documents that might be found in a safe in her office might prove she was involved in a tax-evasion scheme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was never any evidence whatsoever, either of Fortas or his wife being corrupt. It was and is not illegal to take a speaking fee: members of the Court do so routinely today. And there was nothing incriminating in her safe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Richard Nixon, John Mitchell, and Abe Fortas knew the old legal saw<\/a>: \u201cA grand jury can indict a ham sandwich.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mitchell had also dredged up another payment that Fortas had earned, this one $20,000 a year for serving on the board of a charitable foundation (not uncommon for high-end DC lawyers then or now).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was also totally legal (and nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars Ginny Thomas has taken from rightwing groups since her husband was put on the Court) but Fortas gave back the money anyway. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not only did that not<\/em> help: his returning the money was, Nixon charged, proof<\/em> that it was corrupt in the first place!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mitchell then announced he was going to have a Justice Department lawyer named William Rehnquist convene a grand jury to look into the \u201ccrimes\u201d that right-wingers were claiming Fortas and his wife had committed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Nixon\u2019s White House Counsel John Dean, who was there and knew the players, wrote in his book on the era (The Rehnquist Choice<\/a>)<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDid the Justice Department have the goods on Fortas? Not even close. Mitchell\u2019s talk was pure bluff. \u2026 Lyndon Johnson\u2019s Justice Department had investigated this question [back when Fortas was nominated for Chief Justice in 1968] and found nothing improper\u2026. Reopening of the matter by Richard Nixon\u2019s Justice Department was purely a means to torture Fortas.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

But faced with the possibility of his wife being dragged through the mud and both of them spending years and a fortune defending themselves, Fortas threw in the towel.  He resigned from the Supreme Court five months into Nixon\u2019s presidency on May 14, 1969. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With their mission accomplished, Mitchell immediately dropped the threat of the grand jury. As John Dean noted<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Fortas resignation meant that Richard Nixon now had two seats to fill on the Court: Earl Warren\u2019s center seat and the seat of Associate Justice Abe Fortas, who was leaving the Court at fifty-nine years of age. It also meant that two of the Court\u2019s most liberal justices were gone.<\/p>

\u201cNixon\u2019s aggressive posture toward the high court was paying off in a big way, with the help of John Mitchell and his hard-nosed team at the Justice Department, Rehnquist among them.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

So, how will it all play out this time?<\/p>\n\n\n\n