Democrats express outrage over Clarence Thomas luxury travel report

Democrats are voicing outrage following a report that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accepted luxury trips for more than two decades from a Republican mega-donor without disclosing them.

ProPublica reported on Thursday that Harlan Crow, a Dallas-based real estate developer who has donated millions to conservative causes, paid for Thomas to join various vacations, including trips on Harlan’s private jet and 162-foot yacht.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said his committee “will act” following the report.

“The highest court in the land shouldn’t have the lowest ethical standards,” Durbin said in a statement. “Today’s Pro Publica report reveals that Justice Thomas has for years accepted luxury travel on private yachts and jets and a litany of other gifts that he failed to disclose. This behavior is simply inconsistent with the ethical standards the American people expect of any public servant, let alone a Justice on the Supreme Court.”

Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) leaves the Senate Chamber following a vote regarding a nomination on Wednesday, March 15, 2023.

Based on flight records, internal documents and interviews, ProPublica reported that Thomas spent about a week nearly every summer at Crow’s resort in the Adirondacks in addition to a summer 2019 trip to Indonesia and other vacations around the globe. The costs, which spanned hundreds of thousands of dollars, were reportedly covered by Crow.

But those reported trips were never disclosed on Thomas’s financial disclosures.

Under a federal law passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Supreme Court justices and other top government officials are required to file annual financial disclosures. The justices in those reports are required to disclose gifts unless they fall under certain exceptions, and ProPublica reported that Thomas’s trips appeared to violate those rules.

In a statement to ProPublica, Crow said he and his wife had been friends with Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas, since 1996. 

“Justice Thomas and Ginni never asked for any of this hospitality,” Crow said in the statement.

“We have never asked about a pending or lower court case, and Justice Thomas has never discussed one, and we have never sought to influence Justice Thomas on any legal or political issue,” he added. “More generally, I am unaware of any of our friends ever lobbying or seeking to influence Justice Thomas on any case, and I would never invite anyone who I believe had any intention of doing that. These are gatherings of friends.”

The Hill has reached out to a Supreme Court spokesperson and Crow’s company for comment.

Democrats latched onto the report to raise calls for more scrutiny of the conservative justice.

“This secrecy is toxic and wrong,” tweeted Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a Senate Judiciary Committee member who is one of the chamber’s top critics of Supreme Court ethics rules. 

“The Court should not protect it any longer, and the Judicial Conference should look diligently and with urgency into this mess of front group briefs,” Whitehouse added.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing of the Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday, March 28, 2023.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) called for Thomas to be impeached.

And Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted, “The American people deserve a federal judiciary that is accountable to the rule of law, not wealthy Republican donors. Today’s news is a stark reminder that judges should be held to the highest ethical standards and free from conflicts of interest.”

Progressive judicial watchdogs joined the condemnations on Thursday, renewing their calls for strengthened ethics rules and oversight at the high court.

“The astounding reporting from ProPublica leads to a conclusion we’ve all come to expect: the Supreme Court is the least accountable part of our government, and nothing is going to change without a wholesale, lawmaker-led reimagining of its responsibilities when it comes to basic measures of oversight,” Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, said in a statement.

The federal judiciary’s policy-making body last month quietly adopted stricter gift disclosure requirements that clarified a “personal hospitality” exception does not apply to gifts at commercial properties. The exception only applies to food, lodging or entertainment gifts provided by someone with a personal relationship with the justice in a nonbusiness context.

“Supreme Court justices have some of the least strict ethics rules of any public officials, and Clarence Thomas can’t even meet that extremely low bar. If he can’t be trusted to follow even the most basic rules of conduct, how can anyone trust him to interpret the most important laws of the land?” Sarah Lipton-Lubet, president of Take Back the Court Action Fund, said in a statement.