Surprised? Shady Clarence Thomas Just Gave Lindsay Graham a Pass

Associate Justice Clarence Thomas joins other members of the Supreme Court as they pose for a new group portrait, at the Supreme Court building in Washington, Oct. 7, 2022. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Monday, Oct. 24, temporarily blocked Sen. Lindsey Graham’s testimony to a special grand jury investigating whether then-President Donald Trump and others illegally tried to influence the 2020 election in the state.

Three days ago, we thought we might be about to learn what Sen. Lindsay Graham knew about the Trump campaign’s effort to overturn Georgia’s presidential election in 2020. Graham, who was one of Trump’s biggest supporters in the Senate, fought a subpoena from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and lost, setting up a situation where the senator from South Carolina would have to tell the truth or plead the fifth under oath before a grand jury.

But Graham had a, uh, Trump card sitting on the Supreme Court, and you’ll never guess who…by which I mean you already know exactly who I’m talking about. Good ‘ol Clarence Thomas, he of spending years on the bench of the country’s highest court without ever uttering a word, unilaterally give Graham a temporary hall pass from testifying in the Georgia investigation. And what a very problematic pass it is.

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Thomas temporarily blocked the subpoena of Graham under Supreme Court rules that let individual justices deal with emergency petitions by region. Thomas handles such cases that come from Georgia, which also happens to be his home state. His ruling will allow the full court could weigh in on Graham’s argument that he shouldn’t have to testify under immunity granted by the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause—in oversimplified terms, the idea that whatever he did in Georgia was OK because he’s a legislator.

Thomas’ ruling in and of itself doesn’t sound awful; higher court judges routinely hit the brakes on lower court rulings until they can can weigh more evidence and come up with a final decision. The problem here is what we know about Clarence Thomas’ wife, Virginia, “Ginny” Thomas, a Republican activist who was all up in the Trump camp’s attempt to hijack the last election and keep their guy in power.

Just a month ago, Ginny Thomas testified under oath before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that she never informed or involved her husband about her activism on behalf of Trump’s campaign, which is near impossible to believe if you’ve ever lived with a partner who came home excited about a big project at work.

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What was that activism? Well, she was present at the “Stop the Steal” rally that immediately preceded Trump supporters overrunning the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop the U.S. Senate—the same senate that Graham serves in—from certifying Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 election. She was also on a text chain with Trump’s then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows brainstorming about ways to keep Trump in office.

While all this was going on, Clarence Thomas was seated on the Supreme Court and was the only justice who voted against forcing Trump to turn over records from his administration to the Jan. 6 committee. Hmm.

There’s absolutely no way for Clarence Thomas to maintain the appearance of objectivity where any investigation into Trump’s efforts to fleece the public out of a presidential election are concerned. Even if his decision on Graham testifying was just a formality, he should never have been the one to issue it, and he needs to recuse himself from anything having to do with the case in Georgia, or with Trump at all, from here on out.

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