The following is an edited transcript of an interview between Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley and senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America Mark Paoletta on a Saturday Extra edition of Morning Wire.
The Supreme Court has issued several landmark decisions over the last few years – including the overturning of Roe v. Wade and more recently the end of Chevron deference. Many of these decisions fell along party lines, raising the ire of progressive activists. Biographer Mark Paoletta, co-editor of “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in his Own Words” explains the attacks. Among the biggest targets have been Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, both accused of bias and ethical violations. Why is the Left so focused on undermining the conservative justices? And is the barrage of criticism influencing public opinion?
JOHN: Joining us now to discuss the increasingly hostile handling of conservatives on the Supreme Court is Mark Paoletta, senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America and co-editor of “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in his Own Words.” Mark, thank you for coming on.
MARK: Thanks for having me on.
JOHN: First of all, you wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week saying it’s open season on the Supreme Court, and especially Clarence Thomas, someone you know very well and have written a book on. What is driving the attacks and why are they coming now?
MARK: The Left is furious that they don’t control the Supreme Court anymore. For decades, the Left has had a reliable ally in the court to implement their Left-wing agenda — think abortion-on-demand, race-based affirmative action — all of these things were upheld by the Supreme Court acting as a sort of super legislature. And Justice Thomas, whose confirmation I worked on back in 1991, was the beginning of the seeds, the foundation of an originalist court. And because he is a black conservative, the Left is triggered by Justice Thomas, because of their racist views of how a black person should think. And so he has been unbowed for 30 years — more than 30 years — on the Supreme Court. And all of these, recent cases over the past few years with this more originalist court — from the Dobbs decision to the affirmative action decision last year, taking on the administrative state, religious liberties — all of these things are things that Justice Thomas has been writing about for more than 30 years in his dissents and concurrences are now majority opinions. And what you see, John, is that in the past several years, when it’s springtime and the court’s coming down with blockbuster decisions, sort of dismantling this Left-wing body of law, they want to undermine the court to either intimidate the justices so that they change their opinions, they trim their sails on some of the opinions. Ultimately, if they’re not successful with that, they’re laying the groundwork to pack the court if they win in 2024. If they win the White House, if they win the House and Senate, I do believe they will pack the Supreme Court, which means they will try and add four new justices to the court to wipe away this conservative majority that’s in place now. Justice Thomas has been the person they’ve been targeting for 30 years. The high tech lynching in 1991, the belittling of him as a justice when he went on the court, absolutely racist, absolutely despicable. Thomas has never bowed to them. As he always says, “I just do my job, my J-O-B.” It’s the Thomas Court, and they hate him for it. That’s why they go after him time and time again, and his wife. How can we make life difficult for him? How can we try and undermine Justice Clarence Thomas — who, in my opinion, is the greatest Supreme Court justice and our greatest living American? That’s why it’s necessary and important to defend him and for people to write and push back on these lies. This “Fix the Court” chart that came out a couple of weeks ago is just filled with dishonesty, deception, and false information. It is just shocking to me, and I’ve been doing this for a while, how bad and dishonest this chart is that claims to show how many gifts Justice Thomas received during his time on the court. It’s all just a complete dishonest representation of things.
LISTEN: Catch the full interview with Mark Paoletta on a Saturday Extra edition of Morning Wire.
JOHN: Let’s talk more about Fix the Court. First, who are they? And second, what do you make of their claims about his $4.2 million-worth of gifts, supposedly?
MARK: Yes. So, Fix the Court is a group headed by Gabe Roth. It’s funded by lots of Left-wing billionaires. They like to position themselves as this non-partisan, good government group, but they’re anything but. They are a partisan “attack dog” trying to take down this court. With respect to their claims on Justice Thomas, the first thing is they count as gifts vacations he took with long time friends that the judicial conference, the body that regulates the judiciary, has already ruled back in 2012, aren’t required to be reported on their forms. Consider just how idiotic this is — I’ll share some of his friends’ names: Harlan Crow is his good, good friend for 30 years. The Thomases go and visit the Crows up in their summer home in the Adirondacks. That literally shows up as a $280,950 gift over the years. They count this as their home. I’ve been there. I’ve been on some of these vacations. It’s their home, that’s where they go for the summertime, they host their friends and they count that as a gift. That’s absolutely idiotic. There’s no other justice on this chart whose visits to their friends are counted as gifts. Justice Thomas went on a trip to Indonesia with the Crows — again, full disclosure, I was on that trip — they count that trip as a $500,000 gift. This is how they get there: They assume he chartered the boat and the plane for himself. That’s how they get a $500,000 tab. Now, the most dishonest thing they do is … Justice Thomas would go speak at an event — he went down to Dallas to speak at a civil rights conference, he went up to New York to speak at a dedication of a statue, he went to some schools to give speeches — they count those trips, many of them, as gifts. Like the one to Dallas they count it as a $68,000 trip. There’s no other justice who shows up on the chart with similar trips. Stephen Breyer, for example, took 230 trips over the period at issue, which is 2004 to 2023. He went on 63 international trips, 17 of those trips were funded by the Pritzker family, a big Democrat family. He sat on their Pritzker Architecture Prize Board. What is a Supreme Court justice doing sitting on this board? I don’t know, but he was flown to London and Paris and Copenhagen and Ireland and Spain and Beijing — all around the world, and none of those trips are counted as gifts on this Fix the Court chart. So it’s this complete disconnect of using an inconsistent definition of a gift. There’s a scholarship from the Horatio Alger Association named for Justice Thomas’s son to go to two schools. Justice Thomas had been involved with it to honor him. He didn’t get any benefit from it, it didn’t go to any family members, but Fix the Court counts that as a $35,000 gift to Justice Thomas. When they don’t count a million dollar gift Justice Ginsburg got from the Berggruen Institute, that she accepted, and she’s the one who decided to donate the money to all of these organizations. She donated it. But the inconsistent treatment of what’s a gift and what’s not, to me, shows the dishonesty of Fix the Court. The last one is even football tickets. Justice Thomas went to a football game out at the University of Nebraska. The ticket price on the ticket itself is $65 to sit in this suite. They counted it as, I think, $987. They come up with these ridiculous figures. They don’t apply them to the other justices in the same consistent way. And they piggyback off of a lot of ProPublica’s work. And ProPublica has been another kind of “attack dog” organization, a Left-wing funded group that’s been going after Justice Thomas for the past year. One of the things ProPublica has written about is that there was a yacht trip that Justice Thomas went on to the Bahamas with a friend. It’s absolutely false. It’s a complete lie. It never happened. The owner of the boat wrote to the Senate Judiciary Committee saying this is completely false. But ProPublica kind of quietly updates their piece, but doesn’t change the first half of their story which talks about this Bahamas trip. And it shows photos of this boat. Justice Thomas has never even put eyes on this boat. I know this for a fact. And the owner has written to the Senate Judiciary Committee. So these are the kinds of lies that the truth never catches up with. And they create this narrative to paint Justice Thomas in the worst possible light, the most dishonest light.
Credit: Regnery Publishing
JOHN: And how have we seen the legacy media handling these claims? Are they just parroting these claims – or are they pushing back and doing their own fact checking?
MARK: They are pushing them on steroids. It’s just astonishing to me. They’re not even looking at these numbers. They’re not doing any kind of due diligence. How are you coming up with these numbers? They assumed Justice Thomas, when he went up to the Adirondacks, flew on Crow’s plane every year for the past 20 years. They claim it cost $613,323. Again, this is based on a calculation that he’s chartered the plane himself and he goes up there every year. Well, on the trips to the Adirondacks, the Thomas’s drove 95% of the time in their own vehicle. So it’s a complete lie in terms of these calculations. Another one was for $997,000 for flights out to California that they tag for Justice Thomas. Again, on some of these trips he’s going to give a speech or he’s going to participate in a conference or something like that. Every other justice who does that, they don’t count that as a gift. But with Justice Thomas they do. That’s the fundamental dishonesty with this chart and this representation. The media has been awful on it. It’s been very frustrating. There was an ethics complaint filed in 2011 by 20 Democrat members of Congress, of course led by Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), saying that Justice Thomas was violating the Ethics in Government Act law by not disclosing his trips with Harlan Crow. This was back in 2011. There had been a New York Times report about how Justice Thomas was traveling with his friend Harlan Crow. Then, the Judicial Conference came out with a letter in 2012 that they sent to Congress that basically said, We’ve looked at this. Justice Thomas has not failed to put down anything he’s required to put down on his forms. So this was dealt with in 2012. When ProPublica first did their initial attack on Justice Thomas last year, they never mentioned that letter. They kind of “memory holed” it. Which is to me either dishonest or incredibly sloppy. I called them out on it over the years, even last week when they wrote about Justice Thomas, they failed to mention this 2012 letter, which in my view addresses this issue. These are your friends, these are not strangers you’re traveling with or visiting. The last thing on this point: Joe Biden, as vice president and president, has literally gone to billion dollar donors and said, I want to use your house for a vacation. And they take their home over for the week or whatever the time period is. They have the whole Biden clan come down. There’s David Rubenstein’s house up in Nantucket, a $33 million home, I think. Homes down in Kiawah Island, down in St. Croix. Biden has never disclosed these vacations, these trips, these stays at these palatial mansions when the guest isn’t even there and they’re not even friends. The only folks in the press who have written on this is the New York Post, Steven Nelson, who’s done a great job on it. But there you have Joe Biden taking advantage of donors and staying at homes. It’s not personal hospitality. It’s not visiting friends. It’s just taking over somebody’s home to have a vacation there. The Democrats and the media are absolutely radio silent on it. I’ve pushed it out there on X, written about it. But that’s the double standard. For 10 years, Justice Jackson failed to disclose her husband’s consulting income on her forms. I pointed that out. It clearly seems to be wrong. The group I’m with, Center for Renewing America (CRA), filed a complaint on her not disclosing this information and she still hasn’t disclosed it or corrected her forms. It’s like it’s in a bubble where nobody hears, because they don’t want to hear. They just want to attack this court and conservative justices.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
JOHN: Do you believe these attacks are working? We’ve seen polls that show Americans have lost faith in major institutions, that includes the Supreme Court. What are your thoughts about the impact of these attacks?
MARK: Great question. I do think the attacks on the court are having an impact. I always point out that the court’s approval is low, historically, but Congress is also down by about 13%. It doesn’t rise above 18% with a disapproval rate of like 78%. I’ve testified before Congress and they introduced this as part of their opening statements, that the court has this low approval rating and something must be done, it’s broken. And I’m like, your approval ratings are at 18% with a disapproval of 78%. I think the Supreme Court’s disapproval is somewhere around 52%. It’s a joke that Congress is using the low approval ratings as a reason to say that something must be done with the court. Nothing is wrong with the court. But the other thing is, of course, The Supreme Court’s not supposed to be sort of a popular organization or institution. It’s supposed to protect our rights and interpret and apply the Constitution, come what may. Some opinions are going to be controversial. The way the Left will play it, however, it will push their approval ratings down. The ethics complaint, which I believe is completely made up, is meant to drive it down so they can try and pack the court if they win in ‘24. So, it is having an effect. It’s dangerous. It’s terrible. I go back to March of 2020, when Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the Democrat leader in the Senate, stood on the steps of the Supreme Court and literally threatened, by name, two Supreme Court justices — Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch. He said, “…You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” I think there’s a direct through line from that threat — and it was a threat, in my view, of physical violence — to the assassination attempt of Justice Kavanaugh. So the Left wanted to tarnish and muddy and slime up the justices on the court so that people don’t have faith in it. And then they wanted to stir them up to actually go protest in front of their houses, in a dangerous way, to threaten these justices. I’ve known Justice Thomas for more than 30 years. I know a number of other ones, too, and they’re all under 24-hour protection now. This is unprecedented. This was never the case a few years ago. They now have actionable death threats, and I blame this all on the Left, on the Democrats in Congress, and other Left-wing groups. The Justice Department has not enforced a law that makes it a crime to protest in front of a justice’s house for purposes of intimidation. It’s all very, very much out of hand and dangerous. And they’re willing to let this foment because they don’t like what the Supreme Court is doing. It’s the last sort of independent entity that’s protecting our liberties, protecting our constitutional rights. That’s why I’ve been out there a lot trying to defend the court against these lies and these misrepresentations and these dishonest attacks.
JOHN: Well, Mark, thank you so much for talking with us.
MARK: Thanks, John. I appreciate it.
