In slamming the Supreme Court’s alleged ethics problems, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse laid out a deliberate series of accusations that one Twitter user called “one of the most on point performances I’ve seen by a Senator.”
Notably, Whitehouse’s skewering came even before the latest SCOTUS bombshell revealed that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas also allowed his grand-nephew’s tuition to be paid for by his generous benefactor, billionaire Harlan Crow.
Background: Thomas has been given a lot of things by his good friend Crow, a fact which is not in dispute. Thomas’s mother lives in a house Crow owns (and purchased from Thomas) and Crow has spent lavishly over decades providing for Thomas family vacations. Justice Thomas doesn’t deny these things.
Thomas’s defense — as mounted for him by others, like Sen. Ted Cruz — is that 1) these gifts don’t violate his ethical obligations and 2) everybody does it.
In the “everybody does it category,” Sen. Cruz makes a particular example of retired Justice Stephen Breyer‘s own billionaire benefactor, the Pritzker family, for whose prestigious architecture prize Breyer has long been a jurist. (Note: Breyer’s position was publicly known.)
WATCH: I expose the baseless smears directed at Justice Clarence Thomas by Democrats and the corporate media. pic.twitter.com/lAjYnOtyHj
— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) May 2, 2023
But Democratic lawmakers see a much more menacing situation — one that threatens the legitimacy of the Supreme Court itself — in the recent revelations. (Americans are largely in favor of SCOTUS justices disclosing gifts.)
Sen. Whitehouse is Cruz’s opposite on the issue, and when the Rhode Island Senator seized the microphone this week he enumerated his case that Thomas has committed serious ethics breaches that harm the Court.
Did you think I’d show up to the hearing on Supreme Court ethics without receipts? pic.twitter.com/QjdF7T0rIl
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) May 2, 2023
Like Cruz, who boasted about his Thomas defense on Twitter (“I expose the baseless smears”), Whitehouse also bragged about his presentation, saying he had the “receipts” on Thomas. He captioned his highly detailed performance with “Did you think I’d show up to the hearing on Supreme Court ethics without receipts?”
Whitehouse claims the Supreme Court is “playing out of bounds” on ethics and that they, alone among the branches of government, “refuse to allow investigation.” About Thomas’s case specifically, Whitehouse says “it’s a cover-up in plain view.”
