Drive-By Smears of Clarence Thomas Never End
22nd December 2023
Most Clarence Thomas hit pieces can’t stand up to perfunctory scrutiny. But the newest doesn’t even make any sense.
In a new article with five names in the byline, anti-Supreme Court outfit ProPublica takes a decades-old offhand complaint that Thomas made about his salary and spins it into a nefarious conspiracy. In 2000, Thomas apparently groused about his pay to a “vocal conservative,” then-Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla. (The justice was hardly alone. It was a big issue in the 2000s.)
This interaction, we are informed, “set off a flurry of activity across the judiciary and Capitol Hill.” By “flurry of activity,” ProPublica means a single memo in which the possibility of raising justices’ salaries was discussed.
Like all SCOTUS smears, the piece is loaded with performative journalistic jargon—”newly unearthed documents,” for instance—meant to make it look like ProPublica is engaging in acts of reporting rather than activism.