Lefty Professor Demanding Justice Thomas Recuse Over Wife’s Texts Accidentally Explains Why He Shouldn’tAntipathy toward Ginni Thomas is no basis for relativistic standards or a manufactured recusal rule that seems ripe for political abuse.BY: MARK PAOLETTA
MAY 03, 2022
Efforts to change the outcome of Supreme Court cases by trying to force Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself continue apace, all based on new standards that have never been applied to any other judge or justice. At last week’s House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing, Professor Stephen Gillers, a well-known judicial ethics expert, invented a new standard to block Justice Thomas from all cases regarding the 2020 elections and the events of Jan. 6, 2021, because of his wife Ginni Thomas’s activities. But he is wrong on the law and on the facts.
At the outset of the hearing, where I was also a witness, Gillers did agree that none of Ginni Thomas’s political activities before her texts with Mark Meadows required Justice Thomas to recuse himself from any case. This destroyed the prior Democrat and media narrative regarding past cases and revealed their complaints as the frivolous partisan attacks that they are.
Thus, the critics are wrong that Justice Thomas was required to recuse himself from legal challenges to Obamacare because Ginni said it was a “disaster” and urged the law’s repeal. Nor was a recusal required when she worked with groups on messaging, and those groups separately and without Ginni’s involvement, filed amicus briefs before the Supreme Court.
Consistent with the law’s recusal provisions and the Supreme Court’s 1993 Statement of Recusal Policy, Justice Thomas has not had to recuse because Ginni has never been a party nor a litigant before the court, and she does not have an “interest” that would be “substantially affected” by the outcome of the case.
Gillers’s Defense of Judge’s Wife Applies to Ginni ThomasGillers made the same point when he filed a brief defending Ninth Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt’s decision to not recuse from a case involving a challenge to a ban on same-sex marriages in California, even though his wife, Ramona Ripston, who was the head of an ACLU chapter, had spoken out forcefully against the ban and her group had joined two amicus briefs opposing the ban in the court below.
He noted she was neither a party nor a litigant and had no interest beyond a general interest in “endorsing an outcome favoring equality.” But in now arguing for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from 2020 election cases, Gillers claims that Ginni Thomas’s conduct is different than what was at issue in the Reinhardt case.
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Source:
https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/03/lefty-professor-demanding-justice-thomas-recuse-over-wifes-texts-accidentally-explains-why-he-shouldnt/
