Most Clarence Thomas hit pieces can’t stand up to perfunctory scrutiny. But the newest doesn’t even make any sense.
In a new article with five names in the byline, anti-Supreme Court outfit ProPublica takes a decades-old offhand complaint that Thomas made about his salary and spins it into a nefarious conspiracy. In 2000, Thomas apparently groused about his pay to a “vocal conservative,” then-Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla. (The justice was hardly alone. It was a big issue in the 2000s.)
This interaction, we are informed, “set off a flurry of activity across the judiciary and Capitol Hill.” By “flurry of activity,” ProPublica means a single memo in which the possibility of raising justices’ salaries was discussed.
Like all SCOTUS smears, the piece is loaded with performative journalistic jargon—”newly unearthed documents,” for instance—meant to…
