Bret Stephens: Just for a change, Gail, let’s start with something other than Donald Trump. How about … Clarence Thomas’s junkets?
Gail Collins: Absolutely! When Justice Thomas isn’t busy announcing that the Supreme Court could do to contraception what it did to abortion rights, he’s apparently been happily taking luxury yacht and jet trips with his great old friend, the billionaire Republican megadonor and Nazi memorabilia collector Harlan Crow. Along with Thomas’s wife Ginni — I guess she was taking time off from trying to overturn the 2020 election.
Bret: You know, every time I try and fail to overturn an election, a nice $500,000 vacation in Indonesia helps salve the disappointment.
Gail: Bret, I presume the happy couple was having a great holiday weekend despite all the fresh publicity about their trips. They got to listen to all the reports of a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas blocking the sale of a drug that terminates pregnancy in the first 10 weeks.
Next, I guess, Thomas will be suggesting that the only acceptable form of birth control is the rhythm method. Much about him, from his judicial goals to his behavior, is a scandal. Let’s not forget that he’s the one who was confirmed despite the compelling testimony of Anita Hill about his wretched comments.
Any chance of getting him tossed off the court, huh? Huh?
Bret: Sorry, but the only scandal I see here is that the luxury trips don’t square with Justice Thomas’s self-portrait as a guy who likes to drive his R.V. around the country, spending nights in Walmart parking lots. Until last month, there was no rule requiring justices to disclose this kind of information about vacations with wealthy friends, assuming those friends didn’t have business before the court. Which makes the idea of trying to toss him off the court a nonstarter, not to mention a bad precedent lest some liberal justices turn out to have rich and generous friends, too.
Of course, I say all this as someone who’s generally a fan of Justice Thomas, even if I’m not as conservative as he is. If people want to criticize him, it should be for his votes, not his vacations.
Gail: I admit my call for a Thomas-toss was probably rhetorical. But intensely felt. I’ve been bitter ever since Mitch McConnell sat on that Supreme Court opening to keep Barack Obama from having a chance to fill it.
Bret: Totally agree. I’d sooner toss out McConnell than Thomas.
Gail: And while we can’t punish Thomas for his spouse’s misbehavior, Ginni Thomas’s very, very public attempts to get the last presidential election overturned are themselves quite a scandal.
Bret: Agree again. But dubious taste in spouses is not an impeachable offense.
Gail: So let’s go to Thomas’s opinions, especially that one on abortion.
When the court overturned Roe v. Wade, Thomas urged his colleagues to go further and take on issues like the right to contraception. Presuming you weren’t on board with that one?
Bret: As the father of three kids as opposed to, say, a dozen: no. And definitely not on board with the ruling in Texas on the abortion pill.
Gail: So what is it about Thomas you find so … terrif?
Bret: Ideology aside, I read his memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.” I’d recommend it to anyone who hates him, particularly the chapters about his dirt-poor childhood in the Jim Crow South. Few public officials in America today have pulled themselves up as far as he has or against greater odds. Also, I agree with a lot of his jurisprudence, particularly when it comes to issues like eminent domain and affirmative action.
But of course I part company on abortion and contraception — no small questions, especially now.
Gail: I’ll say.
Bret: Speaking of which, you must have been pleased to see a liberal judge in Wisconsin win her election to the state Supreme Court in a landslide, largely on the strength of her pro-choice views. As I predicted last year — and I was not alone — the Dobbs decision is going to hang around Republican necks like a millstone.
Gail: Didn’t Trump blame the anti-abortionist crowd for all those Republican defeats last fall? He might have been right — although his lousy choice in candidates certainly didn’t help.
Bret: Sometimes even Trump has a point. And his opposition to abortion always struck me as being about as sincere as most of his other moral convictions.
Gail: Back during his first presidential foray, when he was still speaking to the Times Opinion folk, I remember him telling us how amazed he was to discover you could get a conservative audience wildly excited just by saying something bad about abortion. That is exactly how Trump became anti-choice.
Speaking of Trump stuff, I had the strangest experience when he went to court last week. Former president facing 34 felony counts. Nothing like that in all American history.
And I found myself feeling … bored. What’s wrong with me?
Bret: Nothing is wrong with you. It’s a normal reaction because none of it is news: We’ve known about the hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels for years, and we’ve been discussing this indictment for weeks.
On the other hand, it reminds me of what Orson Welles supposedly said about flying — something to the effect that the only two emotions one can possibly have on an airplane are boredom and terror. Watching Trump’s speech in Mar-a-Lago later that night was the terror part for me, because he is very likely to ride this misbegotten indictment all the way to the Republican nomination, not to mention an eventual acquittal on appeal — if it even gets to an appeal.
Gail: Listening to the post-indictment speech, I was sorta surprised it was pretty much just … his speech. No sense that this crisis was going to turn anything around. That goes to your point that all this is just another piece of equipment for his re-election tour.
Bret: I hate to say this, but in Trump’s lizardly way his speech was masterful His pitch has always been that he’s fighting a corrupt system — even if what he’s really doing is corrupting the system. And in the progressive district attorney, Alvin Bragg, he’s got a perfect foil. It’s why I hate the fact that this particular case is the one they’re throwing against him. The case in Georgia is so much stronger.
Gail: Hey, New York gets the proverbial ball rolling. But trying to overturn the results of a presidential election — really overturn them — is a tad more serious. Once we move on to Georgia, we really move on.
Bret: Assuming Trump isn’t president again by the time we get there.
I also hate the fact that this case allows him to suck up all of the available political oxygen. All of us in the news media are like moths to the flame, or lambs to the slaughter, or lemmings to the cliff, or, well, pick your cliché.
Gail: Hamsters to the wheel? I’d like something more … nonviolent.
Speaking of elections, what did you think about the mayoral contest in Chicago? Deep liberal versus conservative Democrat, right? And guess who won.
Bret: Seemed to me like a choice between a sane moderate, Paul Vallas, versus a not-so-sane progressive, Brandon Johnson. I wish Johnson well, because I love Chicago and always root for the White Sox except when they play the Yankees. But I’m fearful for its future as a city where people will want to work, invest and build. The No. 1 issue in the city is public safety, and I don’t think that Johnson’s the guy to restore it, even if he no longer supports defunding the police the way he once did.
Gail: Pretty hard to combat crime in a city like Chicago unless the law-abiding folks in high-crime neighborhoods have confidence in you.
Bret: Sure. Also hard to get cops to do their jobs when they feel they’re mayor doesn’t have their backs.
Gail: Of course, the best thing anybody could do to curb crime in Chicago would be to get guns off the street. The city has very tough gun control laws, but they don’t mean a heck of a lot as long as there’s a massive flow of illegal weapons coming in from outside.
Bret: Sorta demonstrating the futility of Chicago gun control …
Gail: Bret, we’ve been talking about abortion rights becoming such a powerhouse election issue. Any chance we’ll ever see the same thing happen with guns?
Bret: Well, you saw what happened with the state legislators in Tennessee, two of whom got expelled after they held a protest in the legislative chamber. A lot of political theater. Not a lot of legislative accomplishment.
Gail: Sigh.
Bret: Gail, this week’s conversation has been too depressing. So, if you haven’t already, be sure to read our colleague Esau McCaulley’s beautiful, profound meditation on the meaning of Easter. It’s not my holiday, religiously speaking, but I couldn’t help but be moved by two paragraphs in particular.
First, Esau asks: “Isn’t it easier to believe that everyone who loves us has some secret agenda? That racism will forever block the creation of what Martin Luther King Jr. called the beloved community? That the gun lobby will always overwhelm every attempt at reform? That poverty is a fact of human existence? Despair allows us to give up our resistance and rest awhile.”
And then: “That indestructibility of hope might be the central and most radical claim of Easter — that three days after Jesus was killed, he returned to his disciples physically and that made all the difference. Easter, then, is not a metaphor for new beginnings; it is about encountering the person who, despite every disappointment we experience with ourselves and with the world, gives us a reason to carry on.”