OPINION
JAMELLE
BOUIE
Ginni Thomas Has a Lot of Explaining to Do
June 17,
2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/opinion/ginni-thomas-john-eastman.html?searchResultPosition=1
Jamelle
Bouie
By Jamelle
Bouie
Opinion
Columnist
Again and
again, during the years that Donald Trump was in the White House, liberals
would ask themselves a single question: “Can you imagine if Barack Obama had
done this?”
“This,” of
course, was any one of the antics or misdeeds that marked Trump’s time in
office: the lies, the insults, the cruelty and the criminality. Imagine if
Obama had gone out of his way to excuse the equivalent of a white supremacist
mob; imagine if Obama had gone to the site of a natural disaster and tossed out
paper towels like so many footballs; imagine if he had railed against “shithole
countries” or tried to pressure a foreign leader into turning over information
to undermine his political opponents.
Imagine
what would have happened if Barack Obama had plotted to subvert and overturn a
presidential election that he had lost.
Republicans
would have lost their minds. Having whipped themselves into a lather over fake
scandals and manufactured controversies during the actual Obama administration,
they would have exploded into paroxysms of partisan rage over any one of these
misdeeds. The Benghazi hearings would have looked like a sober-minded
investigation compared with what Republicans would have unleashed if the shoe
had been on the other foot.
The point
of this mental exercise, for liberals, was to highlight the hypocrisy of the
Republican Party under Trump. Tucked into this attempt to condemn Republican
behavior, however, is an important observation about the value of political
theater. All this conservative hysteria did not defeat Barack Obama at the
ballot box, but it may have helped to put his party at a disadvantage.
The main
effect of these years of Republican scandalmongering was to produce a cloud of
suspicion and mistrust that helped to undermine Obama’s preferred successor, as
well as to shield Trump, as the 2016 Republican nominee, from the kind of
scrutiny that might have made him more vulnerable.
Democrats
do not need to mimic Republican behavior in all of its deranged glory, but they
would do well to heed the lesson that for many voters, where there is smoke,
there must be fire.
It is with
this knowledge in mind that Democrats in Washington should do something about
Ginni Thomas, who has just been asked to testify before the House select
committee investigating the attack on the Capitol. The reason is
straightforward. Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas,
worked with allies of Donald Trump to try to overturn the 2020 presidential
election. (Thomas quickly let it be known that she was looking “forward to
talking to” the committee and couldn’t wait “to clear up misconceptions.”)
Earlier
this year, we learned that Thomas exchanged text messages with Mark Meadows,
the White House chief of staff, in the weeks and days before the Jan. 6 attack
on the Capitol. We also learned, last month, that she urged Arizona Republicans
to discard the results of the election and choose a “clean slate of electors”
for Trump.
And we
learned this week from the Jan. 6 committee that Thomas also sent messages
directly to John Eastman, the conservative lawyer (and former law clerk for
Justice Thomas) who essentially devised the plan to try to overturn the 2020
presidential results.
Eastman
spoke at the Stop the Steal rally before the attack and even requested a pardon
by way of Rudy Giuliani for his activities leading up to the insurrection:
“I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the
works.”
“Thomas’s
efforts to overturn the election were more extensive than previously known,”
The Washington Post reported on Wednesday. Eastman, for his part, claimed to
have known of a “heated” dispute among the Supreme Court justices over whether
to hear arguments about the 2020 election. “So the odds are not based on the
legal merits but an assessment of the justices’ spines, and I understand that
there is a heated fight underway,” he is said to have written in an email to
another lawyer. (On Thursday, Eastman posted a rebuttal on Substack asserting
that he’d heard about the “heated fight” from news reports and that he could
“categorically confirm that at no time did I discuss with Mrs. Thomas or
Justice Thomas any matters pending or likely to come before the court.”)
But if the
first revelation, of Thomas’s correspondence with Meadows, was shocking, then
the revelation of Thomas’s contact with Eastman is explosive. And it raises key
questions, not just about what Ginni Thomas knew but about what Clarence Thomas
knew as well. How, exactly, did Eastman know of tensions on the court? And why
did he predict to Greg Jacob, the chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence,
that the Supreme Court would rule 7 to 2 against his legal theory about the
Electoral College certification process before conceding that it would be 9 to
0?
So while
the committee is rightly seeking testimony from Ginni Thomas, Democrats should
say something, too. They shouldn’t just say something; they should scream
something.
Not only
did Ginni Thomas try to make herself a part of the effort to overthrow the
government, but Justice Thomas was the only member of the court to vote in
favor of Donald Trump’s attempt to shield his communications from congressional
investigators — communications that would have included the messages between
Mark Meadows and Ginni Thomas.
There is
something suspect happening with the Supreme Court, and other constitutional
officers have every right to criticize it. Democratic leaders in Congress
should begin an investigation into Ginni Thomas’s activities and announce that
they intend to speak to her husband as well. President Biden should tell the
press that he supports that investigation and hopes to see answers.
Rank-and-file Democrats should make a stink about potential corruption on the
court whenever they have the opportunity. Impeachment should be on the table.
This
probably won’t win votes. It could, however, capture the attention of the media
and even put Republicans on the defensive. It is true that politics are unpredictable
and that there’s no way to say exactly how a given choice will play out in the
real world. But if the much maligned (and politically successful)
investigations into Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s emails are any indication,
real pressure might turn additional revelations into genuine liabilities for
the Republican Party.
The easiest
thing for Democrats to do, of course, is nothing — to steer away from open
conflict and leave the controversy (and the questions) to the select committee.
But if Democrats choose instead to act as a political party should, they would
do well to remember that if the tables were turned, their opponents would not
hesitate to use every argument and every tool at their disposal.
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Correction:
June 17, 2022
Because of
an editing error, an earlier version of this column mischaracterized the
testimony of Greg Jacob at a House committee hearing on the Jan. 6 attack. He
said that John Eastman initially predicted that the Supreme Court would rule 7
to 2 against the vice president’s ability to overturn the Electoral College
vote, not that the court would rule in favor of it. An earlier version also
misspelled Mr. Jacob’s surname. It is Jacob, not Jacobs.
Jamelle
Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the
chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in
Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
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