In a new interview with CNN this weekend, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should recuse himself — meaning withdraw — from considerations of whether Donald Trump should appear on the ballot in the unfolding presidential race. The question has been raised in challenges that link the ex-president to the violence of January 6, 2021, and invoke Constitutional provisions blocking certain individuals who engaged in insurrection from later holding office.
And the problem for Thomas is that his wife, Ginni Thomas, was actively involved in pushing ambitions within Trump’s circles and those of his supporters of the now ex-president getting another four years in office, which predicated the Capitol violence. She was in repeated communication about these ambitions with Mark Meadows, then the White House’s chief of staff — who’s himself been criminally charged for his alleged role in the post-election schemes.
“Anybody looking at this in any kind of dispassionate, reasonable way would say, if your wife was involved in the Big Lie, in claiming that Donald Trump had actually won the presidential election and [had] been agitating for that and participating in the events leading up to January 6, that you shouldn’t be participating,” Raskin said. He emphasized that he was in fact asserting that Thomas should step aside from these decision-making processes.
Raskin and other Democrats also recently wrote a letter directly to Thomas pushing for his recusal from decisions in a criminal case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith against Trump over his attempts after the last presidential election to stay in power. Raskin noted in the interview, though, that there are questions about how a code of ethics can actually be enforced against the Justices. The idea is that Ginni’s involvement could facilitate a conflict of interest for Clarence Thomas, who’d be ruling on how to respond to actions around which his own wife could be argued to have been in support. Watch Raskin below:
.@RepRaskin tells @DanaBashCNN that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should “absolutely” recuse himself from any future 14th Amendment ballot disqualification case against Donald Trump, but “the question is, what do we do if he doesn’t recuse himself?” pic.twitter.com/1SW5F9v2Sj
— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) December 31, 2023
