The Clarence Thomas Scandal Is About More Than Corruption

As soon as the story broke that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had, for decades, been taking expensive vacations on the dime of billionaire Harlan Crow, liberal critics and conservative defenders huddled around the same question: Had Thomas sold his votes on the court to the highest bidder?

Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, led off with a tweet that Crow funds a conservative outfit that has filed briefs in eight different Supreme Court cases. Each time, Thomas sided with Crow’s group. This wasn’t quite the gotcha liberals were looking for, though. Four of those decisions and judgments were unanimous, and in the other four, Thomas joined with some, sometimes all, the court’s conservative justices.