48 2.27.22
the couple’s. ‘‘In other words, the fi eld’s not ready
for things to blossom or fl ourish, but he’s doing
what he can to prepare it. And that’s what he’s
been doing.’’
Leo, a Catholic like the justice, fi rst met him
when he was clerking on the District of Colum-
bia Circuit. Thomas, then a judge on that court,
became a mentor. The justice has spent time at
Leo’s New England vacation home, is godfather
to one of his children and has supported him
through hardships, including the death of his
14-year-old daughter from spina bifi da. The two
men often discussed religion — Thomas once rec-
ommended he read ‘‘A History of Christianity’’ by
Paul Johnson — and Leo says Justice Thomas saw
parallels between how the church grew and how
to build a body of conservative jurisprudence.
‘‘It’s very similar to what happened with the
Catholic Church in the Middle Ages,’’ he said of
the justice’s approach, adding that the church
and its institutions ‘‘did their work during that
time, laying the foundations for future Catholic
thinking and Catholic thought to sort of grow
the church and preserve its traditions. It hap-
pened quietly; it did not happen in the grand
chambers of the Vatican, but it happened.’’
Thomas has described his judicial philoso-
phy as one of natural law, in which liberty and
equality are endowed by God. In the Thomas
view, slavery and Jim Crow segregation were
betrayals of the ideals enshrined in the nation’s
founding documents — and so are progressive
programs like affi rmative action: He is equally
opposed to government imposing obstacles
or providing special protections. ‘‘Whether
deemed inferior by the crudest bigots or con-
sidered a victim by the most educated elites,
being dismissed as anything other than inher-
ently equal is still, at bottom, a reduction of our
human worth,’’ he said in a recent speech. In an
essay called ‘‘Clarence X?’’ Stephen F. Smith, a
Notre Dame professor and former Thomas clerk
who is also Black, argues that his former boss
‘‘frequently (if not invariably) seeks to demon-
strate that his conservative positions on matters
of race are benefi cial for Black Americans, as
well as legally required.’’
But those positions are often out of step
with a majority of Black Americans, and in his
autobiography, Thomas laments being ‘‘brand-
ed a traitor to my race’’ for ‘‘daring to reject
the ideological orthodoxy that was prescribed
for blacks by liberal whites.’’ Such rejection of
orthodoxy was evident in a 1995 concurring
opinion on desegregation, when he questioned
why majority- Black schools were necessarily a
problem: ‘‘It never ceases to amaze me that the
courts are so willing to assume that anything
that is predominantly black must be inferior,’’
he wrote.
During these years, the couple were embraced
on the right; they even hosted Rush Limbaugh’s
third wedding at their Virginia home in 1994,
with Justice Thomas offi ciating. Ginni Thom-
as was laboring in establishment Republican
circles, but an ideological ferocity akin to her
mother’s simmered. ‘‘I’ve been on a mission for
a long time,’’ she told U.S. News & World Report
in 1995. ‘‘I wouldn’t be in this town if I wasn’t on
a mission.’’ By the time the Tea Party movement
arose in opposition to the Obama presidency,
her sense of mission was redoubled. ‘‘Over the
last 30 years, I have worked and struggled inside
this Beltway, waiting for you people to show up,’’
she told Tea Party activists in a 2010 speech at
the Conservative Political Action Conference.
‘‘I adore all of the new citizen patriots who are
rising up across this country, and I am happy
to help show you the ropes in the Washington
area, ’cause we need help.’’
Newly emboldened, that same year Ginni
Thomas called Anita Hill, leaving a voice mail
message on a Saturday morning. ‘‘I just wanted
to reach across the airwaves and the years and
ask you to consider something. I would love
you to consider an apology sometime and some
full explanation of why you did what you did
with my husband,’’ she said. ‘‘So give it some
thought. And certainly pray about this and hope
that one day you will help us understand why
you did what you did. OK, have a good day.’’
(Ginni Thomas characterized the call by saying
she was ‘‘extending an olive branch.’’)
When asked if Justice Thomas agreed with
making the call, Armstrong Williams was quick
to answer. ‘‘Of course not! But he had to deal
with it,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s his wife, it’s his best friend,
his most trusted confi dante, and he loves her
unconditionally. He doesn’t agree with every-
thing, but they work it out privately.’’
Hill was taken aback and made the call pub-
lic: ‘‘She can’t ask for an apology without sug-
gesting that I did something wrong, and that is
off ensive.’’ Hill had not been the only woman
to level accusations against Clarence Thomas:
At the time of his confi rmation hearing, anoth-
er former E.E.O.C. employee, Angela Wright,
who was fi red by him, detailed inappropriate
sexual comments she said he made, including
remarking on her bra size. A third former agen-
cy employee said, ‘‘If you were young, Black,
female and reasonably attractive, you knew full
well you were being inspected and auditioned
as a female.’’ Neither was called to testify.
In 2010, shortly after news broke of Ginni
Thomas’s call to Hill, Lillian McEwen, a for-
mer assistant U.S. attorney who dated Clarence
Thomas for several years after his separation
from his fi rst wife, spoke out: ‘‘He was always
actively watching the women he worked with
to see if they could be potential partners,’’ she
told The Washington Post in support of Hill’s
account. ‘‘I have no hostility toward him,’’ shesaid. ‘‘It is just that he has manufactured a diff er-
ent reality over time.’’ In 2016, Moira Smith, the
general counsel at an Alaska natural- gas com-
pany, said she was groped in 1999 by Justice
Thomas while she was a 23-year-old Truman
Foundation scholar, eight years after he joined
the court.
The Thomases have rejected all such allega-
tions. ‘‘I think, and I’ve said this only a few times
publicly, one of the best things that could have
happened to me was to have gone through the
kind of confi rmation I went through,’’ he told
the conservative activists at the Eagle Forum
in 1996. ‘‘I am the freest person on the court. I
have no illusions, no desires for accolades, no
desires for praise. I’m there to do a job. I will
do it, and I will go home.’’A few weeks after Mitt Romney lost the 2012
presidential election, Ginni Thomas called
Steve Bannon, then the chairman of Breitbart,
and they had lunch at the Washington town-
house that was both Bannon’s residence and
Breitbart’s headquarters. Romney’s loss pre-
saged a battle for the Republican Party’s direc-
tion, and Thomas wanted to start a hard-right
round table to serve as an alternative to an
establishment meeting run on Wednesdays by
Grover Norquist, the anti- tax crusader. ‘‘She had
the idea, ‘I think we need something to counter
Grover’s Wednesday meeting,’ ’’ recalled Ban-
non, who didn’t know her well at the time. ‘‘And
I said, ‘That’s a brilliant idea.’ ’’
The previous year, Thomas’s activism drew
scrutiny of her and her husband, when Com-
mon Cause, an advocacy group, reviewed I.R.S.
fi lings and criticized Justice Thomas for failing
to disclose his wife’s income — nearly $700,000
over fi ve years from the Heritage Foundation
— as required by federal law. He subsequent-
ly amended 20 years of fi lings. After her stint
at Heritage, Ginni Thomas ran a Washington-
based constitutional studies center for Michi-
gan’s Hillsdale College, a conservative bastion
that her husband has called ‘‘a shining city on
a hill.’’ She also briefl y ran her own advoca-
cy group called Liberty Central, which cam-
paigned against a planned Islamic community
center and mosque in Lower Manhattan near
ground zero; that group was funded in large
measure by Harlan Crow, a friend of the Thom-
ases’ and board member of the American Enter-
prise Institute, a conservative think tank whose
work Justice Thomas has cited. Crow, a major
Republican donor, gave $500,000 to Liberty
Central. (Ginni Thomas’s 2010 pay of $120,511
was nearly 13 percent of the organization’s rev-
enue that year, tax records show.) In the wake
of the fi nancial disclosures, more than 70 House
Democrats asked the justice to recuse himself
from deliberations about President Barack
Obama’s Aff ordable Care Act, which Ginni
Thomas lobbied against. He declined.Thomases
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