Clarence Thomas, the Gordon Gekko of the Supreme Court

How much is enough? And at what cost to the country?

There’s a scene in Wall Street where Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko is explaining to Charlie Sheen’s Bud Fox the difference between being rich and being rich. “I’m talking about liquid,” he says in the back of his limousine. “Rich enough to have your own jet. Rich enough not to waste time. Fifty, a hundred million dollars, Buddy. A player. Or nothing.”

Wall Street came out in December of 1987, when Ronald Reagan was still president and greed was still good. Adjusted for inflation, $100 million back then is almost a quarter billion in 2024 dollars. Very few humans operate at that level of wealth. Most of us have more modest financial goals than owning our own PJ to avoid the TSA line at Newark Airport.

Four years after Wall Street’s release, Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. He grew up poor; he didn’t have indoor plumbing in his house until he was six. For most of his career, he’d worked for the government: as an assistant Attorney General of Missouri, as a legislative assistant for the Department of Commerce, as the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—where he was Anita Hill’s supervisor—and as a judge on the DC Circuit. None of these jobs paid nearly as well as what partners at white-shoe law firms raked in. Thomas was never Bud Fox rich, let alone Gordon Gekko rich. Quite the opposite, as Pro Publica reports:

Thomas did not come from money. When he was appointed to the court in 1991, he was 43 years old and had spent almost all his adult life working for the government. At the time, he still had student loans from law school, Thomas has said.

The full details of Thomas’ finances over the years remain unclear. He made at least two big purchases around the early ’90s: a Corvette and a house in the Virginia suburbs on 5 acres of land. When Thomas and his wife, Ginni, bought the home for $522,000 a year after he joined the court, they borrowed all but $8,000, less than 2% of the purchase price, property records show.

Public records suggest a degree of financial strain. Throughout the first decade of his tenure, the couple regularly borrowed more money, including a $100,000 credit line on their house and a consumer loan of up to $50,000. Around January 1998, Thomas’ life changed when he took in his 6-year-old grandnephew, becoming his legal guardian and raising him as a son. The Thomases sent the child to a series of private schools.

That all changed in January 2000. According to Pro Publica, Thomas bellyached to some Gordon Gekko types of his acquaintance that if his standard of living didn’t start improving, and soon, he might have to quit the Court and find a better-paying job. Whatever Thomas’s intention, this complaint was viewed as a threat. And lo and behold, money suddenly came pouring in.

There was the $1.5 million advance for his memoir—a time-honored way of compensating public figures that is bipartisan. His wife, Ginni, took work with the Heritage Foundation—as well as, secretly “of course,” from Leonard Leo. And that is when his long, strange relationship with Harlan Crow began.

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Clarence Thomas is not a nepo baby, or some oligarch spawn playing his own personal game of Brewster’s Millions to blow through as much plundered dough as possible. For one thing, while he has one of the cushiest jobs imaginable—he gets three-plus months off every year, he basically cannot be fired, his wife seems to pick his clerks, his clerks do the heavy lifting, he rarely has to deal with the press—it is, at the end of the day, a nine-to-five job. He can’t be fired, sure, but he also can’t quit and still expect to receive all the generous gifts from Harlan Crow & Friends. He will never be, as Martha-Ann Alito so memorably put it, “free of this nonsense.”

Thomas has raked in over $4 million in gifts over the last 20 years. He’s made about the same from his day job in that span. The net salary plus the gifts comes to $8,000,000—$400,000 a year on average. There’s also the aforementioned mammoth book advance and Ginni’s income.

What astounds me about the money is, like, why does he need that much? Seriously: what is he even using it for? Let’s say the seven-figure book advance was enough to pay off his mortgage and his remaining law school loans and credit card debts. So he has his house free and clear, and he has a killer FICO score. Even if his $250,000 RV wasn’t a gift, it was paid off long ago. His great-nephew’s boarding school bill, most of his vacations, his Frederick Douglas Bible—even his mother’s home renovations—were all underwritten by Crow.

Here are the fixed expenses that most of us spend our money on:

• Mortgage/rent

• Property taxes

• Car payments

• Insurance (home, auto, life, etc.)

• Medical bills

• Utilities

• Cable/internet

• Phones

• Subscriptions to Spotify and Netflix and various Substacks

Again: his house is paid for. Same with his cars, most likely. His medical insurance is free. His biggest expenses are property taxes and home owners insurance. His salary covers all of that, with plenty to spare.

Kids can be expensive. Thomas has one son from a previous marriage, who has long since grown up and left the nest, and from what I gather, does not depend on his father for financial assistance. His grand-nephew, as Hafiz Rashid revealed last week in the New Republic, is in prison in South Carolina and has not spoken to his former legal guardian in eons. By his account, the Thomases didn’t spend anything on him. And Clarence and Ginni don’t have any biological children. So there’s nothing going out that way.

I’m doing the math here, and calculating the budget, because the volume of loot he’s grabbed makes me ask the question Fox asks Gekko at the end of Wall Street: How much is enough?

I can’t even imagine the trauma around money that comes from growing up how Thomas grew up. I do know what debt feels like, and understand how that can suck up one’s soul. Perhaps, as a result of his impoverished upbringing, he has a pathological need to acquire as much cash as he can—although, if money were that important to him, he’d never have left Monsanto, his lone, brief foray into the world of corporate law. Did he get a glimpse of the Harlan Crow good life, like Bud Fox, and decide that he wanted to live in luxury, too?

Or is money just a symbol of power? Perhaps there is another Gordon Gekko line that resonated with him: “I create nothing; I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you’re not naïve enough to think we’re living in a democracy—are you, Buddy?”

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The icing on the cake of what most objective humans would call bribery is that Thomas churns out judicial opinions that are both poorly argued and tangibly harmful to society. Take the “bump stock” ruling he shat out last week. A bump stock is a simple modification that turns a semi-automatic weapon into what most objective humans would call a machine gun.

The bump stock is how the Las Vegas shooter managed to fire over a thousand rounds in a little over ten minutes, killing 60 people (!) and wounding 500 (!!). As Lisa Needham writes in Public Notice, “The Las Vegas shooting was so jaw-dropping, even by American standards, that it spurred even the Trump administration, which otherwise functioned like a wholly-owned subsidiary of the National Rifle Association, to take action.” The decision that makes bump stocks legal again, she explains, “rests on Thomas’s tortured explanation of the phrase ‘a single function of the trigger,’ as the statutory definition of a machine gun is that it must fire multiple rounds with a single trigger pull.” It’s an interpretation that is either disgustingly cynical or fatally stupid.

Worse,

Thomas embedded a few graphics into his majority opinion to show how a trigger works with a bump stock, an approach that Dahlia Lithwick over at Slate accurately characterized as “I know everything, here’s a Peanuts comic strip.” It’s distressing to watch Thomas actively substituting his layman’s understanding of how a bump stock works for that of the firearms experts of the ATF. Worse, Thomas's material came straight from an amicus brief filed by the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) in support of the gun store owner, Michael Cargill, the plaintiff in the case. 

The FPC is much further to the right than even the National Rifle Association. They’re not really big fans of democracy and are known for deploying violent rhetoric in support of their worldview that the only freedom that matters is the freedom to own more guns. In the wake of this decision, they’re already over on X bragging about the other ATF regulations they plan on getting overturned.

Needless to say, Thomas also signed off on the Dobbs decision. The price the rest of us pay for Clarence living high on the Harlan hog is more gun carnage, more government-mandated births, and more women dying from lack of medical care. He is, for all intents and purposes, jeopardizing 333 million American lives to make money he doesn’t need.

To again quote Martha-Ann Alito: VERGOGNA.

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Photo credit: Clarence and Gordon.