Turn out Ginni Thomas’ seditious conspiracy is a family affair
In the aftermath of the January 6th insurrection, the notorious and multifarious text messages of Ginni Thomas, wife of SCOTUS associate justice Clarence Thomas, were largely ignored by their receivers. They were either too extreme or too damningly traitorous to be openly responded to.
But Ginni Thomas didn’t just send out text messages. She also sent out emails. And while her emails were also largely ignored as well, one of them wasn’t.
It turns out the one reply she did receive came from Arizona state legislator Shawnna Bolick, the wife of Clint Bolick, Associate Justice of the Arizona Supreme Court. It further turns out that Clint Bolick is an old friend of Clarence Thomas. They worked together before Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court. Thomas is also godfather to one of Bolick’s sons.
The email that Ginni Thomas sent to Shawna Bolick said in part, “Please reflect on the awesome authority granted to you by our Constitution. And then please take action to ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen for our state.”
The reply that Ginni Thomas received from Ms. Bolick is not, by itself, particularly damning. It contained a personal note together with practical advice on how to legally file a complaint about personal experiences with voter fraud in Arizona. So far so good.
But then it gets interesting. A couple of months later Shawna Bolick authored a bill that would give the Arizona legislature the power to throw out election results, exactly what Ginni Thomas had asked her to do a couple of months previously. While that bill was defeated in committee, the intent and implications behind it are scary indeed.
Now this is where the rubber meets the road. Shawna Bolick is now running for Secretary of State in Arizona, a role where she would oversee elections and render important decisions about the outcome of elections.
Now the Secretary of State in Arizona is bound by state law just like anyone else. Even in Arizona and other red states, it’s the people, not the politicians, who decide the outcome of elections. That’s what we mean by “democracy.” That’s another place where the rubber of democracy meets the road of political reality. You don’t just decide one day that, because you’re Secretary of State, you can throw out the election results simply because you don’t like them. Right?
Not so fast. There’s a fringe legal theory known as the “independent state legislature doctrine” that is gaining traction in radical rightwing circles. That theory says that state legislators can pick the president for pretty much any reason they want. They can, in effect and in fact, decide whether or not the American people get to choose their president.
If that sounds familiar that’s because it’s the kind of thing we’ve seen go on in Russia and South America and Africa and anywhere that tinpot dictatorships run things. Going further back we remember it as children on playgrounds making up rules as we go along to suit our stake in any game. It comes, in short, from the infancy of human political discourse.
And that is how democracy dies, brothers and sisters. One friend whispers something to another, and they get an idea and try it, but it fails, so they try it again. And they keep trying. And after a while, nibble by nibble, bit by bit, the grand edifice we so magnificently erected 246 years ago comes tumbling down.
This is why the Republican Party must go. It has morphed into something so toxically antithetical to what America stands for that it can no longer be contemplated as anything other than a terrorist group dedicated to the destruction of the nation. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.