a 2019 opinion. ‘‘We should not follow it.’’ When
he has cited Federalist No. 78, he has under-
scored Hamilton’s comment that judges ‘‘would
require an uncommon portion of fortitude’’ to
defend constitutional principles when they are
unpopular. ‘‘The trait that Hamilton singles out
— fortitude — is fundamental to my philosophy
of life,’’ Thomas said in a 2001 speech to the
conservative American Enterprise Institute.
He has said the route to safeguarding the
Supreme Court is simply through stricter
adherence to the Constitution, and he warned
at a recent speech at the University of Notre
Dame that judges have been exceeding their
authority. ‘‘There’s always a temptation, I think,
to go beyond,’’ he said, adding that when judg-
es ‘‘begin to venture into political, legislative
or executive- branch lanes,’’ they ‘‘are asking
for trouble.’’ He laid out the consequences: ‘‘I
think the court was thought to be the least dan-
gerous branch, and we may have become the
most dangerous.’’
But more than any other sitting justice, Thom-
as has stoked concerns of a hyper partisan court.
He has frequently appeared at highly political
events hosted by advocates hoping to sway the
court. He and his wife sometimes appear togeth-
er at such events, and their appeal is apparent:
He fulfi lls the hard right’s longing for a judge
— and especially a Black judge — oblivious to
the howls of the left, while she serves up the
red meat the base wants to hear in her speech-
es. They often portray themselves as standing
in the breach amid a crumbling society. ‘‘It’s
very exciting,’’ Ginni Thomas said during a 2018
Council for National Policy meeting, ‘‘the fact
that there’s a resistance on our side to their side.’’
Her role became increasingly public in the
Trump era, when she started emceeing an
annual awards ceremony celebrating some of
the best-known Trump allies. The awards are
handed out in conjunction with United in Pur-
pose, a group created by Bill Dallas, an evan-
gelical political activist. Some recipients lead
organizations that have business before the
Supreme Court.
‘‘When the Bat phone rings and it’s Commis-
sioner Ginni Gordon, otherwise known as Ginni
Thomas, of course you have to show up,’’ said
Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent
turned popular pro-Trump radio host, after
receiving one of Thomas’s Impact Awards in- ‘‘I can’t say enough about Ginni,’’ Bongino
told the audience at the event, which includ-
ed the Fox News pundit Sean Hannity and Ed
Meese, a Reagan administration attorney gen-
eral. ‘‘I idolize her husband — he’s an icon to
me,’’ Bongino said, but added that it was Ginni
Thomas who connected him with right-wing
leaders when he was making several unsuccess-
ful congressional bids. ‘‘I think in the long run,
when you look at the impact on the conservative
movement and the principles we hold dear, I
think her and her husband stand toe to toe.’’
The federal judicial code of conduct, adopted
in 1973, restricts judges from being ‘‘a speaker,
a guest of honor or featured on the program’’ at
fund- raising events. While the code doesn’t offi -
cially apply to the nine justices, Roberts said in a
2011 report that the justices ‘‘do in fact consult’’
it when ‘‘assessing their ethical obligations’’ — a
statement reiterated by a spokeswoman for the
court when we asked for comment. But accord-
ing to documents and recordings of such events
reviewed by The Times, Justice Thomas has at least
twice headlined annual conferences at the Eagle
Forum, a conservative grass-roots group opposed
to abortion and modern feminism. The fi rst was
in 1996 when he received an Eagle award. ‘‘He’s
better than Rehnquist, he’s better than Scalia, he’s
just wonderful,’’ Phyllis Schlafl y, the founder of
the Eagle Forum and one of the most infl uential
conservative activists of her generation, told the
audience, according to a cassette recording of
the speech. She even recited a poem in his honor,
which began: ‘‘No high court justice shows such
promise/As our favorite, Clarence Thomas/You’re
a jurist for the ages/Who sends liberals into rages.’’The couple returned to the Eagle Forum years
later, in 2017; this time his wife received the
Eagle award. It was the year after Schlafl y died,
and the organization, which is dependent on
member and conference fees, was struggling.
They were featured on the event program, and
documents show that Ginni Thomas urged
attendees to come hear her and ‘‘my amazing
husband’’ in a personal letter that was part of the
event’s promotional materials, adding, ‘‘God can
use such an occasion for encouragement and
insights!’’ (Full registration for the group’s annu-
al conference cost $350 as of 2019.) Afterward,
the organization tweeted a promotional video
aimed at prospective members that included
footage of the couple’s appearance.
In 2008, Justice Thomas delivered a keynote
speech to donors to the Manhattan Institute and
spoke at a secretive political retreat hosted by
the billionaire Charles Koch. And he has had
a long relationship with the Heritage Founda-
tion, which employed his wife as a liaison to the
George W. Bush White House. The group once
invoked Justice Thomas’s speech at one of its
Leadership for America fund- raisers in a direct
appeal that it sent to Philip Morris seeking a
$50,000 contribution. And in 2020, he objected
to an ethics proposal circulated by the policy-
making body of the federal court system that
would have barred judges from membership
in ideological legal groups like the Federalist
Society, while he was speaking at the group’s
convention. ‘‘I think they’re about to silence
the Federalist Society,’’ he said. ‘‘So I guess I
can’t come back.’’
Perhaps most important in understanding
the couple’s far- reaching philosophy and proj-
ect is their long relationship with the Council
for National Policy, aspects of which have not
been previously reported. Justice Thomas head-
lined an event for the group in 2002, and in 2008
he attended one of its meetings and was photo-
graphed with a gavel behind a lectern bearing
the group’s name.
Just over a decade later, Ginni Thomas would
join the board of the council’s action arm. During
a presentation in 2019, she warned that ‘‘conser-
vatives and Republicans are tired of being the
oppressed minority,’’ adding that they were
being ‘‘falsely vilifi ed, slandered and defamed as
extremists and bigots and haters.’’ The left, she
said, was ‘‘making it justifi able and normalized to
fi ght us, to hurt us, to kill us even.’’ For her, this
was a fi ght decades in the making.Before introducing Justice Thomas at the Eagle
Forum in 1996, Schlafl y spoke about his mother-
in- law. ‘‘Now, fi rst I want to present the wife of
our distinguished speaker, Ginni Thomas, and I
want to tell you that she is, I’m very proud to say,
a second- generation Eagle,’’ she said. ‘‘It was backThe New York Times Magazine 35‘HE HAS CHARTED A
VERY RADICAL APPROACH
TO JUDGING — IT’S SURPRISING,
ACTUALLY, HOW FAR THE
C OU RT H A S M OV E D
IN HIS DIRECTION.’