New York Times Editorial: Justice Thomas and His Wife

New York Times Editorial: Justice Thomas and His Wife
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: October 12, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/opinion/12tue3.html?th&emc=th


Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court, is the founder and chief executive of Liberty Central, a nonprofit organization set up to “restore the greatness of America,” in part by opposing the leftist “tyranny” of President Obama and Democrats in Congress. Its first contributions of $500,000 and $50,000 came from undisclosed donors. The size of those gifts, their anonymity and their importance to the organization raise a serious issue of ethics for Justice Thomas.

Sarah Field, an executive of Liberty Central, told The Times that the organization pays Mrs. Thomas. Justice Thomas is a beneficiary of that pay and has a responsibility under federal law to “inform himself” about who the donors are because they have an impact on Mrs. Thomas’s personal financial interests.

Mrs. Thomas is not legally required to disclose the donors. That is unfortunate, but she does have a duty to do so, just as former President Bill Clinton had a duty to disclose the donors to his library and charitable ventures when his wife became secretary of state.

Justice Thomas needs disclosure to know if either of those donors is a party in a case before the Supreme Court or has an interest in a party. That is the only way he can comply with a fundamental ethical and legal requirement to “disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

Even if his wife weren’t paid by the organization, Justice Thomas would have a duty to obtain the donors’ names. The principle of a Supreme Court holding requires that. As former Justice John Paul Stevens once wrote for the court, “The very purpose” of the impartiality standard “is to promote confidence in the judiciary by avoiding even the appearance of impropriety whenever possible.”

Justice Thomas could claim that he does not know who the donors are and, therefore, could not be biased on their behalf, but people would doubt him. Mrs. Thomas’s activities must be above suspicion so Justice Thomas can be as well. Take his partial dissent in the Citizens United case, in which he joined the conservatives to give corporations an unlimited right to spend money in politics. Alone among his colleagues, he also took the radical position that the disclosure requirements still in federal campaign law are unconstitutional.

That is an obvious trigger of the sort of “suspicions and doubts” the Stevens opinion was intended to quell. The Thomases can easily dispel the doubts.