The New York Times Magazine 33from the congressional committee investigating
the events of Jan. 6. Ginni Thomas co- signed a
letter in December calling for House Repub-
licans to expel Representatives Liz Cheney
and Adam Kinzinger from their conference for
joining the Jan. 6 committee. Thomas and her
co- authors said the investigation ‘‘brings dis-
respect to our country’s rule of law’’ and ‘‘legal
harassment to private citizens who have done
nothing wrong,’’ adding that they would begin
‘‘a nationwide movement to add citizens’ voices
to this eff ort.’’
A few weeks later, the Supreme Court ruled
8 to 1 to allow the release of records from the
Trump White House related to the Jan. 6 attack.
Justice Thomas was the sole dissenter.
Nearly 10 months after the dramatic events at
the Capitol, Ginni Thomas ventured out onto a
small balcony inside the Heritage Foundation,
the conservative redoubt that stands on Massa-
chusetts Avenue a few blocks from the Capitol.
In a bright red dress, she beamed and waved
to friends in the crowd who gathered last Octo-
ber to celebrate her husband’s three decades on
the Supreme Court. Beyond a sweeping bank
of windows, the sun had sunk to
just above the horizon, next to the
Washington Monument.
The attendees represented the
cream of Washington’s Republi-
can legal establishment, ‘‘really a
who’s who of all-stars,’’ as one of them, Donald F.
McGahn II, the fi rst White House counsel under
Trump, would say when the speeches started.
Many had clerked for Justice Thomas, includ-
ing a number of Trump- appointed judges who
are themselves touchstones on the right, like
Neomi Rao and James Ho. Others were activists
who had worked alongside Ginni Thomas, a Tea
Party veteran.
Though eff orts to overturn the election had
failed and Joe Biden was deep into his fi rst year
as president, the mood in the room was buoyant,
even triumphal. Justice Thomas, who for years
labored at the margins of the court, now found
himself with a new 6-to-3 conservative major-
ity. At the Heritage tribute, Mitch Mc Connell,
the Senate Republican leader, called Thomas
‘‘a legal titan’’ and ‘‘the brightest possible north
star.’’ Playing to the crowd of nearly 250 of his
party’s elite, he dryly asked: ‘‘What could I, Mitch
Mc Connell, possibly know about a notable leader
who is parsimonious with his public statements?
Who shuns the performative aspect of public
life? And who is viewed as a boogeyman by the
radical left? What would I know about that?’’
Among the crowd’s laughter, Thomas’s deep
baritone was most audible.
Much has changed since Thom-
as joined the court in 1991, when
the judicial orthodoxy of the right
had little traction — including the
belief that Roe v. Wade, whichestablished a right to abortion, relied on a phan-
tom ‘‘right to privacy’’ that isn’t explicit in the
Constitution, or that there was ‘‘no device more
destructive to the notion of equality’’ than affi r-
mative action and racial quotas, as former Chief
Justice William H. Rehnquist once wrote in a
dissenting opinion. During his fi rst decade on
the court, Thomas was often characterized by his
critics as a cipher who almost never asked ques-
tions from the bench and was an underwhelming
understudy to Justice Antonin Scalia.
But on the right, Thomas has come to be
regarded as an epochal justice. The man who
succeeded Thurgood Marshall, becoming the
second Black justice, may end up with a lega-
cy just as consequential. Trump’s conservative
appointments have tipped the balance of the
Supreme Court toward Thomas and his origi-
nalist philosophy, which purports to interpret
the Constitution as it would have been in the era
in which it was written, transforming him into
a shadow chief justice. When the consensus-
seeking justice who formally holds that title,
John G. Roberts Jr., sides with the court’s
shrunken liberal wing, as is increasingly the
case, it falls to Thomas, who has served the
longest on the court, to assign who will write
the majority opinion.
Three decades into his lifetime term, Thom-
as has not built his reputation by writing land-
mark majority rulings. Instead, he has been set-
ting the stage for a shift in infl uence, writing
solo opinions on issues like free speech, guns
and abortion that are now poised to become
majority opinions. ‘‘Take his juris prudence
on unborn life,’’ McConnell told the Heritage
Foundation crowd. ‘‘Every time, without fail,
Justice Thomas writes a separate, concise opin-
ion to cut through the 50-year tangle of made-up
tests and shifting standards and calmly reminds
everybody that the whole house of cards lacks
a constitutional foundation.’’
‘‘Justice Thomas does not break, or bend, or
bow,’’ he said. ‘‘We need a federal judiciary full
of men and women who are as bright as Justice
Thomas, as expertly trained as Justice Thom-
as, but most importantly, most importantly, as
committed to total unfl inching judicial indepen-
dence.’’ But in Thomas’s own remarks, he alluded
to the shared purpose of those gathered. ‘‘It is a
joy, an absolute joy, to be able to stand here and
celebrate this moment,’’ he said, ‘‘not because of
me but because of you all and what we’re trying
to defend in this great country.’’
If Thomas has been laying the groundwork
for a conservative revolution, so has his wife,
who once worked at Heritage herself. Ground-
swell, the group she founded, plotted what it
called a ‘‘30-front war’’ on hot- button issues and
seeded talking points throughout the right-wing
media, including with Bannon’s own publicationThe Thomases at
the White House in 2019
for a state dinner honoring
Prime Minister Scott
Morrison of Australia.