"I don't think he should have ever been appointed," Pelosi said of Thomas while calling for the Supreme Court to have a code of ethics.
Scott J. Applewhite/AP
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declined to call on Justice Clarence Thomas to resign from the Supreme Court, but said she thinks he never should've been put on the high court to begin with.
Revelations that Thomas' wife Virginia "Ginni" Thomas exchanged texts with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in which she espoused conspiracy theories and strategized ways to overturn the 2020 election have led progressives, including Reps. Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to call for Thomas to resign or be impeached.
"Do you agree with members of your caucus who are saying that Clarence Thomas should resign?," a reporter asked Pelosi at her weekly news conference on Thursday.
"I don't think he should have ever been appointed," Pelosi replied. "I'm not going to go to that, but I will say that in H.R. 1, our bill to have cleaner government, we have a call for the Supreme Court to have a code of ethics. They have no code of ethics — and really? It's the Supreme Court of the United States...and we don't know what their ethical standards are."
H.R. 1, or the For the People Act, is a sweeping voting rights, campaign finance, and federal ethics reform bill that was passed by the House in March of 2021 but filibustered by all 50 Senate Republicans in June. Among other provisions, the bill would have required "the development of a code of ethics" for Supreme Court justices.
But Pelosi suggested in the briefing that the House should pass the bill's provision mandating a standard code of ethics for the Supreme Court as a standalone measure. She said she'd talk to the House Judiciary Committee about "perhaps having a hearing on that soon."
"Why should they have lower standards than members of Congress in terms of reporting and the rest?," Pelosi asked rhetorically.
Ginni Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, texted Meadows in the days after the 2020 election, according to the messages obtained by the House Committee investigating January 6 and first reported on by the Washington Post's Bob Woodward and CBS News' Robert Costa. While none of the reported texts between Ginni Thomas and Meadows directly discuss Clarence Thomas or his role on the Supreme Court in fielding cases over the 2020 election, they reveal how Ginni Thomas used her position in conservative circles to seek to overturn the election.
They also raise thorny ethical questions about whether Thomas should recuse himself from future records disputes and other cases concerning the January 6 insurrection. More than two dozen Democratic lawmakers have called on Thomas to recuse himself from such cases and explain his dissent in the court's ruling earlier this year allowing the January 6 committee to obtain Trump's records.
"If your wife is an admitted and proud contributor to a coup of our country, maybe you should weigh that in your ethical standards," Pelosi added, referring to Ginni Thomas.
In the texts, Ginni Thomas urged Meadows not to concede Trump's election loss, privately trashed Republicans in Congress for not trying hard enough to overturn the election, rallied behind controversial lawyer Sidney Powell, and told Meadows to "Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down."
Ginni Thomas also pushed outlandish conspiracy theories rooted in the Q-Anon conspiracy movement in her communications with Meadows, including baselessly claiming Trump had watermarked mail-in ballots to find voter fraud and that members of "the Biden crime family" and "ballot fraud co-conspirators" had been arrested and would "be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition."
