The Patriot Post® · Republicans Stymie Dems' Crusade Against Justices
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has long been a target of Democrats going all the way back to his 1991 nomination, which they tried to derail with their Anita Hill smear campaign. Thomas famously decried it as a “high-tech lynching.”
Ever since, Thomas has proven himself to be one of the most constitutionally faithful justices on the bench, and thus he has been a veritable thorn in the side of the Democrats’ radical political agenda.
And with the current makeup of the Supreme Court being 6-3 (mostly) conservative, Democrats have been seeking a way to somehow tilt the Court back toward their activist agenda. Recall that Joe Biden initially dismissed packing the Court but later advocated the creation of a commission to study the potential ramifications of doing so. Unsurprisingly, the commission came back months later, ultimately taking “no position” on the issue. Biden backed off — for now.
However, following the Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, once again the Democrats railed against the Court, ironically charging it with being a politically motivated body. Democrats have looked for a way to discredit the Court itself, and more specifically conservative justices like Thomas.
Coming to their aid is the media outfit ProPublica, which deceptively bills itself as a “non-partisan investigative journalism organization.” It is, however, primarily funded by Democrats and just happens to attack Republicans at a significantly higher rate than Democrats. After digging into ProPublica news coverage, the conservative group Restoration of America PAC recently found some bias: “Of the 716 articles reviewed [from 2022 to 2023], 242 were politically slanted, with a large disparity between anti-liberal and anti-leftist pieces. In total, 232 were anti-conservative and 10 were anti-left.” Not very balanced or “nonpartisan.”
In truth, ProPublica is nothing other than a propaganda arm of the Democrat Party hiding under the guise of independent journalism.
It was ProPublica that started reporting on the supposed ethics violations of Justice Thomas, claiming that he had received lavish gifts and trips from conservative billionaires. It was a blatant smear campaign, eerily similar to that “high-tech lynching” Democrats tried during his nomination.
As Thomas Jipping, senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, observed regarding the story, “Justice Thomas’ critics cannot convince the public that his approach to judging or his individual decisions are legally incorrect, so they and their media enablers drop innuendos and incomplete information, hoping … that uninformed people will assume the worst.”
But of course, that reality doesn’t matter to the Democrats. The story’s existence was enough for Democrats like Senator Dick Durbin to call for an investigation and the supposed need for Congress to hold members of the Court accountable.
Senate Democrats sought to pile on to their bogus innuendoes of “ethics violations” by insisting on launching an investigation and demanding that wealthy conservative friends of Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito turn over information to the Judiciary Committee. To ratchet up the charade, Democrats threatened to subpoena both Leonard Leo, co-chairman of The Federalist Society, and Harlan Crow, a real estate developer with whom Thomas has had a long friendship.
Well, Republicans called their bluff by filing 88 amendments and effectively warning that should the committee go through with its subpoenas, they would block the effort when it went to the full Senate.
Lo and behold, Durbin pulled the subpoena vote for now, stating that the committee “didn’t have time,” but he promised that the Democrats are “still united” on planning to issue subpoenas. We’ll see.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) did issue an ominous warning: “Once you open this door, it’s hard to close.” Indeed.