The outage of Ginni and Clarence Thomas

News item: Ginni Thomas, lawyer, conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas posted pictures of African-Americans claiming to have left the Democratic party. The problem is that the pictures were stock photos, and the quotes were fake.

In this era of “fake news,” bots and stock photos, this might seem par for the course. What makes this report particularly outrageous is that Ginni Thomas is the white wife of the sole African-American seated on the Supreme Court.

Similarly, in and of itself, an African-American being married to a white person is no longer news. Clarence Thomas, however, was put on the Supreme Court to replace one of the titans of American jurisprudence: Thurgood Marshall.

At the time, Clarence Thomas was a relatively undistinguished judge having spent just over a year on the federal bench. When then-President George H.W. Bush nominated him to replace Justice Marshall, Bush called him the “best qualified [nominee] at this time.” Given how many impressive jurists were on the Court of Appeals with him, including later-to-be-named Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, it is hard to imagine how Bush’s statement had any merit. Instead, it is likely that he was the only young, reliably conservative African-American Appeals Court Judge Bush could find at the time. To replace the civil rights icon…