We don’t need to act like we’re convicting a murderer.
Yes we can take it for granted that Thomas knew whether or not his wife was in a mob storming the capital. We can surmise that without proving it beyond all doubt.
I thought she didn’t storm the capitol, but left before that happened. I haven’t read any accounts of her being present on the Capitol grounds that day. From what I understand she was present at the rally beforehand, then went home. The parts where we speculate she may be liable for involve behind-the-scenes communications in the months leading up to Biden’s inauguration, in other words conspiracy.
~Max
Sure I’ll amend to being in a mob immediately prior to storming the capitol and encouraging Trump to overturn the election. Point still stands.
I’ll cite the case again:
- A violation of § 455(a) – which requires a judge to disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned – is established when a reasonable person, knowing the relevant facts, would expect that a judge knew of circumstances creating an appearance of partiality, notwithstanding a finding that the judge was not actually conscious of those circumstances. To require scienter as an element of a § 455(a) violation would contravene that section’s language and its purpose of promoting public confidence in the integrity of the judicial system. This reading of § 455(a) does not require judges to perform the impossible by disqualifying themselves based on facts they do not know, since, in proper cases, the provision can be applied retroactively to rectify an oversight once the judge concludes that “his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” Here, where both lower courts found an ample basis in the record for concluding that an objective observer would have questioned Judge Collins’ impartiality, his failure to disqualify himself was a plain violation of § 455(a) even though it was initially the product of a temporary lapse of memory. Pp. 486 U. S. 858-862.
Your “caution” really isn’t the standard, and for good reason.
You’ve lost the thrust of your argument. “Did you know your wife was participating in the riot last year, which the party requesting documents is investigating?” is a very different question from “do you know what your wife was texting her friends and associates, and what object she had in mind for her political work, and that she may have been involved in a criminal conspiracy being investigated”?
~Max
She was at the riot.
Are you saying the riot began before they stormed the Capitol? AFAIK Mrs. Thomas is not under suspicion for participating in any riot.
~Max
Yes. The mob that gathered for the purpose of storming the capitol. That told everyone they were there to storm the capitol.
Bolding mine, as applicable.
~Max
Am I being whooshed? AIUI it did not become a riot until around noon to one, depending on where in the National Mall you were standing - the catalyst being Mr. Trump’s speech at the Ellipse, throughout which people walked to the Capitol. Mrs. Thomas says she was at the Ellipse that morning and left before Trump started speaking.
~Max
Is there any rule or law requiring a specific number for a ruling? I don’t think so, but maybe you’ll surprise me.
If the justices think a decision is necessary, but, say all of them would be conflicted – like ruling on a tax on people who work in D.C., for example, there is the rule of necessity.
If they would all be equally conflicted and a decision is necessary, they would just do it.
This thread isn’t that, though.
Multiple individuals were charged with some variant of conspiracy, one has been convicted (so far). Therefore, in addition to espousing the same rationale for the crime, Virginia Lamp Thomas was present at the time and place that documented crimes occurred.
While we do not (yet) know the extent of her criminal involvement in the conspiracies of that day, she was present at the crime scene, and is publicly known to be sympathetic to the aims of those who committed crimes in furtherance of those aims. For her to be thus adjacent in every sense to those events, it creates a gross appearance of impropriety for Clarence Thomas to rule on any matters related to that day, or to the discovery of evidence related to those matters.
Clarence Thomas, in the scope of his duties as Supreme Court Justice, is potentially in a position to use his influence to shield his wife or her associates from scrutiny of their relation to crimes committed at the time and place where they were known to be in attendance. This is the appearance of impropriety for which recusal is more than justified.
Absolutely nobody is saying this.
Virginia Lamp Thomas may speak and conduct herself in whatever manner she pleases. She is not bound by any norm of rules and ethics in this case. It is her husband who is bound by professional ethics when the spouse has created the conflict.
You can drop the bit about “you’re telling the little wife to stay at home.” I get why you’d want to stick with this - it smears your opponents by implying misogyny. But the more you continue repeating it after its falseness is explained to you, the more it looks like a conscious deflection.
I’m more than happy to say that if Amy Coney Barrett’s husband or Sonia Sotomayor’s husband texted the White House chief of staff to try and overturn the US government and to prevent the peaceful transition of power, and was present on the day that a mob actually tried to do this, that they should also recuse themselves from any inquiries into the actions around that day.
Happily, most SCOTUS spouses aren’t actually seditious and/or completely deluded and out of touch with reality. Or, if they are, they keep it much better hidden.
This has nothing to do with keeping the little woman home, or keeping the little man home.
Just imagine the head-exploding apoplexy of conservatives if Sotomayor’s husband had texted Jen Psaki to the effect of “Hunter Biden’s laptop is such a nothingburger Republican conspiracy. I hope you’re up to the task of making sure the attention gets deflected elsewhere, for the good of the country.”
Our resident conservative apologists would run this thread to a thousand pages arguing why they should both be lined up together in front of a firing squad with Hunter Biden. It would be in the headlines for the next 2 generations.
And that’s not nearly as wacko as Ginny Thomas’s text to Mark Meadows. Honestly, maybe Justice Thomas should take some time off to care for his wife’s mental health. She’s bonkers.
“Aw, that was just pillow talk, baby.”
I believe you have it backwards. The bar for recusal is lower for non-SC judges than for SC judges, despite the stakes being higher in SC cases. Because in the former case, the recusing judge just gets replaced by another judge without the perceived issue, so nothing really changes. In the latter case, he/she does not.
I think the trouble is that you have to a draw a very thick, bright line between people who are tolerant of 2022 American Republican politics, and people who are not. If the judges you are talking about aren’t, obviously they’d recuse based on the facts in this instance. But the facts in this instance would never apply to them.
All of the judges I worked for, I worked for in a pre-Trump context, and so for all I know they are also insane and believe this is normal now. The way they handled recusals, honestly, was almost always to look at the alleged conflict and say “I don’t think this affects my impartiality. We’re good.” Which is what Thomas did. The reason this is different is because the situation is objectively insane. But to 38% of people or whatever, objectively unreasonable stuff is normal politics, so the argument “this is objectively unreasonable” doesn’t have any force. They’ve already won that battle. There’s not really a step 2 if step 1 is that reasonable people say “this is unreasonable,” and unreasonable people say “nah,” and the vote is pretty much tied. Either you are able to just move the unreasonable people out of the way, or you aren’t.
I think that, like a million other things that have gone wrong, these kinds of cases can’t be individually resolved in a context where all of these other political systems are also insane. The remedy for this situation isn’t shaming John Roberts into privately counseling Thomas that he should recuse moving forward, which is a suggestion that I’ve seen which I think is really funny. The remedy should be that, immediately upon the discovery that a Supreme Court justice’s spouse is a Q Anon lunatic sending messages to cabinet-level officials about putting the president-elect in an extrajudicial military prison, both the justice and the spouse are under subpoena. 97 Senators should have already issued scandalized statements. The non-recusal should be one bad thing that is brought up, but as an example of the larger issue, which is that insane people can’t be Supreme Court justices. But that’s obviously not this world. So I don’t know how we can say this specific decision about recusal in particular was beyond the pale, in that context. The number of other judges who think this is perfectly normal has been growing.
Put another way, if Clarence Thomas gets to be a Supreme Court justice at all, he might as well not recuse from the 1/6 decisions. What’s the difference. You still have a probably-Q-guy on the Supreme Court. I mean, of course it’s judicial ethics 101 that he should have recused. Anyone who disputes that is being unreasonable. But you make him recuse himself from this one case, and then tomorrow his wife texts some Texas sheriff’s group that they should shoot up a Krispy Kreme because it’s a secret abortion HQ.