How Congress could impeach Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas

[mystery-ak]

How Congress could impeach Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas
C. Ryan Barber
6 hours ago


    Recent reports have shed light on Ginni Thomas' efforts to try to overturn the 2020 election results.
    Some are now calling for Congress to impeach her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
    The House last impeached a sitting Supreme Court justice in 1804, but the Senate did not convict.


The revelation of Ginni Thomas' text messages with former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows almost immediately drew calls for an event not seen in more than two centuries of American history: the impeachment of a sitting Supreme Court justice.

Late Thursday, the Washington Post and CBS reported that Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, exchanged more than two dozen text messages with Meadows as she pressed to overturn former President Donald Trump's electoral defeat in 2020.

The messages — 29 in total — do not directly reference Clarence Thomas or the Supreme Court. But they have fueled ethics questions that had already been swirling around Thomas, who at 73 is the longest-serving justice on the Supreme Court.

Even before the text messages became public, Justice Thomas faced calls for his retirement or resignation as the New Yorker, New York Times, and other media outlets illuminated his wife's political activism. But the text correspondence brought a new tenor to the pressure on Thomas to step down from the Supreme Court.

[Kamaji]

He shouldn't step down because of this, but she should definitely rein in her activities.

[mystery-ak]

...and here we go..............


Barbara Boxer: Time to ‘Introduce Articles of Impeachment’ Against Clarence Thomas

Pam Key 25 Mar 2022

Former Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) said Friday on MSNBC’s “The Beat” that it is time to “introduce articles of impeachment” against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Boxer was discussing Thomas’ ruling against releasing documents to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol in light of reports his far-right activist wife texted then-chief of staff Mark Meadows about overturning the 2020 presidential election.

Boxer said, “I looked at it from the lens of someone who served on the Bipartisan Ethics Committee in the Senate for many years. I was chair and co-chair for all those years. I would say this, I thought if Clarence Thomas had been a Senator and his wife was texting the president’s chief of staff about overturning democracy, Clarence Thomas, if he were a senator, would have been thrown out of the Senate if he knew about it and did not recuse himself from the case.”

She continued, “Even though in our history only one Supreme Court justice has been impeached, that was in 1804, I still think it would be good for someone to introduce articles of impeachment, to lay out this abuse of power for everyone to see.”

Host Ari Melber said, “You’re saying, though, that your read here is, this is a potentially impeachable issue for Justice Thomas?”

Boxer said, “I believe so if he knew. If he knew about this communication and as someone who has been married for, guess what, 60 years, I can tell you by listening through Ginni Thomas, through the emails, she was hysterical. It’s hard for me to believe she doesn’t mention a thing or two about that.”

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/03/25/barbara-boxer-time-to-introduce-articles-of-impeachment-against-clarence-thomas/

[Wingnut]

Never gonna happen.  Feenstine is just talking out her ass.

[libertybele]

Impeaching a justice? Just wonderful!  If any justice should be impeached it's Roberts!

[Hoodat]

Spousal texting is an impeachable offense?

[mystery-ak]

Thomas scrutiny intensifies after latest revelations

Justice Clarence Thomas faces mounting ethical questions after reports of his wife’s aggressive effort to help overturn former President Trump’s electoral defeat have intensified scrutiny over the justice’s refusal to step aside from related cases before the Supreme Court.

In the weeks following the 2020 election, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the justice’s wife, reportedly exchanged dozens of text messages with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that appeared to show her strategizing over how to bypass the will of American voters to install Trump for a second White House term despite his loss to President Biden, an outcome she described as an “obvious fraud” and “the greatest heist of our history.”

The latest development, reported Thursday by The Washington Post and CBS, comes a week after Ginni Thomas revealed in an interview that she had participated in the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

more
https://thehill.com/regulation/599821-thomas-scrutiny-intensifies-after-latest-revelations

[Cyber Liberty]

Good luck finding 17 Republican Senators to convict. 

[Kamaji]

Good luck finding 17 Republican Senators to convict. 

Exactly.  They’re trying to bully Thomas into retiring so Bidet can fill his seat with another hard core leftist. 

[Hoodat]

He shouldn't step down because of this, but she should definitely rein in her activities.

Well that's a bit sexist, don't you think?  Virginia Thomas is a grown adult and has as much right to speak her mind as anyone else.  Her husband doesn't have to 'keep her in check'.  Maybe the rest of the GOP needs to grow a set of balls like Virginia Thomas and not cower every time the Democrats falsely accuse us of some scandal.

[Hoodat]

Good luck finding 17 Republican Senators to convict.

Good luck finding one Republican who is willing to stand up to this BS left wing witch hunt.

[Kamaji]

Well that's a bit sexist, don't you think?  Virginia Thomas is a grown adult and has as much right to speak her mind as anyone else.  Her husband doesn't have to 'keep her in check'.  Maybe the rest of the GOP needs to grow a set of balls like Virginia Thomas and not cower every time the Democrats falsely accuse us of some scandal.

Not in the least.  It’s the same reason that conflict of interest rules limit the sorts of stock that family members can invest in.  It creates at least the appearance of a conflict of interest, and should be avoided.

[Hoodat]

Sending a PRIVATE text to someone else is a bit different from purchasing $2 million in Tesla stock while your spouse is passing favorable legislation for Tesla.  There is zero conflict of interest in what Virginia Thomas did.

Now if this was a matter of, let's say, Pfizer being sued over their jab, and that case reached the Supreme Court.  And at that point, Virginia Thomas tweeted to someone to sell all their Pfizer stock, then yes, that would be a serious problem.  But in this case there is no connection between Virginia Thomas' text and her husband's work.

As a general rule, any time the left accuses someone of wrongdoing, it is because they are already doing it themselves.  Maybe we should publish the private texts of the spouses of Biden Administration officials to see if we can impeach them as well.  Any chance of the Washington Post doing that?

[Kamaji]

Not really. 

[mystery-ak]

Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas may have been released from the hospital this week with a clean bill of health, but he was immediately met by a chorus of pundits and professors in a media frenzy calling for Thomas’s recusal from an array of cases. Rep. IIhan Omar (D-Minn.) even called for Thomas to be impeached; others, like MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan, echoed that call.

The reason? Thomas's wife, Ginni, and her communications with White House staff before the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on Capitol Hill.

Earlier this year, the House of Representatives’ Jan. 6 committee won an 8-1 victory before the Supreme Court, which rejected Trump’s privilege objections to the release of White House materials. The sole dissenting vote was cast by Thomas.


Soon after receiving the disputed emails and texts, the predictable leaks began from Congress, including 29 email and text messages from Ginni Thomas encouraging Trump’s then-White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to fight what she saw as a stolen election. Most of these messages preceded Jan. 6 and voiced such views as her Nov. 19, 2020, message to Meadows: "Sounds like [Trump attorney] Sidney [Powell] and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud. Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down."

The leaks had their intended effect. The media exploded with strikingly similar headlines, like Salon's "'Extraordinary level of corruption': Legal experts shocked by Ginni Thomas' QAnon texts" and the New Yorker's "Legal Scholars Are Shocked By Ginni Thomas’s 'Stop the Steal' Texts." The airwaves again are filled with shocked experts doing their best Claude Rains interpretation for cable audiences.

As with many controversies, however, this story calls for a bit less shock and a bit more scrutiny.

Ginni Thomas is a prominent Republican activist. She has publicly stated that she and her husband keep their professional lives separate, as do many Washington couples.

excerpt:

What liability? Ginni Thomas insists she was not trying to "subvert the outcome of the 2020 election" but, instead, to challenge what she viewed as a rigged election. She was wrong, in my view, but that is not a crime — it is protected speech. There is no evidence she advocated or participated in violence on that day, which is the purported focus of the committee. Her "interest" was the same as that of many Republicans who considered the election stolen.

Absent new damning evidence, these messages show constitutionally protected advocacy.

more
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/599863-ginni-thomass-texts-does-a-spouses-opinion-disqualify-a-supreme-court

[Hoodat]

When do we get to see the private texts published from the private personal phones of all the spouses of these committee members?

[mystery-ak]

https://twitter.com/gregkellyusa/status/1507737289304293379

[Hoodat]

Maybe the Committee should investigate how the Washington Post was able to bypass encryption and obtain private phone texts from a private individual?  I'm sure there are some laws that were violated there.