A report from a self-styled non-ideological Supreme Court watchdog is filled with errors and omissions.
It’s late in the Supreme Court’s term, which means it’s hunting season for the justices’ detractors. As usual, Clarence Thomas is a prime target. Fix the Court, which styles itself a nonpartisan advocate for “non-ideological ‘fixes’ ” to make the judiciary “more open and more accountable”—released a chart purporting to show that Justice Thomas has received almost $4.2 million in gifts and “likely gifts” between 2004 and 2023.
The other 16 justices who served during that period, according to the chart, received a combined total of less than $600,000 in gifts. That includes a mere $3,150 for Justice Anthony Kennedy, $55,014 for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and $15,500 for Justice Stephen Breyer.
Can that be true? No. A review of Fix the Court’s claims shows multiple errors and deceptions:
• It counts as “gifts” Justice Thomas’s trips and vacations with friends that weren’t required to be disclosed. Fix the Court counts annual visits by Justice and Ginni Thomas to the summer home of their longtime friends Harlan and Kathy Crow as a gift valued at $280,950. But no other justice’s visits to close friends’ homes are listed on its chart.
In 2011, 20 Democratic lawmakers filed an ethics complaint regarding Justice Thomas not disclosing his trips with the Crows. In response, the U.S. Judicial Conference, which regulates judges’ financial disclosures, concluded in 2012 that Justice Thomas wasn’t required to report such trips and vacations.
• It uses an inconsistent standard for what constitutes a “gift” to inflate Justice Thomas’s numbers. He traveled to Dallas in 2022 to speak at a civil-rights conference hosted in part by the American Enterprise Institute. Fix the Court counts the plane travel provided by Mr. Crow, an AEI trustee, as a gift valued at $68,333.
But the group doesn’t count Justice Breyer’s more than 230 trips for events—63 of them outside the U.S.—including the 17 trips the Pritzker family’s Architecture Foundation paid for Justice Breyer to take to London, Paris, Beijing and Copenhagen. Justice Kennedy and his wife traveled to Europe many summers for a month to teach seminars, but none of those trips are on the Fix the Court chart.
