Welcome to the Daily Article Podcast for Thursday, March the 31st, 2022.

I'm Chris Elkins with the Denison Forum, narrating today's article written by Dr. Jim Denison.

Virginia, also known as Jenny, Thomas, is the wife of longtime Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

According to the Washington Post, 29 text messages obtained by the Post and CBS News

shows that she repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows

to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential

election. In response, some Democrats are calling on Justice Thomas to recuse himself on cases

related to the January 6th Capitol riots. Some are even calling for Justice Thomas to step down from the court or be impeached.

As we will see today, this controversy is relevant far beyond Justice Thomas, his wife, and their critics.

Former prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy states that the statutes governing judicial disqualification,

Section 455 of Title 28 U.S. Code, involves financial or legal stakes in the matter or some

connection to the matter as an attorney. According to McCarthy, Jenny Thomas's conservative political activism up to

and including the text messages to Mark Meadows about the 2020 election does not activate those triggers.

He adds, if it did, many judges appointed by Democrats would have been disqualified from cases

over which they presided despite the political and legal activism of their spouses.

His statement links to a Newsweek article detailing numerous examples of such activism.

To reinforce his argument, McCarthy states that Supreme Court justices are not even subject

to disqualification over their own activities that bear directly on cases.

He notes the example of Justice Elena Kagan, nominated by President Obama,

who served as Mr. Obama's Solicitor General when the administration was formulating its legal strategy

to defend the Affordable Care Act.

When the act came before the Supreme Court, she did not recuse herself from the case

...