Harlan Crow Sure Isn’t Paying for Your Kid’s School

Harlan Crow Sure Isn’t Paying for Your Kid’s School

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK

MAY 08, 2023

In 1969, Justice Abe Fortas resigned his seat at the Supreme Court for accepting $15,000 in exchange for a series of paid lectures at American University. Part of the Fortas scandal also involved news of him accepting a stipend for doing legal work for a very rich friend (money he had actually returned when the benefactor was indicted and before the outcry).

None of Fortas’ colleagues defended him for this. No one blamed the press or even the Nixon administration (which very much orchestrated the ouster). It was widely understood that Fortas had done something that undermined the public legitimacy and independence of the court and that he had to go.

Over the past few weeks we have learned that Justice Clarence Thomas took multiple luxury vacations, valued in millions of dollars , over many years, paid for by Harlan Crow, a billionaire GOP donor who has business before the court. We know Crow had also contributed the $500,000 seed money that became Ginni Thomas’ Liberty Central, which paid her salary. We also know that Harlan Crow purchased the home in which Justice Thomas’ mother currently resides, rent free. And late last week, we learned that Crow paid years’ worth of private school tuition for Thomas’ grandnephew, Mark Martin, of whom Thomas had legal custody and whom Thomas was, as he put it, “raising as a son.” Justice Thomas knew such gifts needed to be disclosed because he did so with another tuition payment gifted to Martin in 2002. But he did not report the tuition Crow paid.

Last Thursday, we also learned that in January in 2012, Leonard Leo arranged to have Ginni Thomas paid $25,000 for consulting work through Kellyanne Conway’s polling company. The funds came from the Judicial Education Project, a dark money group that listed its address as a UPS Store in Georgetown. Leo’s instruction to Conway asked her to funnel the cash to Ginni, and took care to note that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.” A few short months later, the Judicial Education Project filed an amicus brief in Shelby County v. Holder, arguing for the dismantlement of the Voting Rights Act. Shelby County was a 5-4 decision, with Justice Thomas in the majority.

The insult-comic response to all these revelations has been some sighing version of “I sure wish I had friends like Harlan Crow,” and “I sure wish I had friends like Leonard Leo.” The problem is: Most of the justices, and certainly most politicians and judges and people of generalized fanciness already do have friends like Harlan Crow. American governance is so inextricably bound up with capitalism and cronyism that the shocker would in fact be if justices didn’t have a few friends who were the sort of wealthy political operatives who could buy them a pony or two on demand.

Which means the difference is not that there aren’t other Harlan Crows out there—surely there are. The difference is that most politicians and judges don’t take millions of dollars of gifts and air travel and luxury vacations and rent-free housing and tuition payments from those friends. To the extent that they do, they disclose them. The problem with Justice Thomas is not that wealthy donors to institutions and organizations with interests at the court all want to be his friend. The problem with Justice Thomas is that he thinks that every single aspect of his life is private and that any scrutiny of these “private” affairs is an intrusion. Indeed Leonard Leo swiftly defended his “No mention of Ginni, of course” comment with a statement saying: “Knowing how disrespectful, malicious and gossipy people can be, I have always tried to protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni.”

So that—right there—is the problem. It’s not that Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo aren’t free to pick who their friends are. It’s that they happened to be in charge of spending a ton of money to use the courts to restructure democracy, and they deliberately picked the friends who would help them do it. The problem is that everyone seems to have acceded to an arrangement in which those millionaire donors get to give stuff to their “friends,” and that this ought to be a secret, because otherwise it would compromise their privacy. If you are a Justice, you have to disclose this kind of stuff. If that bothers you—if you are so committed to living a private life beyond the reach of disclosure—you can go be a urologist or something.

Which is why the real answer to why you don’t get to have rich friends like Harlan Crow is not that Harlan Crow wouldn’t like you if he knew you. He probably would. It’s just that Harlan Crow doesn’t want or need to know you. His claim that he met Justice Thomas and found himself “sympatico” has less to do with the nature of private friendship than with the nature of public power. And the way power currently works in this country is that you get to buy it. If you don’t see the straight line between Citizens United, Leonard Leo, Shelby County, and the concerted effort to take power from regular you and give it to Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo, you are not seeing the plan clearly.

There’s also something specifically infuriating about the way defenders of the deep spiritual kinship between Harlan Crow and Clarence and Ginni Thomas root their argument in the fact that paying for an at-risk youth’s private school tuition is a noble act—“charity” even. The problem with that is: This is a conservative legal movement that is racing to subvert voting, public education, the administrative state, and (at present) the possibility of student loan forgiveness. So Harlan Crow’s replacement of an entire New Deal safety net with an ad hoc charitable benefits system administered by himself and directed only at the offspring of personal friends is specifically infuriating. Because the kids who receive the generosity of the Crow’s private charity are not yours, and the kids who receive the protections of EPA regulation are not yours, and the kids who receive the benefits of going to schools where nobody will shoot them are not yours. The beauty of Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow is that they always get to determine who benefits, and guess what, until and unless you are related to a sitting Supreme Court Justice: It will be not you.

The lesson we are learning from the new scandals at the high court go way beyond “ethics” reform. This is no longer an ethics problem. This is a democracy reform problem and it signals first and foremost an effort to deform democracy to serve the Harlan Crows and the Leonard Leos of the world. It also signals a view of democracy in which they will determine whose private life is private and who are the “gossips” (you may still know them as “journalists”).

Indeed, that’s the latest defense that Thomas’ allies have cooked up: His wealthy pals had to funnel the cash and lavish gifts to him and his wife in secret, because if they had done it publicly, or disclosed it, regular people would cruelly intrude upon their cherished privacy with the unspeakable horror of public criticism. (Leo raised this exact argument to explain why he concealed the payment to Ginni, which is akin to a crooked lobbyist saying he had to bribe a congressman in secret because if people found out they might tarnish his reputation.) And if there is one thing we know about Thomas, it’s that he views public criticism (at least of himself) as a profound evil to be avoided at all costs. Bending disclosure rules is, to his mind, perpetually justified by the desire to shield his good name from any scoundrels who would dare speak ill of him. Whether or not he’s adhering to the law is, at most, an afterthought.

It would be painful in the extreme to have to confront the fact that your closest, dearest friendships are sometimes in fact almost wholly transactional. But that is not the issue that is up for debate just now. What is up for debate is whether justices exist in a sphere of privacy so impenetrable, that neither disclosure rules, nor corruption concerns, nor journalism, nor accountability of any kind, may intrude.  That is the world Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo have been building for themselves. Let me assure you, it is not a world that will admit you. They don’t actually need friends like you. You and your kids are on your own.

When Heather Cox Richardson says something
is important, you can be certain it's important.