Ginni and Clarence Thomas have long had issues with ethics and conflicts of interest

In the weeks after the 2020 election, Ginni Thomas, a right-wing agitator and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, strategized with Trump advisors on overthrowing the election. Her head filled with conspiracy theories, Thomas sent dozens of hysterical messages to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows urging him not to concede.

In January, the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s request to block release of records relating to the attack on the Capitol. The Court delivered an unsigned ruling with just one dissent: from Justice Thomas.

Ginni Thomas also attended the Jan. 6 rally. She claims she left early but played a key role in making peace between different extremist factions of the Council on National Policy, a secretive coalition of right-wing groups that helped organize the rally.

Was Clarence’s dissent a vote to protect his wife?

Probably, given the Thomas’s long record of shameless joint right-wing activism on issues that might come before the Court.

For decades Justice Thomas has not recused himself from decisions involving hot-button issues on which his wife has conducted passionate campaigns.

Ginni Thomas claims they lead “parallel lives,” but in a 2011 speech the Justice described he and his wife as “equally yoked.” And their actions give the lie to her whopper.

Conservative justices, notably the late Antonin Scalia, and to a lesser extent liberal justices, have given political speeches and appear regularly at partisan events. Since joining the court in 1991 Clarence Thomas has brazenly flouted judicial ethics more than any other justice and covered the court with what Justice Sonia Sotomayor calls “the stench” of partisanship.

Most Americans regard this behavior as inappropriate, and approval of the Court has reached a new low in polling of 40 percent. Fifty-three percent disapprove of the job it’s doing.

By himself or with his wife Thomas has appeared at numerous events hosted by conservative organizations and helped with their fund raising.

He went to secret “retreats” organized by the Koch brothers that strategized to have decades of campaign finance law overturned. He did not recuse himself from Citizens United (2010) which opened the floodgates to dark money in elections.

Thomas’s partisan breaches of judicial ethics should not distract us from his anti-democratic record of opinions making it more difficult for Americans to vote, to impose limits on the freedom of the press, to expand gun rights, to dismantle regulations that protect workers, and roll back the entire Voting Rights Act.

In a 2019 decision the Court upheld federal agencies broad power to interpret their own often vague regulations, e.g., the EPA’s power to limit emissions. But it significantly weakened that power.

Thomas’s flexible constitutional “originalism” would go further and sweep away the administrative and regulatory state established by Congress since New Deal. His radical view of the constitution would invalidate a host of laws, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, much of the Family and Medical Leave Act, and basic worker protections such as the minimum wage, overtime laws, and the regulation of child labor.

He has supported the Republican appointed justices’ efforts to weaken the Voting Rights Act that ensured the right to vote was not denied based on race or color. And he would go further and allow Republican administrations to dismantle the Voting Rights Act.

He’s not going to change or go away. As criticism mounts prompted by Ginni’s actions, prepare for him to play the race cards and victim as he did at his 1991 hearing. Where he lied and Anita Hill told the truth.

Ron Formisano is the author of “American Oligarchy” (2017) and the crime novel “The Body Traffick” (2021).