Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court Clarence Thomas has been a target of the left for decades. But that targeting has intensified as of late, and is now exposed as part of a broader effort to intimidate the Supreme Court ahead of the 2024 Trump docket.
Watch Congressman Jaime Raskin (D-MD) levies a barely veiled threat against Justice Thomas should he fail to recuse himself from the Trump docket, as aired on CNN State of the Union on Sunday, December 31st, 2023:
DANA BASH: Three of the sitting justices were appointed by Donald Trump and in addition to that, justice Clarence Thomas' wife, Ginny, texted with Mark Meadows about the 2020 election in the lead-up to January 6th, as you well know. Should any of the justices recuse themselves if they take this up?
U.S. REP. JAIME RASKIN (D-MD): Well, finally, the Supreme Court has developed what they're describing as a code of ethics. It's not binding in the sense that they're not going to anyone else. They could have gone to for example, circuit court justices, you could’ve gone to state supreme court justices on a panel, but so they're- they’re deciding for themselves, again, whether they're in violation of their code of ethics. But I think 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 6th, that you shouldn't be participating in--
BASH: So he should recuse himself?
RASKIN: He should- oh, he should absolutely recuse himself. The question is, what do we do if he doesn’t recuse himself.
If the language sounds familiar, it is because it is.
Recall Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s utterances ahead of the Dobbs ruling, which incited violence against the conservative justices of the Supreme Court:
In which Chuck Schumer threatens TWO sitting Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. pic.twitter.com/pA3mryeVK2
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) March 4, 2020
As a result of this inciteful speech, leftist mobs doxxed the justices before marching in front of their homes, and a madman flew cross-country with the intent to do literal physical harm to Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
We are repeatedly told that language matters. The left likes to frame uncomfortable speech as “violence”, while the media frames their actual violence as “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests. Dana Bash, with her intellectual incuriosity as to what Raskin may have meant with his “what do we do if he doesn’t recuse himself” here is no exception.
And it is important to clear that up. Perhaps Raskin is suggesting non-violent consequences for Justice Thomas’ refusal to recuse himself from the Trump docket. But as we saw from the shooting of the GOP congressional baseball practice, deranged individuals will infer a call to violence from such rhetoric.
At this point, reasonable individuals may conclude that Dobbs was a dry run, and that we are in the midst of a campaign to intimidate and influence conservative justices of the United States Supreme Court ahead of the various cases that will come before it.
