Pelosi on Whether Clarence Thomas Should Recuse Himself or Resign: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday sidestepped a question asking if she believes Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should resign in light of the damning reports about his wife’s efforts to have the 2020 presidential election overturned.
At her weekly Capitol press conference, the House Democratic leader responded to a question about Thomas resigning by telling reporters that he should never been been confirmed in the first place. “I’m not going to go to that,” she added on his potential resignation.
Pelosi only managed to call for the Supreme Court to “at least have a code of ethics,” citing the For the People Act, which passed the House this month.
“People say, ‘Well, it’s a personal decision of a judge whether he should recuse himself,’” she added. “Well, if your wife is an admitted and proud contributor to a coup of our country, maybe you should weigh that in your ethical standards.”
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One of the “people” Pelosi says talk about how it’s the personal decision of a judge whether they should recuse themselves is Pelosi. “It’s up to an individual justice to decide to recuse himself if his wife is participating in a coup,” she said during a meeting with Democrats earlier this week.
This is certainly true, but there’s nothing precluding the top Democrat in the House of Representatives from explicitly calling for Thomas to recuse himself (rather than just suggesting it), or to resign as a result of his wife’s efforts to have the election results overturned at the same time Thomas was ruling on election-related cases.
Chuch Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, called for Thomas to recuse him on Tuesday. “I do think he should recuse himself,” he told reporters. “The information we know right now raises serious questions about how close Justice Thomas and his wife were to the planning and execution of the insurrection.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), meanwhile, has called for him to resign. “If not, his failure to disclose income from right-wing organizations, recuse himself from matters involving his wife, and his vote to block the Jan 6th commission from key information must be investigated and could serve as grounds for impeachment,” she wrote on Tuesday.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) last week called for his impeachment outright.
They aren’t alone. In a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts, two dozen other Democrats, including ten senators, not only called for Thomas’ recusal, but demanded that he “immediately issue a written explanation for his failure to recuse himself in prior Supreme Court cases involving efforts to overturn the 2020 election or the January 6th attack on the Capitol.” (Thomas was the sole dissenting vote when the court rejected Donald Trump’s claims of executive privilege to avoid handing over documents to the House Jan. 6 committee.)
“We request that Chief Justice Roberts commit no later than April 28, 2022 to creating a binding Code of Conduct for the Supreme Court — the only court in the country not currently subject to a judicial code of ethics,” the members added.
Republicans, meanwhile, don’t really care about any of this.
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