The Attacks on Justice Clarence Thomas

Three agendas at work, all disgusting or worse.

The Left is in full throat against Justice Clarence Thomas. Not that this is new; it’s anything but new. He started his career on the Supreme Court after a “high tech lynching” involving concocted, last minute claims of sexual misconduct by Anita Hill. (When the tactic didn’t work against Thomas, the Left dusted it off and tried a slightly different version five years ago against Brett Kavanaugh, which fortunately also failed).

The present allegations are that Thomas accepted expensive gifts, travel and vacations from wealthy real estate developer and Republican donor Harlan Crow and failed to report them on financial disclosure forms. Justice Thomas has said that he wasn’t required to report the trips under ethics rules in force at the time; that he consulted his colleagues on the Court; and that he will fully comply with new, more exacting rules recently adopted. 

This of course has not satisfied the Left, because it aims not to be satisfied. So on Tuesday it staged a Senate hearing putatively about Supreme Court ethics but actually a continuation of the fury from the Anita Hill days — a fury borne of the fact that Thomas refuses to live on the liberalism-is-wonderful plantation the Democrats have assigned to him (and black people generally). The hearing is covered in suitably acidic fashion by the Daily Signal, here.

Leading the charge against Thomas (and his wife Ginni for good measure) was Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. Sen. Whitehouse is aptly named, given his inability to give a coherent answer two years ago as to why he was still in an apparently all-white country club and yacht club.

That right-wing rag, the Washington Post, felt compelled to cover the story, and I’ll quote liberally from its article:

It’s not entirely clear whether Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) has indeed belonged to an all-White beach club. What is clear is that he has handled questions about it poorly and that it remains inexplicable that we don’t know more by now.

Whitehouse and his office have offered shifting explanations since a local reporter asked him Friday about his membership in Bailey’s Beach Club, an exclusive club in Newport, R.I., formally known as the Spouting Rock Beach Association.

Whitehouse was asked by the reporter for GoLocalProv.com about what she characterized as the “all-White” beach club. She asked whether the club had admitted any minority members in recent years.

Whitehouse seemed to grant the premise of the question while suggesting that the club had indeed been derelict on diversifying its membership.

“I think the people who are running the place are still working on that,” he said, “and I’m sorry it hasn’t happened yet.”

It wouldn’t take a genius of a staffer to understand that the Senator had walked into a PR disaster by essentially saying that blacks — like, say, Clarence Thomas — might be OK as, you know, lawn ornaments, but don’t really belong in high-falutin’ places like Bailey’s Beach Club, much less the Supreme Court. So a “clarification” was hustled out the next day:

Except Whitehouse and his office later claimed that it indeed had happened — at least to some extent. A spokesman for the senator told The Washington Post’s Felicia Sonmez that the club had “no such restrictive policy” regarding the race or ethnicity of its members. The spokesman also said that “the club has had and has members of color.”

Whitehouse also made the clarification himself, telling NBC-10, “There is no discriminatory policy, and the club has had and does have, a membership of color.” He said there was “never” such a policy. Whitehouse also said the club has “a long tradition of being a family club, and they’re working on improving diversity. I think that’s pretty fair.”

Oh, OK, “working on improving diversity.” Well that’s cool. Or at least it might have been cool in, say, 1981. The Senator trots it out a mere 40 years later.

What’s especially confusing about the initial response and later clarifications is that Whitehouse should probably have been ready for such questions.

This isn’t the first time his affiliation with the club has been an issue, after all. The same local website pressed him on it in 2017, when it reported that he had transferred his shares to his wife. It said it tracked him down “after weeks of [Whitehouse] refusing to answer GoLocal’s questions about his membership in Bailey’s.” The senator said at the time that he would privately take up the diversity issue with the club and that “it would be nice if they changed a little bit, but it’s not my position.”

Ummmmmmmm, this is not getting a whole lot better.

The WaPo then notes:

GoLocal also said in its 2017 story that the issue was raised during Whitehouse’s first Senate campaign, in 2006, at which point he “reportedly promised to quit his memberships in Bailey’s.” But Whitehouse’s office denies that he made such a promise and says he recalls that he transferred his shares to his wife “to accommodate a club policy of spouses not both being members.”

(The Post has been unable to locate a contemporaneous report indicating such a promise by Whitehouse in 2006. GoLocal stands by its reporting, with chief executive and co-founder Josh Fenton saying, “The senator promised a number of times that he would quit. This was well-stated and predates the launch of GoLocal in 2010.”)

Given all of that — including especially Whitehouse saying in 2017 that he intended to take up the diversity issue with the club — one would think he would have more of a handle on where the club stands on the matter. If you were asked about being a member of an “all-White club” and it wasn’t true, wouldn’t your first impulse be to dispute that?

To be clear: The fact that Sheldon Whitehouse can’t give a straight answer about his membership in this exclusive club would not exculpate Justice Thomas if Thomas had done anything that actually smacks of corruption. But that’s exactly what’s missing. It may be improvident to accept large gifts, even from very good friends, when holding a position as prominent and powerful as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. My personal view is that it’s better on the whole not to. And in filling out financial disclosure forms, it’s probably prudent to include the kitchen sink, simply to stay clear of anything that’s close to the line. Not meeting those standards of (possibly excess) caution might be unwise or, at the very worst, careless. But corruption it is not. “Corruption” has a specific meaning. It means taking money to use your Office to do favors for the donor. But there has been no showing — indeed there has not been even an allegation — that Justice Thomas did any such thing.

So why the anti-Thomas, and more broadly, the anti-Court crusade at ten thousand decibels?

Several reasons, I think. The present Court is the most conservative of my lifetime. Even more galling, it’s the only major institution in the country the Left doesn’t own — the media, academic institutions, the entertainment industry and (now) the White House having gone over. Thus the Court needs to be de-legitimized. The attacks on Thomas; and more recently on Justice Gorsuch as well; and by implication the Chief Justice, are part of that. This is the Court that took down Roe, the leading liberal icon of the last 50 years. Chuck Schumer told us point blank that a price was going be paid. Again, I quote the Washington Post:

Speaking to a crowd on the Supreme Court steps, the leading Senate Democrat declared: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.” He meant Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, the newest Justices who were appointed by President Trump….Mr. Schumer, still addressing Messrs. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, added: “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

That makes it pretty clear — about as clear as Luca Brasi would make it.

The second agenda at work in these attacks is to lay the groundwork for defiance of the Court’s expected opinion striking down race-based admissions to college. There was a time in this country when the Court’s decision would have been met with reluctant acceptance even by those who disagreed with it. That time, however, is long gone. Racial preference and white shame are almost as dear to the Left’s heart as limitless abortion, so acceptance is not in the offing. The Left is preparing the battlefield to continue race-doctored admissions by hook or by crook. (Whether it’s the hook or the crook will be the subject of a later entry). Defiance of a Supreme Court opinion ordering equal treatment regardless of race needs to be justified as the New Norm for Better People, and attacking the moral standing of the Court is where it starts.

I hesitate to note the third agenda I sense may be underway here, but there is a darkness abroad in the country that I can’t avoid. The third agenda is a repetition of the attempt to murder Justice Kavanaugh, except this time Justice Thomas will be the target. I don’t think any of the people peddling these reckless and false attacks against the Justice intend this, but the kind of belligerent and inflammatory language they use we know rings the bell with deranged people like Nicholas Roske, who attempted to assassinate Kavanaugh, or James Hodgkinson, who came very close to assassinating House Majority Leader Steve Scalise. The Left knew what it was doing when, years ago, it adopted the motto, “By Any Means Necessary.” We can only hope the Justices are being given protection equal to the threat.