Biden mocks Clarence Thomas over undisclosed luxury trips, says Supreme Court justice ‘likes to spend a lot of time on yachts’
President Biden derided Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for failing to disclose trips he took with a Republican donor, referring to the high court’s longest-serving current justice as “the guy who likes to spend a lot of time on yachts” in an interview published Monday.
Biden, 81, made the cutting comment to The New Yorker while discussing whether the high court’s conservative majority would revisit other precedents after overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that granted constitutional protections for abortion, in June 2022.
In a concurring opinion on the ruling, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Thomas suggested the justices should revisit other precedents legalizing contraception and same-sex marriage, as well as decriminalizing homosexuality.
All those decisions were based on the legal theory of “substantive due process,” which states that rights not specified in the Constitution are protected by the 5th and 14th Amendments.
“Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’” Thomas, now 75, wrote at the time, “we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”
Biden batted down the suggestion during his interview.
“I don’t think there’s a majority to go there,” he said, before pivoting to criticize Thomas for more than 20 years of excursions on billionaire GOP donor Harlan Crow’s superyacht and private jet.
While serving as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden voted against the confirmation of Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991 following allegations of sexual harassment by Anita Hill, who worked under Thomas at the Education Department and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Thomas dismissed Hill’s testimony as “lies” and said the widely televised hearings amounted to a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.”
The justice was confirmed by narrow 52-48 vote in the Senate, with 11 Democrats and 41 Republicans supporting his appointment. At the time, such a tight margin was almost unheard of; no justice had been confirmed with fewer than 60 Senate votes since 1949 — and none would be again until Samuel Alito in 2006.
A federal judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals at the time of his nomination, the conservative Thomas replaced retiring Justice Thurgood Marshall, a liberal and the high court’s first African-American jurist.
Last year, ProPublica reported that Thomas had “accepted luxury trips virtually every year” for decades from Crow, a Dallas-based real estate mogul, without listing them on his financial disclosures with the high court.
One 2019 jaunt to Indonesia with his wife, Virginia Thomas, and Crow would have cost more than $500,000 had the justice chartered his own flight and yacht, according to the outlet.
“Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable,” the justice said in a statement at the time.
“I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure, and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines.”
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee later opened an investigation into Thomas and threatened to subpoena Crow — but have yet to do so.
In November, the Supreme Court adopted its first-ever ethics code, laying out guidelines for the disclosure of reimbursements for travel, food and lodging.
While congressionally mandated ethics rules govern the behavior of lower court judges, Alito has said the Constitution grants no such authority to Congress in overseeing the Supreme Court.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who chairs the Judiciary Committee and led the probe of Thomas, has since suggested the justice also has conflicts of interest that should prompt his recusal from former President Donald Trump’s upcoming appeal of his 2020 election interference case in Washington, DC.
Virginia Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, attended Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, in DC before the Capitol riot and pressured then-chief of staff Mark Meadows to challenge 2020 electoral results, the Washington Post reported.
On April 22, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments from Trump’s attorneys, who argue the former president should not be criminally prosecuted for his attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.
The Post has reached out to the Supreme Court for comment.
