Mark Watson

Revelations about Virginia Thomas’s audacity of openly expressing her political opinions will likely lead to a fever pitched demand from the left that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas either resign or recuse himself from any deliberations and votes on First Amendment issues coming before the Court.

Shut up, woman.

Complaints that Mrs. Thomas’s high profile would create conflicts of interest for the justice have been voiced on CNN, NPR and the Washington Post.

Of all the attacks, leave it to a far left radio talk show host to find the gutter faster than most.

Host Mike Malloy called Justice Thomas a “Nazi” and a “house negro”. Malloy charged that Justice Thomas has never even written a majority opinion since ascending to the high court.

Given Malloy’s penchant for spewing forth baseless allegations and smears, it isn’t surprising to learn that Thomas has written well over 100 majority opinions. Any bets on how many Supreme Court opinions Malloy has ever read in his life?

President Obama openly mischaracterized the Supreme Court’s decision striking down portions of McCain-Feingold during his State of the Union address, and scolded the justices to their faces. His criticism was raucously approved by Democratic lawmakers.

Now a justice’s wife is in some crosshairs.

What is Virginia Thomas’s sin?

Virginia Thomas organized a nonprofit lobbying group in January called Liberty Central, Inc. A quick visit to its web site reveals Thomas’s conservative beliefs. The Liberty Central website promises “to preserve freedom and reaffirm the core founding principles…in the fight for liberty and against the liberal Washington agenda.”

Critics complain that a wife of a Supreme Court justice actively engaged in partisan political activity somehow violates judicial impartiality.

George Washington University constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley described Thomas’s actions on MSNBC’s Countdown show as follows: “It’s, in a word, injudicious,”

“The fact that this is news is an example of the self-restraint used by most spouses previously,” Turley said.

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While the law professor acknowledged that neither Justice Thomas nor his wife is violating any ethics law, he called Mrs. Thomas’s actions rather unseemly and predicted that they will raise questions about the Court’s impartiality.

Judicial canons call for judges to refrain from political activity. Judicial spouses are not even mentioned in any judicial limitations.

Although Thomas began her conservative site in January, it only came to light over the weekend.

The justice’s wife has praised Tea Party activists. She told the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year, “I adore all the new citizen patriots who are rising up across this country.”

With Thomas’s past political involvement, it is curious that her latest actions have brought so much media attention. She’s a past staff member of former Congressman Dick Armey (R-Texas).
Thomas has previously worked with the Heritage Foundation and, while there in 2000, identified possible staff members for a prospective George W. Bush Administration.

Thomas became an administrator of Hillsdale College in 2008.

When Clarence Thomas was undergoing confirmation in 1991 as a Supreme Court justice, Virginia Thomas received special notice in a piece in the Washington Post titled “Who’s afraid of Virginia Thomas?”, in which the writer suggested that the hard-working, Omaha-born lawyer earned critics because of her strong opinions on issues that might come before her husband if he were confirmed.

Such strong opinions, it was suggested, provided “further grounds for opposing him.”

The writer also suggested that even Mrs. Thomas’s whiteness revealed much about the potential justice’s character.

With her husband firmly entrenched on the Supreme Court as a reliable voice of conservatism, Mrs. Thomas’s activism will surely gear up criticism, and ugly name-calling, of Justice Thomas.

In the years since Justice Thomas was confirmed, Mrs. Thomas has never shied away from voicing her political opinions. Her husband continues to be treated by the left as a mere pawn of extreme conservative whites.

Were Thomas a reliable pawn of extreme liberal whites, he would be praised and his wife lionized by the left.

It raises the question: Are the president’s State of the Union attack on the Court, along with the attack on Mrs. Thomas, opening salvos in a battle to undermine the authority of the Court?

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