Lefty legal commentator Mark Joseph Stern can’t stop attacking Justice Thomas, this time perpetuating a smear about a photo Justice Thomas took with Herschel Walker.
The J6 Committee released the transcript of Ginni Thomas’s interview last week — full disclosure, I represented Mrs. Thomas in that inquiry — and Stern seized on Mrs. Thomas’s comment that Justice Thomas is not interested in politics. Stern posted to Twitter a photo of Justice Thomas and Herschel Walker taken in April 2022, and wrote, “Pretty extraordinary that the Thomases keep claiming Clarence has no interest in politics when he posed for a picture at the Supreme Court with Herschel Walker during his Senate run. (In an area of the building where the general public is NOT allowed.)” This is the same smear that Lawrence O’Donnell also pushed back in April when the photo was first published.
Except it’s all wrong.
In April, Justice Thomas hosted a reception at the Supreme Court for recent inductees into the Horatio Alger Association. This organization has awarded $235 million in scholarships to more than 35,000 at-risk students. Herschel Walker was one of many inductees this year, so he attended the event too.
Justice Thomas was inducted as a member into the Horatio Alger Association in 1992 and has hosted a reception for the group at the Court nearly every year. Members include Americans who have achieved great success despite adversity. His 1992 class included Maya Angelou, Wayne Huizenga, Henry Kissinger, and John Silber.
Justice Thomas regularly poses for individual photos with the members in attendance at the reception, which is why he took a picture with Walker. This photo had nothing to do with Walker’s campaign and does not demonstrate an interest in politics. Justice Thomas had no knowledge of or anything to do with publishing the photo — Walker’s campaign did. Stern takes a perfectly ordinary picture from a non-political event and turns it into a smear on Justice Thomas.
What is consistent with the attacks on Thomas is that his critics create new standards that Justice Thomas “violates.” If taking a photo with a politician is too “political,” then what about this 2015 photo with Democrat Nancy Pelosi and Democrat-appointed Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan? Pelosi was the leader of the Democratic party at the time and would stand for re-election in 2016 and many times thereafter. Does this photo show these three Justices’ interest in partisan politics? Of course not. It’s a photo from a reception in the Capitol. It’s not “politics” to pose for a photo. Except, I guess, when Justice Thomas does so. If the Left doesn’t like you, even charity events are political.
But suppose you want an example of a Justice engaging in partisan politics. How about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg attending an event in 2010 at the Woman’s National Democratic Club, where she was awarded the Club’s Eleanor Roosevelt award? This Club’s stated mission is to support Democrat candidates. Here are photos of RBG accepting the Democrat club’s award and her husband Marty giving her a tribute at this event.
I don’t recall any member of the press at the time or since reporting that Justice Ginsburg was acting “politically” for accepting an award at this event. I only learned about it in Nina Totenberg’s new book, Dinners with Ruth, published in September 2022, nearly two years after Justice Ginsburg’s death. Totenberg called the group “a partisan club for Democratic women.”
And, as revealed in this new book, it is very interesting that Nina Totenberg, a Supreme Court reporter for NPR, emceed this event and claims to have gotten her boss’s approval to participate in this Democrat group’s event. I pointed this troubling episode out in my written testimony when I recently testified before the House Judiciary Committee. I am not aware of Mr. Stern nor any of his press colleagues raising any concerns about Justice Ginsburg engaging in this blatantly political event.
Mark Joseph Stern and the rest of the Lefty press are attacking Justice Thomas and the other constitutionalist Justices with invented “ethics” charges to erode faith in the Court, now that it has a working originalist majority. Conduct that has been perfectly acceptable and appropriate (and even lauded) is falsely portrayed in the non-stop effort to gaslight the American people into believing that there is something wrong with the Court.
In truth, the only thing that has changed is that the Court is no longer acting like a super-legislature to implement the Left’s progressive agenda. So now they are doing everything they can to have the American people lose faith in this institution. It’s reckless and unconscionable what the Left is doing, but I have faith that these Justices will not bend to this assault. They have no better role model than Justice Thomas, who has never bowed to the non-stop smears and attacks in more than 30 years on the Court. And because of his courage and his new colleagues, the Court is moving back to its proper place in our constitutional structure. Expect more smears from Mark Joseph Stern and others.