Here’s Your One Chance, Clarence And Ginni Thomas, Don’t Let All These Billionaires Down
Here’s Your One Chance, Clarence And Ginni Thomas, Don’t Let All These Billionaires Down
A lot of things happened in the year 2000.
As we all know, Clarence Thomas is an extremely principled man who is honored to be here on this Supreme Court, just cold hurling judicial pubes at everybody’s Cokes.
It appears, though, according to new reporting from ProPublica, that there has long been a cost associated with keeping him there. And no, that cost is not his salary. His salary isn’t enough. He didn’t come from money, and his seditionist wife was never important enough to bring home the bacon on her own merit, we guess, so a number of right-wing billionaires — oh, Clarence Thomas’s billionaires! — have just supplemented his pauper’s salary with baubles and trinkets and rides on yachts and probably Ginni Thomas’s entire career.
Back in 2000, Thomas only made $173,600 per year, which was a halfway decent salary, but not particularly fancy, certainly not by DC standards. (SCOTUS salaries still aren’t anything approaching exciting compared to the private sector.) But he was just spending and spending and spending. Lots of borrowing throughout the 1990s. A $522,000 house he and Ginni only put down $8,000 on. He and Ginni were raising his grandnephew now, and they had just borrowed $267,000 from a buddy of theirs to buy an RV, so they could tour all the Walmart parking lots.
The ProPublica story begins: “In early January 2000, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was at a five-star beach resort in Sea Island, Georgia, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.”
But listen, it’s not like he and Ginni were just on the beach at the five-star resort stuffing bon-bons in each other’s Speedos. He was there for work, giving a speech to Republicans. (He didn’t report that one on his financial disclosures, what a Clumsy Clarence.) And while flying home, ProPublica says, he bitched and moaned the entire time to a Republican congressman — former Rep. Cliff Stearns, turns out — about how he didn’t make enough money.
Congress should give Supreme Court justices a pay raise, Thomas told him. If lawmakers didn’t act, “one or more justices will leave soon” — maybe in the next year.
At the time, Thomas’ salary was $173,600, equivalent to over $300,000 today. But he was one of the least wealthy members of the court, and on multiple occasions in that period, he pushed for ways to make more money. In other private conversations, Thomas repeatedly talked about removing a ban on justices giving paid speeches.
Apparently Thomas was talking about this a lot around that time, how if they didn’t figure out a way for him to have many beaucoups more dollars, he might just have to quit.
But he never quit, blessings and hallelujahs, because all these conservative billionaires started lavishing him and his wife with the timeliest of gifts, and they all lived happily ever after!
Now, is correlation equal to causation? That is, did the billionaires and Clarence have a specific secret arrangement? Dunno. Just like we dunno if there was any specificity as to why suddenly Ginni Thomas was in high demand in conservative power circles, when there’s scant evidence she’s even the first person you’d ask to organize a neighborhood Amway presentation.
All these things just happened somehow and for some reason. God’s plan, we bet!
Thomas accepted a stream of gifts from friends and acquaintances that appears to be unparalleled in the modern history of the Supreme Court. Some defrayed living expenses large and small — private school tuition, vehicle batteries, tires. Other gifts from a coterie of ultrarich men supplemented his lifestyle, such as free international vacations on the private jet and superyacht of Dallas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow.
Precisely what led so many people to offer Thomas money and other gifts remains an open question. There’s no evidence the justice ever raised the specter of resigning with Crow or his other wealthy benefactors.
Yes it is a mystery why all these Republican billionaires would be interested in buying Supreme Court justices. Allegedly.
ProPublica says that when Thomas started whining on that plane to Cliff Stearns, it “set off a flurry” all over DC. “We wanted to make sure he felt comfortable in his job and he was being paid properly,” said Stearns recently, and it sounds like he worked hard on the issue.
L. Ralph Mecham, a high-up dude on the business side of the Court, worked on the issue, which made it all the way to Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and Mecham openly worried Democrats in Congress maybe wouldn’t support raising SCOTUS salaries if it was viewed as only a strategy to keep Thomas and Antonin Scalia from resigning. (Scalia was also a pauper, whereas lib justices like Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were the king and queen of France, respectively.)
Lobbyists were involved. Mitch McConnell tried to make a thing happen. But those salaries never did get raised, beyond inflation/cost of living.
But it was a whole thing in 2000, Clarence Thomas just bitching to the whole town about how he didn’t have enough money. Some of ProPublica’s sources who know him don’t think Clarence Thomas really was going to quit, but just was pretending because he wanted money.
We guess it worked, just not in the legislative way.
Because in 2003 he got a $1.5 million book advance and for some reason the Heritage Foundation started giving Ginni Thomas six figures for her expertise in (???) and rides on PRIVATE JETS! and somebody randomly gave him $5,000 for tuition for his grandnephew and dang, that’s before Harlan Crow started paying hundreds of thousands of tuition for the kid and in 2019 Clarence and Ginni got to go to Indonesia on Harlan’s yacht and and they flew there on a JET! and one day the loan for Clarence’s Walmart-visitin’ RV just went away somehow, it was a mystery, and it wasn’t long after that benevolent man took Clarence and Ginni Thomas in off the street, and one week later they were pourin’ his tea in a five-room hotel suite (yes they were), and they charmed a king, a congressman and an occasional aristocrat, and then they got them a Georgia mansion and an elegant New York townhouse flat, and they ain’t done bad.
Now in this world, there's a lot of self-righteous hypocrites that would call Clarence and Ginni Thomas bad.
Fuck you, they don’t care what you think.
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I am not going to justify anything that Clarence Thomas did. Or rather, what the "new friends" of Clarence Thomas gave him after he made these comments. However. Regarding this comment: "he was one of the least wealthy members of the court". I will note that he was the only Black person on the Supreme Court at that time.
A couple years ago I attended a presentation by the author of this book: "The Black Tax" by Shawn Rochester. (Wonkette link) https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+black+tax+book+by+shawn+rochester&crid=P9BMU3FXEEUM&sprefix=the+black+tax+book%2Caps%2C112&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_1_18
The author outlined all the ways that policies against the Black race cost black folks money over the last 400 years, and thus the ability to accumulate wealth. Even as a person whose (white) ancestors immigrated in the late 19th and early 20th century, we had such a leg up over Black families that had been in America for generations if not centuries.
Just something that kicks around in my brain at random times.
I make significantly less than Clarence, and if my financial woes get even half as deep as his were I'll lose my job and ability to work in the entire industry I'm in. I don't understand why a Supreme Court justice isn't held to the same standard as an average zhlub.