Clarence Thomas Leads All Other Justices In Grifting Sweepstakes By A F**kload
Winner and still champion!
On this week’s edition of “Hoarders: Supreme Court,” we take a look at Justice Clarence Thomas, who has spent 30 years amassing wealthy friends and unreported gifts at a level that might have had King Solomon hollering, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, how about we cool it with the tribute for a while, my palace only has but so many rooms!”
We have been writing about Thomas and his penchant for letting the filthy rich gift him stuff that he then does not report on his financial disclosure forms, thus violating all sorts of ethics rules and common sense, for well over a year. But it was tough quantifying all the graft. Math was always our worst subject, and that was when we were young and had not yet pickled our brain in cheap beer and Makers Mark.
Luckily the folks at Fix the Court have put together numbers and estimated value of all the gifts given to all Supreme Court justices over the last 20 years, both reported and unreported to the Federal Trade Commission. Unsurprisingly, Clarence Thomas tops the list by, to put it delicately, a metric fuck-ton:
Of the $6,592,657 of gifts and “likely” gifts identified by FTC, a WHOPPING $5,879,796 of them went to Clarence Thomas.
Holy crap!!!!!!! and HOLY CRAP!!!!!! and !!!!!!!!!!!!
And this report only goes back over the last 20 years. Add in any gifts Thomas has received since his confirmation in 1991, and that total presumably would jump.
So maybe his first decade on the bench was not bad graft-wise for a guy who was making $173,000 a year in salary when he first joined the Court, we can’t say. But what we can say for sure is that the next two decades were stunningly lucrative for old Clarence and his insane coup-plotter of a wife.
We doubt it is a coincidence that the graft dramatically increased after two events: when Thomas helped put George W. Bush on the bench in 2000, which eventually got his wealthy patrons some huge tax cuts, and when he started complaining to conservative congressmen that his salary wasn’t worth it, which scared his benefactors into thinking he might jump to private practice. So they initiated Operation Kick Up a Taste to Clarence to keep him happy and on the Supreme Court, where he could rule in ways beneficial to them.
Hating your country pays really well! We think Benedict Arnold said that. Or possibly Roger Taney.
For comparison, the next-highest gift number by dollar value for a SCOTUS justice is Antonin Scalia, who accepted $175,861 in gifts since 2004. Though to be fair, he has been dead for nearly half that time. Maybe he would have grabbed another $6 million or so for himself in the last eight years, we’ll never know.
Someone put these dollar amounts in handy chart form for all of our entertainment:
Or, if you prefer to use pie charts so you can see just how large a percentage of dessert Clarence Thomas is hogging, Quinta Jurecic of Above the Law made this:
And Fix the Court says this is likely an undercount, as the group is mostly relying on reporting by ProPublica and others to try and put together a comprehensive list of all the gifts his wealthy buddies gave Thomas that he did not report on his disclosure forms. It is entirely possible — likely, even — that even with all the reporters who have been digging into this story, there are still some trips on private jets to exclusive resorts that have not yet surfaced.
Clarence Thomas has always wanted to be filthy rich. Part of his origin story is that he was unable to land a job with any big law firms when he graduated from Yale Law School, and so had to settle for moving to Washington DC and becoming a civil bureaucrat. The Supreme Court, it turns out, was sort of a back-up career. It’s a bit like applying to all the PAC-12 state universities while making Harvard your safety school.
As of Friday morning, we have not seen any reaction to this story from Thomas’s usual defenders. This can be interpreted as a) they are all too busy, b) they are all off on luxury vacations without cellphone service, or c) they are all dead. We were going to add d) some semblance of shame finally caught up with them, but ha ha ha, there is no way that is ever going to happen.
Shoot, Harlan Crow is probably flying the Thomases off to the Seychelles right now on an all-expenses-paid trip, where they can recover from this latest revelation of the extent of Clarence’s unbounded and unparalleled grubbiness.
Wonkette does not use the support of our generous readers to rent private jets and fly off to the Seychelles. Yet.
Rep. Byron Donalds meant to say that Black families were better off under HARLAN, not Jim, Crow, and specifically the Thomases were better off.
Crook, liar, con man, not even a good judge. I believed Anita Hill. He should never have been appointed.