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      Texts Show Ginni Thomas’s Embrace of Conspiracy Theories

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      In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas was involved in a range of efforts to keep President Donald J. Trump in power.Two days after the 2020 election, Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, texted an old friend, Mark Meadows, the chief of staff to President Donald J. Trump.She sent messages that had been making the rounds on pro-Trump sites, where anger over the election echoed her own raw feelings, including this passage: “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”Then she added of this fanciful, if chilling, set of conspiracy theories: “I hope this is true.”She texted Mr. Meadows again the next day. “Do not concede,” she wrote. “It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.”The messages were among a flurry of text traffic between Ms. Thomas and Mr. Meadows that was revealed this past week, part of a trove of documents previously turned over to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. (Ms. Thomas has openly opposed the committee and called for Republicans who serve on it to be expelled from the House Republican conference.)A hard-line conservative activist, Ms. Thomas had long been viewed with suspicion by the Republican establishment. Yet her influence had risen during the Trump administration, especially after Mr. Meadows, who like Ms. Thomas has roots in the Tea Party movement, became chief of staff. Now, an examination of her texts, woven together with recent revelations of the depth of her efforts to overturn the election, shows how firmly she was embedded in the conspiratorial fringe of right-wing politics, even as that fringe was drawing ever closer to the center of Republican power.The disclosures add urgency to questions about how Ms. Thomas may have leveraged her marriage to Justice Thomas, who would be ruling on elections cases throughout the battle over the 2020 vote and beyond. As his wife agitated for Mr. Trump and his aides to turn aside the election results, Justice Thomas was Mr. Trump’s staunchest ally on the Supreme Court and has remained so. This year, in January, he was the only justice who noted a dissent when the court allowed the release of records from the Trump White House related to the Jan. 6 attack.Calls intensified this past week for Justice Thomas to step aside from such cases. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said on Friday that Justice Thomas “needs to recuse himself from any case related to the Jan. 6 investigation, and should Donald Trump run again, any case related to the 2024 election.”The Thomases have been a fiercely close couple for decades. In his memoir, Justice Thomas wrote that they were “one being — an amalgam” and called her his “best friend.” She often uses similar language to describe her husband.In one of his texts to Ms. Thomas, Mr. Meadows called the election a “fight of good versus evil” and added: “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues.”“Thank you!! Needed that!” Ms. Thomas replied. “This plus a conversation with my best friend just now… I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!”Ms. Thomas’s texts to Mr. Meadows tap into a deep well of debunked conspiracy theories. References to the rounding up of elected officials, reporters and bureaucrats for military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay are drawn from QAnon, which imagines Satan-worshipping leaders running the country and trafficking children.Yet in the days after the election, Ms. Thomas had far more standing to take action than most who embraced such canards. As Mr. Trump courted Justice Thomas during his years in office — curious about his popularity among the Republican base and also about rumors that he might retire, aides said — the justice’s wife won increasing access to the White House.Though some Trump aides came to view her with such suspicion that they assembled opposition research meant to damage her standing with Mr. Trump — among other things, she pressed the president to hire people who could not pass background checks, the aides said — her clout grew with time.The arc of her political career had also led her to a powerful new platform. Ms. Thomas had started out working for establishment right-leaning organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But her desire for more radical change had led her to the Tea Party, and increasingly to the party’s fringes. Mr. Meadows, who was appointed chief of staff in March 2020, held similar views and has attended meetings of Groundswell, a group that Ms. Thomas founded in 2013 after consulting with Stephen K. Bannon, who would later become Mr. Trump’s chief strategist.With their brand of conservatism ascendant, Ms. Thomas had been appointed in 2019 to the nine-member board of CNP Action, an offshoot of a secretive but influential conservative group called the Council for National Policy, whose membership includes leaders of the National Rifle Association, the Family Research Council and the Federalist Society.The New York Times Magazine, in a profile of the Thomases published last month, detailed CNP Action’s assertive role in efforts to overturn the presidential election. That included circulating a document to its members in November 2020 urging them to pressure Republican lawmakers in swing states to challenge the results and appoint alternate slates of electors: “Demand that they not abandon their Constitutional responsibilities during a time such as this,” the document said.Text messages between Ms. Thomas and Mark Meadows were part of a trove of documents turned over by Mr. Meadows to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.Al Drago for The New York TimesIn one of her texts, the contents of which were earlier reported by The Washington Post and CBS News, Ms. Thomas sent Mr. Meadows a link to a video featuring Steve Pieczenik, a former State Department official who was claiming that mail-in ballots had been watermarked as part of an elaborate government sting operation to catch voter fraud. Mr. Pieczenik previously appeared on a webcast with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and claimed that the 2012 school massacre in Newtown, Conn., was a false-flag operation, a notion that has been thoroughly debunked.On Nov. 19, Ms. Thomas promoted the efforts of Sidney Powell, the Trump lawyer who spent much of the postelection period spreading conspiracy theories. “Sidney and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud,” Ms. Thomas wrote to Mr. Meadows. “Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.”That same day, Ms. Powell held a news conference with Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington. There, she laid out baseless allegations that a cabal that included Chinese software firms, international shell companies and the financier George Soros had conspired to hack America’s voting machines.At that time, Ms. Powell was in the early stages of preparing four federal lawsuits that would present this purported plot as a reason for judges to overturn the election results. She nicknamed her suits the “Krakens,” referring to a giant octopus-like sea creature.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Virginia Thomas’ text messages. More

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      Real Justice: Justice Jackson

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      WASHINGTON — A snarling pack of white male Republicans ripping apart a poised, brainy Black woman at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, using sordid innuendos and baseless claims about race and porn to smear her, as her pained family sits behind her.It has been 31 years since I watched this scene, disgusted, when Anita Hill was questioned during confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas. Now Ketanji Brown Jackson has been cast into the same medieval torture chamber on Capitol Hill, with Democrats once more struggling to shield their witness from being mauled.This time, the male Torquemadas were joined by a female inquisitor, Marsha Blackburn. The Tennessee Republican is all magnolia Southern charm — until she spits venom.“Can you provide a definition for the word woman?” Blackburn asked Judge Jackson, invoking the controversy over a transgender swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania. Blackburn’s question inspired Tucker Carlson to later hold up a graphic of a woman’s reproductive system, along with a silhouette of a woman so shapely that Roger Ailes would have approved.What is a woman? Jackson shows that a woman is someone who stays cool in the face of calumny and is headed for the Supreme Court. And that will be justice for Justice Jackson.A better question might be: What is a senator?Is it a dolt who cares more about boosting unrealistic presidential ambitions with distorted information than making the Senate, for once, look like a dignified body?Feral Republicans took an exemplary record and twisted it to make Jackson look like an enabler of pedophiles. Tom Cotton all but accused her of lying, just as Arlen Specter accused Hill of perjury — based on nothing.Less than a year ago, Lindsey Graham voted to confirm Jackson for the D.C. Court of Appeals, calling her “qualified.” Now he berates her with odd questions and seems to blame her for Brett Kavanaugh’s grilling. If only John McCain could appear to him like Hamlet’s father’s ghost and slap him into shape.Perhaps Joe Biden sees his selection of Judge Jackson as a sort of expiation for his dismal performance as committee chairman for the Hill-Thomas hearings. Biden allowed the Republicans to run wild, and then he shut down the hearings before Hill’s backup witnesses testified. He cleared the path for Clarence Thomas, a liar and sexual harasser, to ascend to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court and impose his far-right views on the country.As Jill Abramson wrote in the Times Opinion section, the court’s 6-3 majority now “seems to be reshaping itself in Justice Thomas’s image.”In a speech at Notre Dame last year, Thomas lamented, “We have lost the capacity, even I think as leaders, to not allow others to manipulate our institutions when we don’t get the outcomes we like.”And yet manipulating institutions is exactly what his wife, Ginni, tried to do. As Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported in a Washington Post-CBS News bombshell, the conservative activist worked frantically to overturn the results of the 2020 election, calling it an “obvious fraud,” as Donald Trump and his allies were vowing to go to her husband’s court to nullify Biden’s win.Ginni Thomas has had a chip on her shoulder since the Hill-Thomas hearings — she shamelessly left Hill a voice message in 2010 asking for an apology — and no doubt she thought if she could help claw back the presidency from Biden, that would be sweet revenge.In a cascade of text messages, she urged Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to get Trump back into the Oval. “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” she pleaded, adding, “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.” Ginni — who attended the Jan. 6 rally before the raid on the Capitol started — urged Meadows to “Release the Kraken.”The Republicans badgering Judge Jackson aren’t asking a single question about the explosive revelations regarding Ginni Thomas — and nor are the rest of their party. Did the justice know what his wife was doing? Was he OK with it? Does he accept that he must recuse himself from cases dealing with Jan. 6 and the election?Apparently not. “Justice Thomas has already participated in two cases related to the 2020 election and its aftermath, despite his wife’s direct involvement in the so-called Stop the Steal efforts,” Jane Mayer reported in The New Yorker.When the court rejected Trump’s request to prevent the Jan. 6 committee from getting his records relating to the attempt to overturn the election results, Thomas was the sole dissenter. Do the records implicate Ginni?Stephen Gillers, a judicial ethicist, told Mayer that it was Clarence Thomas’s duty to know about Ginni’s crusade: “‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ is not an acceptable strategy for the Thomases’ marriage.”Thomas should never have been on the court. Now that we know his wife was plotting the overthrow of the government, he should get off or be thrown off. You can’t administer justice when your spouse is running around strategizing for a coup.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Ginni Thomas Texts Expose Rift in House Jan. 6 Panel

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      There is debate within the committee investigating the assault on the Capitol over whether to seek testimony from the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas about her efforts to overturn the 2020 election.WASHINGTON — Buried in the thousands of documents that Mark Meadows, former President Donald J. Trump’s final White House chief of staff, turned over late last year to the House committee examining the Jan. 6 attack were text messages that presented the panel with a political land mine: what to do about Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas.The messages showed that Ms. Thomas relentlessly urged Mr. Meadows to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which she called a “heist,” and indicated that she reached out to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, about Mr. Trump’s legal efforts to keep power. She even suggested the lawyer who should be put in charge of that effort.The public disclosure of the messages on Thursday focused new attention on one avenue of the investigation and risked creating a rare rift within the committee about how aggressively to pursue it, including whether to seek testimony from Ms. Thomas, who goes by Ginni.In the Thomases, the committee is up against a couple that has deep networks of support across the conservative movement and Washington, including inside the committee. The panel’s Republican vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, has led the charge in holding Mr. Trump to account for his efforts to overturn the election, but has wanted to avoid any aggressive effort that, in her view, could unfairly target Justice Thomas, the senior member of the Supreme Court.So although a debate has broken out inside the committee about summoning Ms. Thomas to testify, the panel at this point has no plans to do so, leaving some Democrats frustrated. That could change, however: On Friday, despite the potential for political backlash, Ms. Cheney indicated she has no objection to the panel asking Ms. Thomas for a voluntary interview.A New York Times Magazine investigation last month examined the political and personal history of Ms. Thomas and her husband. That included her role in efforts to overturn the election from her perch on the nine-member board of CNP Action, a conservative group that helped advance the “Stop the Steal” movement, and in mediating between feuding factions of organizers “so that there wouldn’t be any division around Jan. 6,” as one organizer put it.During that period, the Supreme Court was considering a number of cases related to the election, with Justice Thomas taking positions at times sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s efforts to challenge the outcome.This month, Ms. Thomas acknowledged attending the rally that preceded the violence in an interview with a conservative news outlet, but otherwise downplayed her role. Then came disclosure of the texts to Mr. Meadows, the contents of which were earlier reported by The Washington Post and CBS News.If the committee does not summon Ms. Thomas, some legal analysts said, it runs the risk of appearing to have a double standard. The panel has taken an aggressive posture toward many other potential witnesses, issuing subpoenas for bank and phone records of both high-ranking allies of the former president and low-level aides with only a tangential connection to the events of Jan. 6.“I think it would be a dereliction not to bring her in and talk to her,” said Kimberly Wehle, a University of Baltimore law professor who has closely tracked the committee’s work. “It certainly is inconsistent with their neutral, ‘find the facts where they go’ type of approach to this.”The committee’s light touch with Ms. Thomas to date reflects a number of considerations by both members and investigators, according to people familiar with the inquiry. Some saw the pursuit of Ms. Thomas as a distraction from more important targets. Others worried that pursuing Ms. Thomas could by implication sully the reputation of Justice Thomas, an icon among the Republican base. Still others argued that the panel could not know the full extent of her role without further questioning. And some members of the committee saw the text messages for the first time on Thursday.Text messages show that Ms. Thomas relentlessly urged the president’s chief of staff to overturn the 2020 presidential election.Susan Walsh/Associated PressThe lack of consensus also underscores the extent to which Justice Thomas’s shadow, including his network of supporters and former clerks, looms over various aspects of the investigation. Three of Justice Thomas’s former clerks — a federal judge, a top committee investigator and a key adviser to Mr. Trump — have major roles in the matter.A main strategist in the effort to try to overturn the election, the lawyer John Eastman, was a former clerk of Justice Thomas’s. John Wood, one of the Jan. 6 committee’s top investigators and another former Thomas clerk, is leading the so-called gold team examining Mr. Trump’s inner circle. And a federal judge, Carl J. Nichols, who is hearing cases related to the Capitol riot, is also a former clerk of Justice Thomas’s.This dynamic was on display during a deposition in December of Mr. Eastman, who was subpoenaed by the committee to talk about his role in helping Mr. Trump try to overturn the election. Mr. Wood began the questioning by noting that Mr. Eastman had once served as a clerk to Justice Thomas.“Like you, John,” Mr. Eastman shot back.For at least several weeks, the committee’s senior level has discussed whether to call Ms. Thomas to testify, as well as whether to issue subpoenas for any other communications she may have had with the White House or the president’s legal team about the election, including a message she told Mr. Meadows she sent to Mr. Kushner, according to people with knowledge of the investigation.There are plenty of leads to pursue. The committee could recall Dustin Stockton, a rally organizer who told The Times about a conversation he had with Caroline Wren, a Republican who helped raise money for the Jan. 6 “March for America,” in which she described Ms. Thomas’s peacemaking role. They could also recall Amy Kremer and Jenny Beth Martin, two rally organizers close to Ms. Thomas, to ask about her postelection communications with them.It could subpoena records from not only Ms. Thomas, but also CNP Action, which was deeply involved in the effort to spread falsehoods about the election. Investigators could ask her the name of the friend she was referring to when she wrote back to thank Mr. Meadows, saying: “Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now…I will try to keep holding on.” (Ms. Thomas and her husband have publicly referred to each other as their best friends.) Ultimately, they could ask her whether she had discussed Mr. Trump’s fight to overturn the election with her husband.Ms. Thomas said she attended a rally on Jan. 6 before the pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesJustice Thomas has declined to comment on the matter, through a representative. A lawyer for Ms. Thomas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Privately, some Republicans conceded that Ms. Thomas’s texts to Mr. Meadows were a mistake — particularly ones in which she urged Mr. Meadows to make Sidney Powell, a lawyer who had advocated conspiracy theories about voting machines being hacked, the face of the legal team. Yet the Republicans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they worried about being seen as critical of Ms. Thomas, predicted that if Democrats increased pressure on the Thomases, the right would counter with more calls for investigations of Democrats if Republicans win back the House in the November elections.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Virginia Thomas’ text messages. More

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      Justice Thomas Ruled on Election Cases. Should His Wife’s Texts Have Stopped Him?

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      The nature of the text messages was enough to require recusal, legal experts said. But the Supreme Court has traditionally left such decisions to the discretion of the justice in question.WASHINGTON — The disclosure that Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, had sent a barrage of text messages to the Trump White House urging efforts to overturn the 2020 election brought into sharp focus the conflict of interest her political activism has created — and the lack of a clear-cut remedy.It is one thing, experts in legal ethics said on Friday, for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice to express political views, even ones shot through with wild conspiracy theories. That may not by itself require the justice’s recusal from cases touching on those views.But the text messages from Ms. Thomas, a longtime conservative activist who goes by Ginni, revealed something quite different and deeply troubling, experts said.The messages from Ms. Thomas to Mark Meadows, President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff, sent during and just after the fraught weeks between the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, demonstrated that she was an active participant in shaping the legal effort to overturn the election.“I’m not sure how I would have come out if we just had a lot of texts from her saying that ‘this is terrible,’ said Amanda Frost, a law professor at American University in Washington.“But she wasn’t doing just that,” Professor Frost said. “She was strategizing. She was promoting. She was haranguing.”The texts were among about 9,000 pages of documents that Mr. Meadows turned over to the congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack. Democrats immediately seized on the disclosure to draw attention to the conflicts they said were presented by Ms. Thomas’s political activities and to press Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases concerning the election and its aftermath. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said that Justice Thomas’s “conduct on the Supreme Court looks increasingly corrupt” and that he had been “the lone dissent in a case that could have denied the Jan. 6 committee records pertaining to the same plot his wife supported.”Justice Thomas, Mr. Wyden said, “needs to recuse himself from any case related to the Jan. 6 investigation, and should Donald Trump run again, any case related to the 2024 election.”But Justice Thomas, who was released from the hospital on Friday after being treated for the last week for flulike symptoms, has long been a pillar of the conservative establishment. Republicans, even those who have distanced themselves from Mr. Trump and the more extreme wing of their party, showed no interest in pressuring him to recuse himself.Ms. Thomas’s text messages were heated and forceful, urging Mr. Meadows to pursue baseless legal challenges. “Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,” one said.Ms. Thomas’s activities should have prompted Justice Thomas to disqualify himself from cases related to them, said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University.“He had an obligation not to sit in any case related to the election, the Jan. 6 committee or the Capitol invasion,” he said.Professor Frost agreed that the situation was “an easy case.”“When your spouse is conversing with people who have some control over litigation to challenge an election,” she said, “you shouldn’t be sitting on the Supreme Court deciding that election or any aspect of it.”But Justice Thomas did participate in a ruling in January on an emergency application from Mr. Trump asking the court to block release of White House records concerning the attack on the Capitol. The court rejected the request, in a sharp rebuke to the former president.Only Justice Thomas noted a dissent, giving no reasons.He also participated in the court’s consideration of whether to hear a related appeal, one in which Mr. Meadows filed a friend-of-the-court brief saying that “the outcome of this case will bear directly” on his own efforts to shield records from the House committee investigating the attacks beyond those he had provided.The Supreme Court last month refused to hear the case, without noted dissent. There was no indication that Justice Thomas had recused himself.In December 2020, around the time of the text messages, Justice Thomas participated in a ruling on an audacious lawsuit by Texas asking the court to throw out the election results in four battleground states. The court rejected the request, with Justices Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. issuing a brief statement suggesting the majority had acted too soon in shutting the case down.In February 2021, Justice Thomas addressed election fraud in a dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision to turn away a challenge to Pennsylvania’s voting procedures.Ms. Thomas’s messages urged Mark Meadows, President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff, to pursue baseless legal challenges.Oliver Contreras for The New York Times“We are fortunate that many of the cases we have seen alleged only improper rule changes, not fraud,” he wrote. “But that observation provides only small comfort. An election free from strong evidence of systemic fraud is not alone sufficient for election confidence.”Justice Thomas did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.All federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, are subject to a federal law on recusal. The law says that “any justice, judge or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”Judging by the nature of the text messages and the uproar over them, that provision alone is enough to require Justice Thomas’s recusal, legal experts said.A more specific provision concerning relatives, including spouses, might also apply to his situation. Judges should not participate, the law says, in proceedings in which their spouse has “an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.”Professor Gillers said the word “interest” was the key.“By writing to Meadows, who was chief of staff and active in the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement, she joined the team resisting the results of the election,” Professor Gillers said. “She made herself part of the team and so she has an interest in the decisions of the court that could affect Trump’s goal of reversing the results.”The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Ginni and Clarence Thomas Are Making a Mockery of the Supreme Court

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      What did Justice Clarence Thomas know, and when did he know it?The question usually gets directed at politicians, not judges, but it’s a fair one in light of the revelation on Thursday that Justice Thomas’s wife, Ginni, was working feverishly behind the scenes — and to a far greater degree than she previously admitted — in a high-level effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.As The Washington Post and CBS News first reported, Ms. Thomas, a supremely well-connected right-wing agitator, was in constant communication with the White House in the weeks following the election, strategizing over how to keep Donald Trump in office despite his incontrovertible loss. “Do not concede,” she texted to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, on Nov. 6, the day before the major news networks called the election for Joe Biden. “It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.” (To date, Mr. Trump has not conceded.)In dozens of messages with Mr. Meadows over several weeks, Ms. Thomas raged over baseless allegations of voter fraud and shared unhinged conspiracy theories, including one that the “Biden crime family” was in the process of being arrested and sent to Guantánamo Bay for “ballot fraud.”“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” Ms. Thomas wrote at one point. “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”Ms. Thomas had already acknowledged some involvement in the fight over the 2020 election count, recently confirming that she attended the Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally in Washington, but she said she went home before Mr. Trump spoke to the crowd and before a mob of hundreds stormed the Capitol in a violent attempt to block the certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory. The texts reveal that her efforts to subvert the election were far more serious than we knew.Now recall that in January, the Supreme Court rejected Mr. Trump’s request to block the release of White House records relating to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. Mr. Meadows had submitted a brief in the case supporting Mr. Trump. The court’s ruling came as an unsigned order, with only one noted dissent: from Justice Thomas.Perhaps Justice Thomas was not aware of his wife’s text-message campaign to Mr. Meadows at the time. But it sure makes you wonder, doesn’t it?And that’s precisely the problem: We shouldn’t have to wonder. The Supreme Court is the most powerful judicial body in the country, and yet, as Alexander Hamilton reminded us, it has neither the sword nor the purse as a means to enforce its rulings. It depends instead on the American people’s acceptance of its legitimacy, which is why the justices must make every possible effort to appear fair, unbiased and beyond reproach.That may seem naïve, particularly in the face of the crippling assaults on the court that Mitch McConnell and his Senate Republicans have carried out over the past six years in order to secure a right-wing supermajority that often resembles a judicial policy arm of the Republican Party — starting with their theft of a vacancy that was President Barack Obama’s to fill and continuing through the last-second confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett while millions of voters were already in the process of casting Mr. Trump out of office.And yet the public’s demand for basic fairness and judicial neutrality is not only proper but critical to the court’s integrity, as the justices, whoever nominated them, are well aware. Partly in response to the court’s tanking public-approval ratings, several of them have grown increasingly outspoken in defense of their independence. (Though not all of them.)The most obvious way for justices to demonstrate that independence in practice, of course, is to recuse themselves from any case in which their impartiality might reasonably be questioned. It does not matter whether there is, in fact, a conflict of interest; the mere appearance of bias or conflict should be enough to compel Justice Thomas or any other member of the court to step aside.Many of them have over the years, out of respect for the court as an institution and for the public’s faith in their probity. Just this week, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson vowed that if confirmed she would recuse herself from an upcoming case challenging Harvard’s affirmative-action policies, because of her multiple personal and professional connections to the university. Legal-ethics experts are not even in agreement that her recusal would be necessary, but Judge Jackson is right to err on the side of caution.Justice Thomas has paid lip service to this ideal. “I think the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference,” he said in a speech last year. “That’s a problem. You’re going to jeopardize any faith in the legal institutions.”Bench memo to the justice: You know what jeopardizes public faith in legal institutions? Refusing to recuse yourself from numerous high-profile cases in which your wife has been personally and sometimes financially entangled, as The New Yorker reported in January. Especially when you have emphasized that you and she are melded “into one being.” Or when you have, as The Times Magazine reported last month, appeared together with her for years “at highly political events hosted by advocates hoping to sway the court.”Ms. Thomas’s efforts, and her husband’s refusal to respond appropriately, have been haunting the court for years, but this latest conflagration shouldn’t be a close call. “The texts are the narrowest way of looking at this,” Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor and one of the nation’s foremost legal-ethics experts, told me. “She signed up for Stop the Steal. She was part of the team, and that team had an interest in how the court would rule. That’s all I need to know.” He said he has over the years resisted calling for Justice Thomas’s recusal based on his wife’s actions, “but they’ve really abused that tolerance.”Yes, married people can lead independent professional lives, and it is not a justice’s responsibility to police the actions of his or her spouse. But the brazenness with which the Thomases have flouted the most reasonable expectations of judicial rectitude is without precedent. From the Affordable Care Act to the Trump administration’s Muslim ban to the 2020 election challenges, Ms. Thomas has repeatedly embroiled herself in big-ticket legal issues and with litigants who have wound up before her husband’s court. All the while, he has looked the other way, refusing to recuse himself from any of these cases. For someone whose job is about judging, Justice Thomas has, in this context at least, demonstrated abominably poor judgment.If Justice Thomas were sitting on any other federal court in the country, he would likely have been required by the code of judicial ethics to recuse himself many times over. But the code does not apply to Supreme Court justices, creating a situation in which the highest court in the land is also the most unaccountable.This is not tolerable. For years, Congress has tried in vain to extend the ethics code to the Supreme Court. For the sake of fundamental fairness and consistency, the code must apply to all federal judges; it would at the very least force the hand of those like Justice Thomas who seem unmoved by any higher sense of duty to the institution or to the American people who have agreed to abide by its rulings.The court is in deep trouble these days, pervaded by what Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently called the “stench” of partisanship — a stench arising in no small part from the Thomases’ behavior. It is hard to imagine that the other justices, regardless of their personal politics, aren’t bothered.No one should have to choose between their devotion to their spouse and their duty to the nation. But Justice Thomas has shown himself unwilling or unable to protect what remains of the court’s reputation from the appearance of extreme bias he and his wife have created. He would do the country a service by stepping down and making room for someone who won’t have that problem.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      These Senators Grilling Judge Jackson Have Ambitions Beyond Senate

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      Four of the senators on the panel grilling Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson are known to have dreams beyond the walls of the U.S. Senate.Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a future president, the old saw goes.So as the Senate Judiciary Committee convenes this week to consider the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for a Supreme Court seat, we’ll be watching the panel not just for probing questions about her judicial philosophy but also for clues to 2024.Four Republican senators on the committee have flashed signs of larger aspirations, and they share a lot else in common. All are men who are roughly within a decade of one another in age. All have one or two Ivy League degrees. Each has sought to mold the Republican Party in his own image. And all approach these hearings knowing they are just as much onstage as Jackson is.For the supremely ambitious, a Supreme Court nomination battle is an irresistible opportunity. It’s a chance to build email lists, rustle up campaign cash and impress base voters. Remember how Kamala Harris used the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to preview her 2020 presidential run?It’s still early to be thinking about the 2024 presidential race, but candidates are already engaged in “shadow jockeying,” said Bob Vander Plaats, an influential Iowa conservative. “Everybody’s waiting to see what Trump does.”Even so, Republican activists are looking for a champion, said Rachel Bovard, a senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute. “They want to see that you have a pulse,” she said.But big hearings can be perilous, too. Senators can’t be seen as “playing for the cameras,” Quin Hillyer, a conservative columnist, told us. More and more Republican voters, he said, want “toughness without histrionics.”With that in mind, here are the four Republican senators to watch:Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas is a foreign policy hawk, particularly on China.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesThe hard-linerTom Cotton, 44, of Arkansas has two degrees from Harvard and served in Iraq and Afghanistan as an Army Ranger. He’s been an increasingly frequent visitor to Iowa and New Hampshire of late — telltale signs that he has caught the presidential bug.Cotton is a foreign policy hawk, particularly on China. But he has also staked out hard-right positions on domestic policy, with calls to restrict legal immigration and roll back criminal justice reforms.In a speech this month, Cotton embraced the Republican Party’s “proud, patriotic and populist” direction under Trump. “We’re the party of the common man, the worker, the farmer, the cop on the beat,” he said. But he broke with Trump over the First Step Act, which he blamed for the early release of “child predators, carjackers and gang members.”Senator Ted Cruz of Texas at CPAC in Orlando, Fla., last month.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesThe former Tea PartierTed Cruz, 51, of Texas ran for president once before and might again, his allies say. A graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, Cruz has been a major force in Republican politics since entering the Senate in 2013.He has gone through three main phases during his time in Washington. First he was a Tea Partier known for defying Republican leaders over government spending. Then he was a presidential candidate who came in second to Trump in 2016 by running as a conservative true believer. And now he’s a beard-sporting Trump ally who preaches “America First” dogma with the zeal of a convert.Cruz once took to the national spotlight like a moth to flame. But in recent years, that spotlight has been harsh: His vacation to Cancún during a storm that left millions of Texans without electricity or running water drew withering scorn, and his recent apology to Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, for calling the Jan. 6 rioters “terrorists” was seen as groveling.He has been subdued about Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination, calling for her to be treated with “dignity and decorum.” After meeting her in his office last week, he joked on a podcast that he was “highly suspect” of her — for rejecting his offer of Cuban coffee.Close observers of Cruz say he appears less calculating, more relaxed and more authentically himself than in the past — potentially meaning he has set aside his presidential ambitions or simply that he’s trying out a different approach.“I think Cruz looks at it as, nobody’s going to beat him to the conservative lane,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist. “He may not need to pick every single fight.”Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri also speaking at CPAC last month.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesThe young upstartJosh Hawley, 42, of Missouri, is an evangelical Christian who promotes traditional values. That puts him on a potential collision course with Cruz and with former Vice President Mike Pence, said Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.Hawley has carved out a significant following on the right by going after tech companies for what he calls their alliance with the “radical left.” And though he has said he’s not running for president in 2024, he hasn’t exactly spurned the speculation, either.Hawley is an unapologetic supporter of the Jan. 6 protesters. And though he condemned the violence at the Capitol as “horrific,” his campaign has put a photo of himself hailing the Jan. 6 crowd on mugs (“the perfect way to enjoy Coffee, Tea, or Liberal Tears!”). He has raised millions by complaining that Democrats are attempting to “cancel” him. On March 1, he led his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference by noting his objection to the certification of the Electoral College votes. “I wasn’t backing down then; I haven’t changed my mind now,” he said to raucous applause.Allies say that Hawley, a Yale Law School graduate who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, sees the Supreme Court as his domain. Of the four senators, he’s the only one who has bucked the wishes of Senate Republican leaders by forcefully attacking Jackson’s record. Fact-checkers have found his claims wanting, and the White House called them “toxic.” He likely won’t be able to stop her confirmation. But the fact that Hawley is fighting Jackson’s nomination at all could endear him to Republicans who want a brawler in their corner.“His goal appears to be to make Ted Cruz look like the statesman of the group,” said Terry Sullivan, a Republican political consultant.Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesThe prairie philosopherBen Sasse, 50, of Nebraska is a former university president who has mapped out his own path as a sporadic Trump critic. Sasse has an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a doctorate from Yale. But unlike the other senators, he embraces and even flaunts his intellectual roots.Sasse wrote his dissertation about “culture-warring entrepreneurs” who seized on the debate over prayer in schools to power Ronald Reagan’s political ascent — an early expression of Sasse’s pox-on-both-houses approach to politics. A lone wolf in the Senate, Sasse often positions himself above what he derides as the “tribal” politics of Washington. In noting Jackson’s nomination, for instance, he said the Judiciary Committee has been “a place of grandstanding and rabid partisanship.”“Grandstanding” is a word Sasse employs frequently — as when he tangled last week on the Senate floor with Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat of Connecticut, over aid to Ukraine. The skirmish caught the eye of conservative pundits, who saw it as a sign that Sasse is seeking attention.But for what? If there’s a lane for Sasse in a coming presidential election, it’s likely as a Never Trumper or an independent. He voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment, a no-no for Republican base voters.What to read The ex-wife of Eric Greitens, a leading Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Missouri, accused him in court documents of knocking her down and confiscating her keys, phone and wallet during an argument in 2018.Republicans are relitigating the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation battle, Glenn Thrush writes, even as they prepare to question Jackson in confirmation hearings that began with opening statements on Monday.Erica L. Green looked back at Jackson’s years at Harvard University, where the future judge learned to navigate “one of the most elite and white institutions in the country.”FrameworkIn North Carolina, Pat McCrory, the Republican Senate candidate, released an ad accusing his opponent Ted Budd of being soft on Russia. via YouTubeRussia becomes a campaign liabilityTo understand just how rapidly the politics of foreign policy are shifting on the right, look no farther than North Carolina — where being associated with Donald Trump’s views on Russia is now a political problem.The state is electing a replacement this year for Senator Richard Burr, who is retiring. On the Republican side, the May 17 primary is largely a two-way contest between Pat McCrory, a former governor, and Representative Ted Budd, a far-right lawmaker who was endorsed by Trump.As the war in Ukraine broke out, McCrory released an ad accusing Budd of being soft on Russia. The ad shows a clip of Budd calling Vladimir Putin “intelligent” — much as Trump praised the Kremlin leader’s aggression as “genius.”“While Ukrainians bled and died,” a narrator scolds, “Congressman Budd excused their killer.”In a sign that McCrory’s attack might be landing, Budd’s allies responded with a response ad calling it “a low down, dirty hit job.” The ad quotes Budd as saying, “Putin is evil. He’s an international thug,” and emphasizes his support for Ukraine.Each side has spent only a few thousand dollars on the ads so far, indicating the goal was to generate free media coverage and not to reach voters directly.But the exchange underscores how being perceived as an apologist for Putin is suddenly a bad look in a Republican primary thanks to Volodymyr Zelensky, the charismatic president of Ukraine. By presenting an alternate model of strength and machismo, said Rick Tyler, a former Cruz aide, “Zelensky has changed the whole dynamic of the Republican Party.” Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— Blake & LeahIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      The Supreme Court Did the Right Thing. I’m Still Worried.

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      State legislatures are, and always have been, creatures of state constitutions, bound by the terms of those constitutions and subject to the judgments of state courts.This has important implications for the nature of state legislative power. The federal Constitution may give state legislatures the power to allocate electoral votes and regulate congressional elections, but that power is subject to the limits imposed by state constitutions.Imagine what could happen if that were not the case. Imagine, instead, that state legislatures had plenary power over federal elections, which would allow them to overrule state courts, ignore a governor’s veto and even nullify an act of Congress. State legislatures would, in essence, be sovereign, with unchecked power over the fundamental political rights of those citizens who lived within their borders.This change would both unravel and turn the clock back on our constitutional order, with states acting more like the quasi-independent entities they were before the Civil War and less as the subordinate units of a national polity.But that, apparently, is what some Republicans want.Recently, Republicans in North Carolina and Pennsylvania asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block congressional maps drawn by their state courts. Their argument was based on a revolutionary doctrine that would tee up this fundamental change to the American political system.The challenges, which failed, stemmed from the effort to gerrymander Democrats out of as much power as possible. In North Carolina, the proposed gerrymander was so egregious that the state Supreme Court ruled that it was in violation of the state’s constitution. The court drew a new map to rectify the problem. In Pennsylvania, likewise, state courts drew a new congressional map after Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, vetoed the heavily gerrymandered map produced by the Republican-led legislature.The North Carolina Supreme Court’s ruling and the Pennsylvania governor’s veto should have been the last word. Both were acting in accordance with their state constitutions, which bind and structure the actions of the state legislatures in question. For Republicans, however, those checks on their power are illegitimate. Their argument, in brief, is that neither state courts nor elected executives have the right to interfere with or challenge the power of state legislatures as it relates to the regulation of federal elections.Nestled at the heart of the Republican argument is a breathtaking claim about the nature of state legislative power. Called the “independent state legislature” doctrine, it holds that Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution — which states that “the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators” — gives state legislatures total power to write rules for congressional elections and direct the appointment of presidential electors, unbound by state constitutions and free from the scrutiny of state courts.This isn’t a new theory, exactly. In his concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore in 2000 — joined by justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — Chief Justice William Rehnquist argued that under Article II, any “significant departure from the legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors presents a federal constitutional question.” Meaning, in short, that a state court could go beyond its authority in adjudicating state election law. The other two Republican-appointed justices on the court, Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor, declined to join Rehnquist’s concurrence, even as they voted to stop the counting and give George W. Bush the win.For 20 years, the doctrine lay dormant. It was resurrected, in 2020, by allies of Donald Trump, who needed some constitutional pretense for their attempt to overturn his defeat. Before the election, a number of state courts had ordered state governments to make accommodations for the pandemic, citing state constitutions. Elsewhere, governors, secretaries of state and state boards of election took matters into their own hands, bypassing the legislature (and using their own authority under the law) to accommodate voters. When, after the election, the Trump campaign sued either to throw out ballots or to invalidate results, its lawyers offered the “independent state legislature” doctrine as justification. So too did supporters of Trump who wanted Republican legislatures to void election results and choose electors who would give the president a second term.The basic problem with this doctrine is that it’s bunk. “The text of the Elections and Electors clauses is silent as to the role of state constitutions, but the subsequent history is anything but,” the legal scholar Michael Weingartner writes in a draft article on the theory of independent state legislatures. “Since the Founding, state constitutions have both directly regulated federal elections and constrained state legislatures’ exercise of their authority under the Clauses.” What’s more, over the past century, “nearly every election-related state constitutional provision was either approved and presented to voters by state legislatures or placed on the ballot and enacted by voters directly.” Even if the federal Constitution is vague on the full scope of state legislative power to regulate elections, both history and practice have fixed the meaning of the relevant clauses in favor of constraint. State constitutions (and state courts) do in fact regulate state legislatures as it relates to election law.Some proponents of the “independent state legislature” doctrine argue that theirs represents the original understanding of the Elections and Electors clauses in the Constitution. Another researcher, Hayward H. Smith, says otherwise. “The history demonstrates beyond cavil that the founding generation understood that ‘legislatures’ would operate as normal legislatures, not independent legislatures, with respect to both procedure and substance,” he writes. In fact, he notes, a review of every state constitution adopted in the 19th century reveals “that both explicit and nonexplicit limitations on ‘legislatures’ were widespread before, during, and after the Civil War.”There’s simply no basis for the claim that the Constitution grants state legislatures this kind of unaccountable power over the conduct of federal elections. It runs counter to the basic idea behind the American political system, that is, the sharing and separation of power among competing and overlapping institutions. It defeats the purpose of this delicate balance to give state legislatures plenary power over federal elections (to say nothing of how it is incongruent with the elite frustration over the scope of states’ power that gave rise to the Constitution in the first place).Thankfully, the Supreme Court rejected the challenge from Republicans in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Still, there may be four votes for the theory of the “independent state legislature.” In a 2020 dissent from the majority on the question of whether Pennsylvania should count certain mail-in ballots, Justices Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh appeared sympathetic to the doctrine. Neil Gorsuch endorsed it outright, writing that “The Constitution provides that state legislatures — not federal judges, not state judges, not state governors, not other state officials — bear primary responsibility for setting election rules.”Dissenting from the court’s decision in the North Carolina case, Alito called the question of state legislative power an issue of “great national importance,” a clear signal that he is open to the arguments of Republican legislators. Kavanaugh concurred. “I agree with Justice Alito that the underlying Elections Clause question raised in the emergency application is important, and that both sides have advanced serious arguments on the merits. The issue is almost certain to keep arising until the Court definitively resolves it.”It is unclear where the newest justice, the Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett, stands on the doctrine, although she appears to have voted with the majority in these particular cases.It is a good thing that the Supreme Court has decided not to throw out more than 230 years of precedent and practice for the sake of a bizarre and anti-democratic reading of the Constitution. But previous Supreme Courts have endorsed bizarre and anti-democratic readings of the Constitution — the Constitution itself has an uneasy relationship with American democracy — and this court, especially, has been more hostile than friendly to the more expansive view of our democratic rights.We can breathe a sigh of relief, for now, but when it comes to the future of the “independent state legislature” doctrine, the worst may still be on the horizon.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Supreme Court Allows Court-Imposed Voting Maps in North Carolina and Pennsylvania

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      State courts had ruled that earlier maps for congressional elections had been warped by partisan gerrymandering. Democrats stand to benefit from the justices’ decision.The Supreme Court on Monday allowed congressional maps that had been approved by state courts in North Carolina and Pennsylvania to stand, giving Democrats an advantage in this year’s election in two key states.In issuing the orders, the Supreme Court rejected requests by Republicans to restore maps approved by G.O.P.-controlled state legislatures. Those district lines were thrown out and replaced by courts in both states after challenges by Democrats.Under the new court-imposed maps in both states, Democrats are likely to gain more seats than they would have under the legislature-approved versions.But in the North Carolina case, there were signs that at least four of the court’s more conservative justices could later rule that state courts are powerless to change congressional maps adopted by state legislatures.Such a ruling would fundamentally alter how congressional elections are conducted and amplify partisan gerrymandering, allowing the party that controls the legislature to draw voting districts favoring its candidates.But that will not happen before this fall’s election.Stanton Jones, a lawyer for some of the plaintiffs who had challenged the North Carolina map, said the Supreme Court’s order meant that “North Carolina voters will now be able to vote in free and fair congressional elections this year.”He said that for now, the order signaled an end to “a decade of extreme Republican gerrymanders.”Still, the court’s three most conservative members — Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch — said they would have blocked the North Carolina map because it was likely that the State Supreme Court had violated the Constitution in overriding the State Legislature.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.New York: Democrats’ aggressive reconfiguration of the state’s congressional map is one of the most consequential in the nation.Legal Battles: The U.S. Supreme Court let stand voting maps that had been approved by state courts in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, giving Democrats a temporary win.“There must be some limit on the authority of state courts to countermand actions taken by state legislatures when they are prescribing rules for the conduct of federal elections,” Justice Alito wrote.Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh filed a short concurring opinion agreeing that the question posed by the case was a substantial one. But he said the court should address it in the ordinary course rather than in response to an emergency application.Taken together, the two opinions suggested that there are four justices ready to add a case on the question to the court’s docket when it is next presented in a petition seeking the court’s review rather than on what critics call the court’s shadow docket. It takes four votes to grant such review.But it takes five votes to prevail. The swing vote would almost certainly belong to Justice Amy Coney Barrett.In a second order in the Pennsylvania case, the court provisionally turned down a similar application on technical grounds without noted dissent.The North Carolina Supreme Court had rejected a map drawn by Republican lawmakers that effectively gave their party at least 10 of the state’s 14 House seats, notwithstanding that voters statewide are roughly equally divided between the two parties.A three-judge panel of the state Superior Court in Raleigh instead adopted a new map drawn by a nonpartisan panel of redistricting experts that appeared to split North Carolina’s congressional districts roughly equally between Republicans and Democrats. It gave each party six relatively safe House seats and made the other two competitive.After the State Supreme Court refused to block that ruling, Republican state officials asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in.In the Pennsylvania case, the State Supreme Court adopted a map that appears to give Republicans nine fairly safe seats and Democrats eight, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. Each party currently holds nine House seats, but Pennsylvania will lose a seat next year because of reapportionment after the 2020 census.Voters and a Republican candidate for the House sued state officials in federal court to challenge the new map. When they did not receive immediate relief, they asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.Both emergency applications relied on the Elections Clause of the Constitution, which says “the times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.” That meant, the challengers argued, that the state legislature has sole responsibility for drawing congressional districts and that state courts have no role to play.“The question presented here,” North Carolina Republicans wrote in their application, “goes to the very core of this nation’s democratic republic: what entity has the constitutional authority to set the rules of the road for federal elections.”How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More