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Let’s Get Real about Ginni (And Clarence) Thomas

White House Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway is interviewed by by Mercedes Schlapp during the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center February 23, 2017 in National Harbor, Maryland. Hosted by the American Conservative Union, CPAC is an annual gathering of right wing politicians, commentators and their supporters. — Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, moderates a panel discussion during the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 23, 2017 in National Harbor, Maryland. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

March 26, 2022 11:32 a.m.

To my slight surprise, the Ginni Thomas story — the texts about her involvement in the January 6th conspiracy — appears to be escalating rapidly. Politico’s Playbook is in such a case a good barometer. A couple days ago I felt I was pushing the envelope by saying Justice Thomas should recuse himself from any Jan. 6th or Trump election (past or future elections) related cases. Over the last 36 hours, though, calls for this are not only coming from standby legal ethics experts but from a number of conservative legal types who have in the past been either indifferent to or protective of Ginni Thomas’s fairly open involvement in GOP partisan politics. (Justice Thomas was already the sole dissent in a case that could quite likely have involved — though in the event it apparently did not — communications from his wife to other participants in the Jan. 6th conspiracy.) Now the Jan. 6th committee seems prepped to ask her to testify and, if she doesn’t agree, subpoena her, though here there appears to be a division centering around Liz Cheney.

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