WASHINGTON—A MoveOn.org petition to impeach Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for ethics violations and for refusal to bow out—recuse himself—from cases involving Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has garnered almost 1.4 million signatures.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has filed her own articles of impeachment against both Justice Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito.
The anti-Thomas petition now has 1,383,689 signatures. But it’s unlikely to make a dent on the House Republican majority. Under the Constitution, the House impeaches top federal officeholders by a simple majority, but the Senate then tries them and needs a two-thirds vote for conviction. In two impeachment trials of Trump for his actions during his former presidential term, the Senate fell short.
Nevertheless, “an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history,” as then-House Minority Leader Gerald Ford, R-Mich., said more than 40 years ago while trying to impeach Justice William O. Douglas.
Won’t impeach Thomas or Alito
And the current right-wing Trumpite House GOP is not going to impeach Thomas, the intellectual leader of the court’s right-wingers or Justice Samuel Alito, who fulfilled a long-held right-wing goal by outlawing the federal constitutional right to abortion, throwing the issue back to “states’ rights.”
Ocasio-Cortez filed an impeachment article against him, too, on ethics and conflict-of-interest charges. The petition against Alito has drawn 77,278 signatures. Its target is 80,000.
“The unchecked corruption crisis on the Supreme Court has now spiraled into a constitutional crisis threatening American democracy writ large,” Ocasio-Cortez explained. The two justices’ “pattern of refusal to recuse from consequential matters before the court in which they hold widely documented financial and personal entanglements constitutes a grave threat to American rule of law, the integrity of our democracy, and [is] one of the clearest cases for which the tool of impeachment was designed.”
Ocasio-Cortez also notes the federal Code of Judicial Conduct holds lower-court judges to a higher ethical standard than the Constitution’s impeachment for “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” But that code doesn’t apply to the Supreme Court and Senate Republicans have successfully stalled congressional efforts to write an ethics code for the justices.
“The lifetime appointments of Supreme Court justices make enforcement of these standards” in the judicial code “a solemn responsibility for the protection of our democracy,” said Ocasio-Cortez.
MoveOn, unlike Change.org, did not disclose the authors of its pro-impeachment petitions. The anti-Thomas petition was explicit about his conflicts of interest: Accepting lavish gifts from big Republican donor Harlan Crow, including expensive travel and purchase of the justice’s boyhood home in Georgia for a future museum. Crow bought the house for an above-market price and one condition is the justice’s mother can continue to live in it, rent-free.
The MoveOn petition was also explicit about Justice Thomas’s conflict of interest in the court’s party-line ruling granting Trump virtually absolute immunity from federal criminal trials, forever, for official and semi-official actions during his prior presidential term.
Thomas did not recuse—withdraw from the case—himself even though his wife, Ginni, a prominent right-wing lobbyist, sided within the Trump White House with the Trumpite insurrectionists who ravaged the U.S. Capitol three and a half years ago. She also attended Trump’s incendiary rally before that attack, though she did not participate in the attack itself.
The second Trump trial involved his orders, action and inaction on that attack. And the court’s grant of perpetual immunity from prosecution was Trump’s latest scheme to avoid federal prosecution for it.
Ocasio-Cortez’s impeachment article against Justice Alito also says he accepted gifts from GOP big givers with business before the court. But it concentrates on what she calls his open support for the U.S. Capitol Trumpite invaders, and his refusal to withdraw from cases involving that insurrection—including the immunity case.
“By repeatedly—over a period of multiple years—flying flags associated with the attempt to overturn the election results and stop the peaceful transfer of power, Justice Alito publicly displayed a bias toward those who incited and executed the January 6 insurrection,” the impeachment article says.
“Because Justice Alito engaged in a pattern of declaring sympathy with the parties before the Supreme Court” in Trump-related cases, federal law “required Justice Alito to recuse from all matters related to the insurrection.”
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