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Here’s what is brewing this morning in the news:

Enough is Enough: The call for Clarence Thomas to resign

A recent expose on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has many people questioning his ethics and whether or not he is fit to continue serving on the nation’s highest court.

The article published by the New York Times delves into Thomas’s relationship with Dallas real estate magnate Harlan Crow, who is a major contributor to conservative causes and some of Justice Thomas‘s pet projects.

The New York Times reports:

“The two men met in the mid-1990s, a few years after Justice Thomas joined the court. Since then, Mr. Crow has done many favors for the justice and his wife, Virginia, helping finance a Savannah library project dedicated to Justice Thomas, presenting him with a Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass and reportedly providing $500,000 for Ms. Thomas to start a Tea Party-related group. They have also spent time together at gatherings of prominent Republicans and businesspeople at Mr. Crow’s Adirondacks estate and his camp in East Texas.

“In several instances, news reports of Mr. Crow’s largess provoked controversy and questions, adding fuel to a rising debate about Supreme Court ethics. But Mr. Crow’s financing of the museum, his largest such act of generosity, previously unreported, raises the sharpest questions yet — both about Justice Thomas’s extrajudicial activities and about the extent to which the justices should remain exempt from the code of conduct for federal judges.”

Supreme Court justices are not bound by the same code of laws that govern federal judges, but current justices have testified that they abide by them and use them as a reference guide for ethical decisions.

Under this code, judges “should not personally participate” in raising money for charitable endeavors and are not even supposed to know who donates to projects honoring them. The rationale is that donors should not feel pressured to give or entitled to any favorable treatment by the judge.

Case in point, Crow reportedly made generous financial contributions to Justice Thomas and his wife’s group Liberty Central, which strongly opposes President Obama’s health care overhaul - an issue which will likely come before the court in the near future. The potential conflict of interest raises many concerns.

This is not the first time Thomas’s ethics have been called into question.

The group Credo Action is saying “enough is enough” and calling for Thomas’s resignation. The group is circulating an online petition, which they report has received 141,946 signatures as of this morning. Their current goal is to reach 150,000.

Here is an excerpt from that petition:

“Crow is not the sole source of questionable ethical behavior on the part of Clarence Thomas. His highly questionable relationship to an ethically challenged Supreme Court justice is simply the latest to be exposed.

“Clarence Thomas participated in a secret political fundraising event put on by the Koch brothers to fund Tea Party infrastructure groups.

“And for years, Thomas disregarded rules requiring him to report his wife's income on financial disclosure forms. His household received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the conservative Heritage Foundation during a period when he was voting on landmark cases in which the rightwing think tank had a clear ideological stake.”

Question: Do you think it’s time for Justice Thomas to go?

Related articles:
Friendship of Justice and Magnate Puts Focus on Ethics
Is Clarence Thomas unfit to serve on the Supreme Court?
A Brief History of Clarence Thomas' Ethical Entanglements

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