Dear Editor,

In 1991 the country spent part of the summer listening and watching on television as Anita Hill testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that Clarence Thomas, then a U.S. Appeals Judge for the D.C. Circuit., sexually harassed her while she worked with him in government for several years. The Senate Judiciary Committee was vetting Thomas after President H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to fill an opening in the U.S. Supreme Court after the death of Justice Thurgood Marshall. Ultimately, the Senate Committee didn’t believe her and sent Thomas’ name to the whole Senate where he was narrowly nominated 52-48. It was a riveting and cringing testimony by Hill, who now teaches law, social policy, and Women’s studies at Brandeis University.

Thomas became an Associate Justice and still sits on the Court today. But new revelations confirm Thomas has had many ethical lapses over the years while sitting on the court as evidenced by his accepting cruises, vacations, the sale of his house, and other questionable activities worth huge sums of money that experts are still counting, all in the guise of a friendship with Harlan Crow, a super wealthy Republican contributor to many GOP causes; this seemingly “pay for play” scheme was not reported publicly by Thomas because the Supreme Court has no code of ethics or rules of conduct for its judges to follow, and this behavior by Clarence Thomas shows some members of the Court can’t be trusted to do the right thing, which is a sad statement about judges making Constitutional, life and death decisions, and decisions that shape America’s judicial future. It mortifies us to think about what is going on behind closed doors at the Supreme Court, and public trust in the Court, already at an historic low, will no doubt plummet after it refuses to stop this ethics abuse by its members.

And by the way, I saw those televised hearings in 1991 and believed Anita Hill was telling the truth then and still do even more so today. It was tortuous for her to testify before 14 men and no women, and the men, predictably, did not believe her.

As I close this letter, a whistleblower has just revealed another apparent ethical lapse, this one by Chief Justice John Roberts. It appears that his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, an attorney herself and a legal recruiter for large corporations and firms who pay her to find lawyers for them, made over $10 million in just eight years while the Chief Justice was serving the public. However, many of the legal firms she approached to find help for her business clients are likely to appear before the Supreme Court, an obvious conflict for the Chief Justice. The shoe keeps dropping at the Court, so stay tuned.

Thank you,

Grant Plymel

Thomasville