Virginia Thomas received nearly $700,000 from the Heritage Foundation between 2003 and 2007 — and that income was not disclosed on Justice Thomas’ financial disclosure forms as required by law. The Heritage Foundation opposes health care reform, and the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act is likely to be appealed to the Supreme Court. In addition, Virginia Thomas recently started a lobbying firm and will serve as an “ambassador to the Tea Party movement.”

In their letter, the House members, all Democrats, also noted that Virginia Thomas and her Liberty Central stood to benefit from the Citizens United decision in 2010 in which Justice Thomas sided with corporations making independent political expenditures.

The House members are asking Justice Thomas to recuse himself if the high court hears a case questioning the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.

Here’s the letter:

Dear Justice Thomas:

As an Associate Justice, you are entrusted with the responsibility to exercise the highest degree of discretion and impartiality when deciding a case. As Members of Congress, we were surprised by recent revelations of your financial ties to leading organizations dedicated to lobbying against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. We write today to respectfully ask that you maintain the integrity of this court and recuse yourself from any deliberations on the constitutionality of this act.

The appearance of a conflict of interest merits recusal under federal law. From what we have already seen, the line between your impartiality and you and your wife’s financial stake in the overturn of health care reform is blurred. Your spouse is advertising herself as a lobbyist who has “experience and connections” and appeals to clients who want a particular decision – they want to overturn health care reform. Moreover, your failure to disclose Ginny Thomas’s receipt of $686,589 from the Heritage Foundation, a prominent opponent of health care reform, between 2003 and 2007 has raised great concern.

This is not the first case where your impartiality was in question. As Common Cause points out, you “participated in secretive political strategy sessions, perhaps while the case was pending, with corporate leaders whose political aims were advanced by the [5-4] decision” on the Citizens United case. Your spouse also received an undisclosed salary paid for by undisclosed donors as CEO of Liberty Central, a 501(c)(4) organization that stood to benefit from the decision and played an active role in the 2010 elections.

Given these facts, there is a strong conflict between the Thomas household’s financial gain through your spouse’s activities and your role as Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. We urge you to recuse yourself from this case. If the US Supreme Court’s decision is to be viewed as legitimate by the American people, this is the only correct path.

We appreciate your thoughtful consideration of this request.

Sincerely,

Reps. Anna G. Eshoo, Anthony D. Weiner, Al Green, E.B. Johnson, Wm. Lacy Clay, Russ Carnahan, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Karen Bass, Richard Neal, Peter Welch, Judy Chu, John Yarmuth, Betty Sutton, Ed Perlmutter, Gerald Connolly, Dennis Kucinich, Kendrick Meeks, Allyson Schwartz, Lloyd Doggett, Gwen Moore, Jared Polis, Maxine Waters, Donald Payne, Bobby Rush, Steve Cohen, Joseph Crowley, Eliot Engel, David Cicilline, Susan Davis, Albio Sires, Mike Doyle, Louise Slaughter, Jim McDermott, Nydia Velazquez, John Garamendi, André Carson, Michael Capuano, Shelley Berkley, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Tim Bishop, Barbara Lee, Joe Courtney, Rosa DeLauro, John Conyers, John Larson, George Miller, Leonard Boswell, Donna Edwards, Lois Capps, Xavier Becerra, Theodore Deutch, Steve Israel, Bill Owens, Laura Richardson, Clarke, Mazie Hirono, Gary Ackerman, Keith Ellison, Raul Grijalva, Chris Murphy, Lynn Woolsey, Peter DeFazio, Jesse Jackson Jr, Sylvester Reyes, Carolyn Maloney, Robert Andrews, Bill Pascrell, Bob Filner, Paul Tonko, Marcia Fudge, Maurice Hinchey, Mike Honda, Frank Pallone, Pete Stark

However, there will still be one section of the building where partisan divides are apparent. Six of the nine Supreme Court justices are set to attend tonight’s speech, with all three absentees hailing from the conservative wing of the court.

Bloomberg reports:

Kathy Arberg, the Supreme Court’s spokeswoman, said that six justices are planning to attend tonight, though she wouldn’t specify which ones. Justice Samuel Alito is in Hawaii, and two other Republican-appointed justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, have strongly suggested in public comments that they won’t go.

Only two Republican appointed justices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy, will be in attendance whereas all justices nominated by a Democratic president will be at the speech.

The division between Obama and the conservative justices was readily apparent during last year’s State of the Union. In one segment of his speech, President Obama criticized the court’s ruling in Citizens United, to which Alito visibly responded by shaking his head and mouthing the phrase “not true.” After that interaction, some questioned whether it was proper for the supposedly impartial Supreme Court justices to attend the State of the Union speech. Nevertheless, the absence of the court’s three most conservative members at Obama’s speech will only increase the already-clear divide of the court.

The invitation makes clear that the Koch-led meetings are a twice-annual affair. At its last meeting in Aspen, Colo., in June, its participants, which include some of the wealthiest people in America, listened to a presentation on “a vision of how we can retain the moral high ground and make the new case for liberty and smaller government that appeals to all Americans, rich and poor.”

The letter obtained by the Times also included a brochure from the Aspen meeting, along with a list of the event’s approximately 200 guests:

The participants in Aspen dined under the stars at the top of the gondola run on Aspen Mountain, and listened to Glenn Beck of Fox News in a session titled, “Is America on the Road to Serfdom?” (The title refers to a classic of Austrian economic thought that informs libertarian ideology, popularized by Mr. Beck on his show.) The participants included some of the nation’s wealthiest families and biggest names in finance: private equity and hedge fund executives like John Childs, Cliff Asness, Steve Schwarzman and Ken Griffin; Phil Anschutz, the entertainment and media mogul ranked by Forbes as the 34th-richest person in the country; Rich DeVos, the co-founder of Amway; Steve Bechtel of the giant construction firm; and Kenneth Langone of Home Depot.

The list also included prominent GOP figures like Fred Malek, current chairman of the 501(c)(4) American Action Network, which shares office space with American Crossroads, and Foster Friess, a wealthy investor, evangelical Christian and Bush donor. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce gave a presentation at the Aspen meeting, while past attendees have included Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, Govs. Haley Barbour (R-Miss.) and Bobby Jindal (R-La.), and Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.).

Here is the witness list from the committee’s website:

Panel I

Majority Witnesses

Lilly Ledbetter — Plaintiff, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire

Jack Gross — Plaintiff, Gross v. FBL Financial Services Inc.

Jennifer Gibbins — Soundkeeper/Executive Director, Prince William Soundkeeper

Minority Witnesses

Captain Flagg Youngblood — United States Army (ret.)

Captain Pete Hegseth — Executive Director, Vets for Freedom
Army National Guard

Colonel Thomas N. Moe — United States Air Force (ret.)

Panel II

Majority Witnesses

Professor Jack Goldsmith — Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Captain Kurt White — President, Harvard Law Armed Forces Association
Army National Guard

Professor Robert C. Clark — Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Austin Wakeman Scott Professor of Law, and former Dean,
Harvard Law School

Gregory Garre — Partner, Lantham & Watkins, Former Solicitor General of the United States

Minority Witnesses

Ronald Rotunda — The Doy & Dee Henley Chair and Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence, Chapman University School of Law

Robert Alt — Senior Fellow and Deputy Director, Center for Legal and Judicial Studies
The Heritage Foundation

Ed Whelan — President, Ethics and Public Policy Center

Professor Stephen Presser — Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History, Northwestern University School of Law

Panel III

Kim J. Askew, Esq. — Chair, American Bar Association, Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary

William J. Kayatta, Jr. — First Circuit Representative, American Bar Association, Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary

Majority Witnesses

Professor Ronald Sullivan — Edward R. Johnston Lecturer on Law, Director of the Criminal Justice Institute, Harvard Law School

Marcia Greenberger — Founder and Co-President, National Women’s Law Center

Justice Fernande “Nan” Duffly — Associate Justice, Massachusetts Court of Appeals, on behalf of the National Association of Women Judges

Minority Witnesses

Dr. Charmaine Yoest — President & CEO, Americans United for Life

Tony Perkins — President, Family Research Council

Commissioner Peter Kirsanow — Benesch Law Firm

David Kopel — Research Director, Independence Institute

William J. Olson — William J. Olson, P.C.

This is the portion of a confirmation hearing when a Supreme Court nominee can sometimes face the most trouble — Anita Hill’s testimony during the Clarence Thomas 1991 confirmation hearings comes to mind. Kagan could potentially hit some bumps in the form of testimony surrounding her dealings with military recruiters while she was dean of Harvard Law School. There are witnesses for both the Democrats and the Republicans who will testify on this issue.

For what it’s worth, I don’t see any controversy in Ginni Thomas’s new venture. She was a political activist in the 1990s; she was an activist in the Bush years; she’s an activist now. I see this as the latest data point in the Tea Party’s alliance with the old-line conservative establishment. Tea Partiers are picking and choosing which conservatives they want to validate, and I’ve never heard them criticize the likes of Justice Thomas. Ginni Thomas, too, is close to activists taken very seriously by Tea Partiers, like Mark Levin. But stuff like this should really settle the question of “Tea Partiers — conservative movement or rising force of angry independents?”

The most interesting thing about the poll might be the alliance between Thomas, a long-time Washington, D.C. fixer and alum of Dick Armey’s congressional office, and the grassroots Tea Party Patriots. The findings are overwhelmingly positive for Tea Partiers — 85 percent of all people polled, for example, worry that “America might be losing the core of what made America great.”

The full poll after the jump.

021810 LC TPP Press Release Poll

“To some extent, it’s unsettling,” says Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. “You quickly get to view the court as . . . composed of these members, and it becomes kind of hard to think of it as involving anyone else. I suspect it’s like people look at their families.”

“It’s stressful for us because we so admire our colleagues,” adds Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. “We wonder, oh, will it ever be the same?”

“It changes the whole family,” agrees Justice Clarence Thomas. “It’s different. … I have to admit you grow very fond of the court that you spend a long time on. … You get comfortable with that, and then it changes. And now it’s changing again. So the institution, the Nine, is different, the reaction is different. You get to learn each other and you have to start all over, the chemistry is different.”

Although Justice Sotomayor has already participated in some decisions, including a dissent from the court’s refusal to consider a death penalty case involving a potentially innocent man, on Tuesday the new court will hear its first oral arguments, beginning with the much-anticipated campaign finance case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

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The proposal attempts to close a loophole created by a 2005 Supreme Court decision, which found that the prohibition on gun ownership applies only to felons convicted in U.S. courts. In handing down that decision, Justice Stephen Breyer indicated that if Congress intended the ban to apply also to foreign convictions, it would have to craft legislation saying so.

On Wednesday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) complied. Her proposal — co-sponsored by Sens. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) — would force the courts to treat foreign felony convictions the same as domestic convictions for purposes of gun ownership. Exceptions would be made in cases when felons could prove either that their conduct would not have been a crime in the United States or that they were denied due process in the foreign court.

“Foreign felons actually have greater gun rights than Americans convicted of felonies or crimes of domestic violence in our own courts,” Feinstein said in a statement. “In a country filled with senseless gun violence, we cannot continue to give murderers, rapists and other violent criminals convicted in foreign countries an unlimited right to buy firearms and assault weapons in the United States.”

The gun control debate is one that usually falls along predictable lines of ideology. But if the 2005 Supreme Court decision is any indication, this proposal might bring out some surprises. Indeed, the Court’s most conservative justices — Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — voted with the dissent.

The Estrada experience comes up all of the time, as a justification for filibusters of Obama nominees (it’s rarely reported how extraordinary it is that the smallest Republican conference since the 1970s can keep on blocking the likes of Dawn Johnsen) and as a straight-up whine that George W. Bush, not Barack Obama, should have broken the barrier by appointing a Hispanic justice.

Neomi Rao, a law professor at George Mason University who worked on judicial nominations for Mr. Bush, said Mr. Bush “should have gotten to name the first Hispanic justice on the court.”

“He really wanted to do so,” Professor Rao said.

But she said that he was largely stymied when Democrats blocked Mr. Estrada from going on the appeals court.

Here’s the thing: Bush didn’t have to appoint Estrada to make a historic move. In 2005, when the Supreme Court seats opened up, Bush could have appointed his then-50-year-old Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. But Bush declined to pick Estrada in part (based on reports from the time) because social conservatives did not believe that Gonzales was a solid vote against abortion rights. The buzz phrase, according to Ramesh Ponnuru, was “Gonzales is Spanish for Souter.” The idea that an ultra-forward-looking President Bush and collection of racially conscious Republicans were denied the opportunity to appoint a Hispanic justice when they lost Estrada is simply bunk.

Though Justice Clarence Thomas didn’t agree (he doesn’t think the court should “second-guess” school officials when it comes to discipline), the eight justices in the majority ruled that given that there was no apparent danger to other students, strip-searching Savana Redding, now a 19-year-old college student, was an unconstitutional overreaction.

The decision, Safford United School District v. Redding (08-479), is available here.

The court didn’t rule out strip-searches at schools completely, however; seven justices ruled that today’s decision applied only to future strip-searches, so neither Redding nor anyone else who’s ever been unconstitutionally humiliated in this manner has any remedy.

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