When a conservative columnist gets one right with pithy flair, it is to be celebrated, or at least quoted.
"Why didn't this give Thomas the willies?" Mona Charen wrote the other day.
And there it was: insight, truth, indeed the essence of Clarence Thomas' dubious contention that a rich right-wing Texas developer giving him lavish things for more than 20 years was simply a dear pal, thus no problem.
What it comes down to is that we need better people than Thomas on the Supreme Court. It's the only solid solution. There are holes in all others.
Ethics regulation is, while honorable, an imperfect science. Real ethics regulation comes only from within, in a thing called conscience.
The handiest rule of thumb on ethical propriety is that, if you feel you should ask others if something you're doing is ethical, then it is unethical already. When in doubt, don't.
When Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica unveiled its investigative report that Thomas had long cavorted on the open tab of rich conservative Texan Harlan Crow--on yachts and private aircraft and at resorts and in a private vacation home in the Adirondacks--and not reported these gifts, The Wall Street Journal editorial page gave us a vivid dose of what some might call Wall Street ethics.
It opined that there was no rule against Thomas accepting this largesse nor any requirement that he make a public disclosure of it, so there was no legitimate story. This was merely a liberal polemic diatribe leaning not on any real point, but on incendiary adjectives such as "lavish," a dead giveaway of a weak argument, the editorial contended.
Personally, I'd have gone with "grossly garish," but that's just me.
Thomas came forward in a rare public communication to defend himself. He explained in a statement issued through the court that, early in his service as a supreme justice, he sought advice privately from unidentified persons whether he was required to report hospitalities such as those extended by his Texas benefactor if the Texas benefactor had no specific case of his own--as a direct appellant or appellee--pending before the Supreme Court.
Thomas triumphantly revealed that the advice came back for him not to worry about it.
He said that, since the U.S. Judicial Conference had now made a rule for judges to report such things as private transportation and lodging at resorts, he would begin to make those disclosures--though it's not clear that a general rule for garden- variety federal judges can compel anything of the supreme ones.
Thomas could have spoken as easily without engaging the court and said, "I was advised that I could get away with it, so I did so until now."
There is an acceptable variation to the rule of "when in doubt, don't." It's "if you have to ask, your question is already answered."
In the end, ethical behavior is a personal virtue. In the end, with no clear rules governing the behavior of our loftiest jurists, the only solution is for only those of the loftiest personal character to get nominated and confirmed for the loftiest justiceships.
In the end, real ethical deportment requires that a justice must personally hold a staunch regard for the law that compels him to accept as plenty the high salary of the office. In the end, the justice must value the integrity of himself and the court on which he is honored to sit, and even guard the appearance of that integrity, more than fancy things from rich people who set out to make friends with him shortly after he got regrettably confirmed to a seat on the highest court.
Sometimes, unassailable integrity in courts is all we have left. If a defeated president wants to claim victory, and if there are sufficient Republican state legislatures to defy the people and the Electoral College, our last refuge becomes justice-devoted judges who cannot credibly be assailed.
Here's an example of a friendship for which a Supreme Court justice needn't seek permission: Two now-departed justices, fierily conservative Antonin Scalia and passionately liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg, found through their association on the court that they really liked each other, in part on the basis of shared interests such as opera, which they enjoyed attending together with their spouses. They also shared family vacations.
They didn't need to ask if any of that was all right. Real ethics living within them permitted the existence of honest regard between persons with honest differences of opinion.
Those two graced the Supreme Court. Thomas doesn't.
There are those who speak of impeaching Thomas. But we can't. He transgressed no law. He makes the law.
All he did was do wrong.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.