Tag Archives: Virginia Lamp Thomas

September 14, 2011 · 7:30 PM

More Ethics Trouble for Clarence Thomas

Mother Jones

If Clarence Thomas was hoping that liberals might just forget about his cozy ties to a Dallas real estate developer, or his failure for a decade to disclose the hundreds of thousands of dollars his wife earned from a conservative think tank, well, he would be wrong. As President Obama’s health care reform bill gets closer and closer to a hearing before the high court, liberal groups are continuing to press for some sort of disciplinary action against Thomas, or at least to force him to recuse himself from hearing the health care case.

To that end, on Tuesday, the left-leaning Alliance for Justice and the good-government group Common Cause asked the Judicial Conference of the United States, which oversees the federal courts, to investigate whether Thomas violated the Ethics in Government Act. The groups allege that Thomas may have violated the act when he failed to disclose his wife Ginny Thomas’s compensation—upwards of $700,000—from the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation.

The groups also are asking the Judicial Conference to investigate whether Thomas may have failed to report travel paid for by the Texas real estate developer Harlan Crowe, as reported by the New York Times. The Judicial Conference was holding its semi-annual meeting in DC this week when the advocacy groups sent their letter. If the Conference concludes that the allegations have merit, federal law requires that if it “has reasonable cause to believe has willfully falsified or willfully failed to file information required to be reported” it must refer the case to the attorney general. Common Cause president Bob Edgar said in a statement Tuesday:

In America, no one is above the law, including Supreme Court justices. For more than a decade, Justice Thomas omitted information about his wife’s income, clearly required by the Ethics in Government Act, from his annual financial disclosure report. Surely such a repeated violation, by someone entrusted to apply laws far more complex than the Ethics Act, at least deserves a formal review by the Judicial Conference and the Attorney General.

Odds are slim that even the Judicial Conference is going to ask Eric Holder to investigate Thomas. But you can’t really fault them for trying. Thomas’s lapses seem egregious enough for some higher authority to take a second look.

Unfortunately, thanks the the separation of powers doctrine, there really isn’t a higher authority when it comes to the Supreme Court. Some members of Congress are trying to change that. Also this week, the Alliance for Justice has been trying to rally support for congressional hearings on a bill introduced earlier this year that would force Supreme Court justices to be covered by the code of conduct that applies to other federal judges and create new procedures for when a justice may have to recuse from hearing a case. Given that virtually no Republicans have signed on, this law, too, has no hope of going anywhere, at least not any time soon. But the Democrats behind it get points for trying anyway.

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June 20, 2011 · 6:25 PM

Thomas’ ethical problems in the spotlight

I, for one, will continue to keep this issue in the spotlight on this blog.   I still believe that it is the backstory of the Anthony Weiner fiasco that everyone including, nay, especially the main stream media, ignored.

As an Anthony Weiner advocate (I used to live in Queens, but not in his district, so there is an inherent affinity for Weiner, as a native son.  Aside from the geographical connection, former Rep. Anthony Weiner and former Rep. Alan Grayson were the most outspoken and passionate supporters for their constituents and for the masses of people disenfranchised by GOP policies. 

Can anyone see a correlation here or am I just wearing my tin-foil hat too tightly?

Daily Kos

The New York Times’ report this weekend highlighted just one of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s problems with ethics.

[Justice Clarence Thomas and real estate magnate Harlan Crow] met in the mid-1990s, a few years after Justice Thomas joined the court. Since then, Mr. Crow has done many favors for the justice and his wife, Virginia, helping finance a Savannah library project dedicated to Justice Thomas, presenting him with a Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass and reportedly providing $500,000 for Ms. Thomas to start a Tea Party-related group. They have also spent time together at gatherings of prominent Republicans and businesspeople at Mr. Crow’s Adirondacks estate and his camp in East Texas.In several instances, news reports of Mr. Crow’s largess provoked controversy and questions, adding fuel to a rising debate about Supreme Court ethics. But Mr. Crow’s financing of the museum, his largest such act of generosity, previously unreported, raises the sharpest questions yet — both about Justice Thomas’s extrajudicial activities and about the extent to which the justices should remain exempt from the code of conduct for federal judges.

This is just one in a growing list of ethical problems for Thomas:

Unethical Fundraising: The Code of Conduct does not allow judges to “personally participate in fund-raising  activities,  solicit funds for any organization, or use or permit the  use of the  prestige of judicial office for that purpose,” except in  very limited circumstances. Yet Justice Thomas attended a Koch-sponsored political fundraiser intended to fund the conservative infrastructure of front groups, political campaigns, think tanks and media outlets. This attendance is technically legal, because of the justices exemption from the Code of Conduct, but the justices claim that they have long followed a policy of “look[ing] to the Code of Conduct for guidance”  in determining when they may participate in fundraising activities.Failure to Disclose: Federal judges and justices are required by law to disclose their spouse’s income — thus preventing persons who wish to   influence the judge or justice from funneling money to them through   their husband or wife. Nevertheless, Thomas falsely claimed that his  wife Ginni — a lobbyist and high-earning member of the professional right — earned no non-investment income whatsoever while she was working at  the right-wing Heritage Foundation. When asked to explain this error,  Thomas — who is one of the nine people responsible for issuing binding  interpretations of the nation’s founding document — claimed that he “misunderst[ood] the filing instructions.”

Potential Conflict of Interest: Ginni Thomas used to lead an organization that vigorously opposes the Affordable Care Act, and she even briefly signed a memo calling that Act unconstitutional. Ginni also may be earning lobbying fees for working to have this Act repealed. A team of conservative lawyers recently argued that such activities by a judge’s spouse requires the judge to recuse from the lawsuits challenging the ACA, but a defiant speech Thomas gave to the conservative Federalist Society leaves little doubt that he will not recuse.

A Financial Stake in His Own Decisions?: Ginni Thomas may also be getting rich off of her husband’s vote in the infamous Citizens United decision — which freed corporations to spend billions of dollars to buy U.S.  elections. Ginni’s new lobbying firm “offers advice on optimizing  political investments for charitable giving in the non-profit world or political causes,” a line of work which has obviously become much more  lucrative since Citizens United.

Continue reading here…

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June 19, 2011 · 12:10 AM

Rep. Anthony Weiner’s Letter to Justice Thomas

When I wrote an article recently, which implied that Anthony Weiner’s trouble with the media may have started out due to his sharp focus on Justice  Clarence Thomas’ ethics problems, many people seemed to scoff at the notion that Weiner’s problems may have been retaliation for him exposing Justice Thomas.

A Letter from Congressman Anthony Weiner

In February, 2011, armed with all these concerns, and anticipating the release of Thomas’ 2010 financial disclosure forms that would reveal Ginni Thomas’ Liberty Central income for the first time, a Congressman drafted a letter that was co-signed by 74 members of Congress, taking the issue of recusal and conflicts of interest directly to Clarence Thomas’ door.

Dear Justice Thomas:

As an Associate Justice, you are entrusted with the responsibility to exercise the highest degree of discretion and impartiality when deciding a case. As Members of Congress, we were surprised by recent revelations of your financial ties to leading organizations dedicated to lobbying against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. We write today to respectfully ask that you maintain the integrity of this court and recuse yourself from any deliberations on the constitutionality of this act.

The appearance of a conflict of interest merits recusal under federal law. From what we have already seen, the line between your impartiality and you and your wife’s financial stake in the overturn of healthcare reform is blurred. Your spouse is advertising herself as a lobbyist who has “experience and connections” and appeals to clients who want a particular decision – they want to overturn health care reform. Moreover, your failure to disclose Ginny Thomas’s receipt of $686,589 from the Heritage Foundation, a prominent opponent of healthcare reform, between 2003 and 2007 has raised great concern.

This is not the first case where your impartiality was in question. As Common Cause points out, you “participated in secretive political strategy sessions, perhaps while the case was pending, with corporate leaders whose political aims were advanced by the [5-4] decision” on the Citizens United case. Your spouse also received an undisclosed salary paid for by undisclosed donors as CEO of Liberty Central, a 501(c)(4) organization that stood to benefit from the decision and played an active role in the 2010 elections.

Given these facts, there is a strong conflict between the Thomas household’s financial gain through your spouse’s activities and your role as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. We urge you to recuse yourself from this case. If the US Supreme Court’s decision is to be viewed as legitimate by the American people, this is the only correct path.

We appreciate your thoughtful consideration of this request.

Sincerely,
ANTHONY D. WEINER

Weiner followed this letter up with the Conflicted Clarence Thomas campaign, highlighting Thomas’ conflicts due to Ginni’s work and income, collecting signatures from citizens who shared his outrage, and making life very uncomfortable for Thomas and his die-hard supporters.

H/t: Angry Black Lady - Please read her extensive article on this topic entitled:  Clarence Thomas – The Original #Weinergate

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June 18, 2011 · 10:13 PM

Justice Thomas Caught Up In Yet Another Ethical Tangle

Anthony Weiner’s last tweets before his political enemies decided to ‘take him down on Twitter’ seemingly had more red meat than anticipated. 

There is a back story in the Anthony Weiner fiasco that the media refused to acknowledge and that is:  the Justice Clarence Thomas ethics violations.  

Weiner was trying to bring the issue out in the open, but was side tracked with his own ethics issues…albeit a matter of personal behavior.  I won’t re-litigate the Weiner “scandal”, but I will say that he was on point in trying to reveal Ginni and Clarence Thomas’ ethics issues.  After all, Thomas is a Supreme Court Justice.

Will the media start paying attention now that the powers that be who wanted to see Rep. Weiner gone have moved on to other things?  Will the media finally do their job?

Here are Rep. Weiner’s last tweets on Justice Thomas just before all hell broke out for Weiner and Thomas went on with his ethically challenged life…

Lets review : for more than a decade #ConflictedClarenceThomas forgot nearly $800k on his filings. 4:43 PM May 27th via TweetDeck

Spouse of #ConflictedClarenceThomas has every right to work for whomever, but he must recuse himself. 4:33 PM May 27th via TweetDeck

For the first time #ConflictedClarenceThomas admits his spouse words for tea party org. 4:31 PM May 27th via TweetDeck

http://scr.bi/mwJ4IG #ConflictedClarenceThomas dumps his conflicts forms on friday before memorial day. #AhFreshAir 4:27 PM May 27th via TweetDeck

Think Progress

The New York Times reports on Justice Clarence Thomas’ longstanding — and highly fruitful — relationship with a leading conservative donor named Harlan Crow. Crow has donated nearly $5 million to Republican candidates and conservative organizations, including $100,000 to the anti-John Kerry Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — and he has also been very generous to the Thomas family:

The two men met in the mid-1990s, a few years after Justice Thomas joined the court. Since then, Mr. Crow has done many favors for the justice and his wife, Virginia, helping finance a Savannah library project dedicated to Justice Thomas, presenting him with a Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass and reportedly providing $500,000 for Ms. Thomas to start a Tea Party-related group. They have also spent time together at gatherings of prominent Republicans and businesspeople at Mr. Crow’s Adirondacks estate and his camp in East Texas. [...]

Mr. Crow has not personally been a party to Supreme Court litigation, but his companies have been involved in federal court cases, including four that went to the appellate level. And he has served on the boards of two conservative organizations involved in filing supporting briefs in cases before the Supreme Court. One of them, the American Enterprise Institute, with Mr. Crow as a trustee, gave Justice Thomas a bust of Lincoln valued at $15,000 and praised his jurisprudence at an awards gala in 2001.

As the Times‘ article details, Crow also donated $1.3 million to help set up a museum that Thomas has been heavily involved in creating — an arrangement that could violate the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges if it wasn’t for the fact that the Supreme Court has exempted itself from this Code.

Sadly, Thomas’ relationship with Crow — and the even more troubling fact that he received a $15,000 gift from an organization that frequently files briefs before his Court — is merely the most recent example of many ethically questionable actions by Justice Thomas:

Unethical Fundraising: The Code of Conduct does not allow judges to “personally participate in fund-raising activities, solicit funds for any organization, or use or permit the use of the prestige of judicial office for that purpose,” except in very limited circumstances. Yet Justice Thomas attended a Koch-sponsored political fundraiser intended to fund the conservative infrastructure of front groups, political campaigns, think tanks and media outlets. This attendance is technically legal, because of the justices exemption from the Code of Conduct, but the justices claim that they have long followed a policy of “look[ing] to the Code of Conduct for guidance” in determining when they may participate in fundraising activities.

Failure to Disclose: Federal judges and justices are required by law to disclose their spouse’s income — thus preventing persons who wish to influence the judge or justice from funneling money to them through their husband or wife. Nevertheless, Thomas falsely claimed that his wife Ginni — a lobbyist and high-earning member of the professional right — earned no non-investment income whatsoever while she was working at the right-wing Heritage Foundation. When asked to explain this error, Thomas — who is one of the nine people responsible for issuing binding interpretations of the nation’s founding document — claimed that he “misunderst[ood] the filing instructions.”

Potential Conflict of Interest: Ginni Thomas used to lead an organization that vigorously opposes the Affordable Care Act, and she even briefly signed a memo calling that Act unconstitutional. Ginni also may be earning lobbying fees for working to have this Act repealed. A team of conservative lawyers recently argued that such activities by a judge’s spouse requires the judge to recuse from the lawsuits challenging the ACA, but a defiant speech Thomas gave to the conservative Federalist Society leaves little doubt that he will not recuse.

A Financial Stake in His Own Decisions?: Ginni Thomas may also be getting rich off of her husband’s vote in the infamous Citizens United decision — which freed corporations to spend billions of dollars to buy U.S. elections. Ginni’s new lobbying firm “offers advice on optimizing political investments for charitable giving in the non-profit world or political causes,” a line of work which has obviously become much more lucrative since Citizens United.

Any one of these instances would be troubling, but the fact that one justice has managed to accrue such a list is deeply disturbing and raises serious questions about what else Thomas might be hiding.

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June 3, 2011 · 5:56 PM

Is Weiner Scandal Retaliation From Clarence Thomas?

As I’ve previously mentioned, I’ve been following the Rep. Anthony Weiner hoopla since last Friday.

I’ve asked myself the same question, is the Weiner scandal retaliation from the Clarance Thomas issue which Rep. Weiner exposed? 

Just before the faux scandal  about Weiner broke out on May 27th, Weiner had been tweeting  about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ possible  ethics violations on his tax returns.

News One

As Rep. Anthony Weiner’s alleged crotch-shot dominates the news, information on possible motives to deface Weiner’s credibility are surfacing under the radar. And as it appears, Weinergate just might be a smear campaign executed by  conservative activists looking to defend Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

For months, Rep. Weiner has prompted Thomas to disclose the money his wife, Virginia Thomas made working for Liberty Central, a political organization that has openly opposed President Obama’s health care reform agenda. According to Weiner, Mrs. Thomas’ political affiliations put the justice’s impartiality on the bench in question.

Details of Virginia Thomas’ salary and other payments were disclosed Friday night as the press and most Americans prepared for the Memorial Day weekend.

The timing of Thomas’ disclosure quickly became ammunition for Weiner, who made it a point to shed light on the hush-hush disclosure via twitter, hurling numerous tweets at  #ConflictedClarenceThomas.

The tweets read:

“Pretty crazy that the Scout does a pre memorial day Friday dumping of its financial disclosure forms. #ButImOnTheCase”

“#ConflictedClarenceThomas dumps his conflicts forms on Friday before memorial day. #AhFreshAir”

“Spouse of #ConflictedClarenceThomas has every right to work for whomever, but he must recuse himself.”

A day after Weiner waged his assault, political pundit Anthony Breitbart broke a story on his site Big Government of a lewd picture sent to a 21-year-old college co-ed from Weiner’s Twitter account. The picture of an unidentified crotch, was sent to Breitbart from Twitter user @patriotusa76 as a screenshot, which @patriotusa76 said he captured reading Weiner’s feed moments before the tweet was deleted.

Breitbart ran with the photo and the story took off, while  Thomas’ disclosure became an after thought. Weiner defended himself by claiming his Twitter account was hacked, but his claims have yet to be substantiated.

As a result, pundits and conspiracy theorist are probing deep into the coincidence. The liberal website The Daily Kos published a story with evidence they claim proves Weinergate is a conservative-led smear campaign.

UPDATE:

Rep. Weiner’s Wife, Huma Abedin Not Worried About Infidelity

NEW YORK– Huma Abedin, Rep. Anthony Weiner’s wife isn’t worried about infidelity after the news of a lewd picture of his crotch was sent to a 21-year-old college student via Twitter, according to friend a of Abedin. 

“She’s not worried about infidelity,” said her friend. “She’s confident and comfortable in her marriage.”

Abedin, a former deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, married Weiner in July 2010.
More pictures…
 
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April 12, 2011 · 7:52 PM

Virginia Thomas builds tea party network

I wonder if the Senate, while going through the confirmation process for Supreme Court nominees, has ever ordered psychological testing for those nominees. 

I know they can’t order the examinations on the nominee’s spouse, but I swear, regarding ”Uncle” Clarence and Ginni Thomas, there’s a case to be made for mandatory psych evaluations of SCOTUS nominees…

Politico

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Virginia “Ginni” Thomas has a new job in conservative journalism that keeps her involved with the recent focus of her political activism and business dealings – the tea party movement.

As a part-time special correspondent for the Daily Caller, Thomas plans to tap into the movement, according to emails sent this month to top tea party organizers around the country, to build a list of “leaders from the grassroots in each state … who have their ear to the ground” and are willing to be surveyed weekly by two “prominent pollsters.” The results will be published on the Daily Caller website.

Thomas’s involvement with the tea party and the conservative movement in general has been a continuing source of controversy both for her and her husband.

Ginni Thomas’s 2009 creation of a tea party non-profit group for which she raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in undisclosed contributions, as well as her subsequent creation of a tea party consulting firm last year, has become the basis for allegations by some liberals that her husband’s impartiality has been compromised.

And her attendance at an annual summit of major conservative donors organized by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch – revealed in a recent speech by a federal judge and Thomas family ally – can be expected to draw even more scrutiny.

In remarks prepared for delivery last month to the San Francisco branch of the conservative Federalist Society, Laurence Silberman, a senior judge on the federal appeals court in Washington, blasted critics of the Thomases as “hypocrites” pushing “phony concerns” about judicial ethics, while ignoring real ones and getting their facts wrong.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53059.html#ixzz1JM7R76V6

 

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December 6, 2010 · 4:00 AM

Virginia Thomas in New Role at Liberty Central, Says Call to Anita Hill Was “Probably a Mistake”

Gee…ya think Mrs. Thomas?

The BLT – The Blog Of Legal Times

Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, announced today she will serve as a consultant to a new organization created by an alliance between Liberty Central, the conservative advocacy group she created earlier this year, and the Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty. The Patrick Henry Center’s longtime president Gary Aldrich will head both organizations. A press release detailing the new arrangement can be found here (.pdf.)

Meanwhile, in an interview published today by The Daily Caller, Virginia Thomas said she resigned as leader of Liberty Central on Thursday. But she said it was “laughable” to suggest that her change in roles at the organization was the result of adverse publicity about an October phone call she made to Anita Hill, the woman who once accused Justice Thomas of sexually harassing her.  Virginia Thomas said the call was “a private matter,” but added, “it was probably a mistake on my part.”

Thomas’s leadership in the group had drawn criticism because her funding sources were not revealed, and because it was taking positions on issues — including the healthcare reform law — that could come before her husband as a justice. In the Daily Caller interview, she said that was not the reason for her change in positions. “There are no problems with me doing what I constitutionally can do as a U.S. citizen,” she said. “I didn’t lose my constitutional rights when I married a judge.” But she did say,“It’s better for the organization not to be centered around a personality.” She added that “if you look at any of the established conservative groups, it’s hard for them to pull away from some of their leaders.”

Continue reading here…

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October 23, 2010 · 4:59 AM

Why Clarence Thomas owes African-Americans an apology

The Grio

When Ginni Thomas — the Tea Partying wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — left Anita Hill a voicemail message asking for an apology, she got it all wrong. It’s really Clarence Thomas who owes the apology, to the black community that is.

During his confirmation hearings in 1991, America was introduced to Thomas. And his handlers and boosters created a Horatio Alger, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps story of a black man who emerged from a meager upbringing in Pinpoint, Georgia to become an embodiment of the American dream. We learned that he had Gullah roots. As someone with Gullah ancestry myself via Charleston, South Carolina, I must ask what happened to Thomas to make him run away from his people and forget from whence he came. Justice Thomas is part of the high court’s conservative majority (led by Justices Roberts and Scalia), and often is regarded as the most rightward judge among his peers. His record on the bench tells the story:

An originalist, Justice Thomas believes in the original intent of the framers of the Constitution. That is bad news for black folks, and presumably for Thomas as well, given that under that judicial philosophy, he and all other blacks should be in chains on someone’s plantation.     Continue reading…

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October 22, 2010 · 6:11 PM

Clarence Thomas’ Ethics Problems, Then and Now

Justice Clarence Thomas has been noted for having the least to say during arguments before the Supreme Court.  It seems he never asks questions of the plaintiff nor the defendant when any given case is argued before The Court.

One has to wonder…is he that stupid or does he have something to hide, knowing that if he made one mistake, he’d be held up to scrutiny by the press and by a country full of bloggers, like myself.

Let me be clear, I do not like Clarence Thomas.  I do not like how Senate Republicans did everything they could to undermine Anita Hill and make HER look like the guilt party at the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings nineteen years ago.  Having said that…

The Nation

Why now? What, after almost twenty years, prompted Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to leave a message on Brandeis professor Anita Hill’s office voicemail asking her to apologize for accusing Justice Thomas of sexual harassment during his 1991 confirmation hearings?

The timing was interesting. Ginni Thomas placed her call to Hill the morning after the New York Times reported that Virginia Thomas’s new Liberty Central organization accepted “large, unidentified contributions” totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those untraceable dollars came in the flood of right-wing funding following the Citizens United campaign finance decision, in which Justice Thomas voted with the majority. The Times reported that a wide range of legal ethicists said Liberty Central’s financing raises “knotty questions” about a conflict of interest for Justice Thomas.

[...]

It is now nearly forgotten that Thomas’s ethics record gave Hill’s accusation traction. Briefly a federal appeals judge, and before that a Reagan operative charged with undercutting civil rights enforcement, Thomas had a long habit of telling untruthful stories. As the late civil rights scholar Haywood Burns, dean of the law school at City University of New York, testified during the ’91 hearings before Hill’s accusations surfaced, Thomas’s testimony and record were marked by “a lack of candor, compassion and ethical judgment.”

Reporting to Congress as head of the EEOC, Thomas misrepresented his agency’s nonenforcement of age discrimination law. As a federal judge he sat on an appeals court review of the criminal conviction of Col. Oliver North, despite having spoken out in support of North’s actions in the Iran/Contra scandal. He failed to recuse himself from a case involving his political patron, Senator John Danforth.

To score points, Thomas even lied about his sister: falsely describing her in speeches as pathetically welfare dependent, a mocking depiction utterly at odds with the proud and hard existence of a woman who worked a series of minimum-wage jobs for most of her life to support her family.

Perhaps Ginni Thomas’s phone call was a smokescreen—an attempted distraction from the reporting on Liberty Central’s funding. Maybe it was unrelated. Either way, twenty years later it bears remembering that Hill’s accusations were not just a matter of “she said, he said.” Hill, in 1991, testified as a credible witness of unquestioned probity.

Thomas had a documented ethics problem then—and, it appears, an ongoing ethics problem now. Back then, Thomas’s truth problem obscured his shameful role in undoing the very civil rights tradition that made his nomination possible. Today, the Thomases’ evocation of that old episode obscures an ethically challenged Supreme Court justice complicit in handing American politics over to corporations and anonymous far-right donors—that is the real scandal.

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October 10, 2010 · 4:37 PM

Clarence Thomas’ Tea Party Wife

So…how legal is this anyway?  I mean in terms of conflict of interest…

Newsweek

The wife of Justice Clarence Thomas is a Tea Party activist. Together, they’re the right’s new power couple.

Justice Clarence Thomas probably had a ho-hum day on June 7, 2010. From time to time, the Supreme Court of the United States makes historic decisions, but on that day, it didn’t. It handed down three noncontroversial rulings, and in all of them, Justice Thomas voted, non controversially, with the majority.

His wife, on the other hand, started the day in a blaze of publicity. Virginia Lamp Thomas, known to all as Ginni, appeared that morning on Sean Hannity’s Fox show. Wearing a TV-red jacket, Thomas bantered with Hannity about the “tyranny” President Barack Obama and his party are inflicting on the country. Then Thomas, who had recently launched a nonprofit called Liberty Central, sounded a dire warning. “We are in a fight for our country’s life,” she said. “We’ve all got to do whatever we can.” Channeling Tea Party rhetoric, she called on conservative voters to give money, sign petitions, and, in November, overthrow those who are turning “citizens” into “subjects.”

It’s like a Hollywood movie. One spouse goes off to work at the Supreme Court, that most august of institutions, where formality and discretion reign. The other puts on her power suit—and occasionally, a foam Lady Liberty crown—and enters the raucous, chaotic world of Tea Party politics and Fox News pontificating. Ever since Ginni Thomas launched Liberty Central with $550,000 in November 2009, she has become a rising star in the constellation of conservative pundits. According to its Web site, Liberty Central is a nonpartisan educational group devoted to reviving America’s “Founding Principles—limited government, personal responsibility, individual liberty, free enterprise, and national security.” It offers scorecards on politicians, a petition against tax increases, and testimonials about the benefits of grassroots activism. (Both Thomases declined to comment for this story.)   Continue reading…

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