Democrats Say Clarence Thomas Should Recuse Himself From Future Trump, Jan. 6 Cases

Outrage is beginning to mount among Congressional Democrats over revelations that the wife of United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was urging the White House to do more to President Joe Biden’s victory in November 2020.

On Friday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) called on Thomas to recuse himself from any future cases related to either former President Donald Trump or cases stemming from investigations into the Jan. 6 Capitol Riot. Doing so, Wyden says, would protect the integrity of the Supreme Court from any appearance of bias.

“Judges are obligated to recuse themselves when their participation in a case would create even the appearance of a conflict of interest. A person with an ounce of commonsense could see that bar is met here," Wyden said in a statement.

Wyden pointed to Thomas’ lone dissenting opinion in a case related to Congress' access to White House records from the day of the Capitol Riot. On Jan. 19, every justice voted against Trump's request to deny the committee access to the records, but Thomas provided no detailed reasoning for his dissent.

Wyden’s call for Thomas’ recusal comes a day after the Washington Post and CBS News published 29 texts from Ginni Thomas to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows urging him to fight harder to overturn Biden’s victory over Trump in the November 2020 presidential election.

“H​​elp This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!... You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden, and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,” read one of her texts on Nov. 10.

Thomas’ activism for conservative political causes has sparked questions about how it may affect cases that reach her husband before the Supreme Court. But legal scholars who spoke to the Washington Post said that this would be difficult to push because few precedents exist of similar appearances of conflict of interest for a Supreme Court justice.

The controversy surrounding Thomas also coincides with the confirmation hearings for Biden’s first nominee to the Supreme Court Ketanji Jackson Brown to fill the seat of retiring Justice Stephen Breyer.

Brown’s hearings have featured accusations by Senate Republicans that she may be biased on future cases such as one tied to affirmative action at her alma mater, Harvard University, which she agreed to do. Critics seized on these attacks to question Republicans for not applying similar scrutiny to Thomas, who is the most senior judge on the conservative-leaning court.

"The people loudest calling for Ketanji Brown Jackson to recuse from a case about affirmative action at Harvard are awfully silent about Clarence Thomas voting to block investigators from seeing his wife's attempt to overthrow the government," the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) tweeted on Friday.