There will be no efforts to hold Clarence Thomas for his seeming conflicts of interest

Nobody has the political will or incentive to hold Mr Thomas accountable. That will ding the image of the court in the public view.

On Thursday, ProPublica dropped a massive investigative report which revealed that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had accepted obscenely expensive gifts and vacations from a Texas billionaire named Harlan Crow.

The many benefits Mr Thomas has received include a $500,000 island-hopping trip off the coast of Indonesia; flying on Mr Crow’s private jet; attending the exclusive Bohemian Grove retreat and visiting Mr Crow’s ranch in East Texas. One particular image that stood out is a painting that features Mr Thomas holding court, cigar in hand, with friends, including Leonard Leo, the head of the conservative Federalist Society that has helped move the Supreme Court rightward.

More importantly, the archconservative justice who is currently the longest serving jurist on the high court appears to not have disclosed the trips.

Almost immediately in the wake of the report dropping, some progressives criticised Mr Thomas. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the number-two Democrat on the House Oversight & Accountability Committee, called the “degree of corruption is shocking - almost cartoonish” and called for the justice to be impeached. Representative Bill Pascrell of New Jersey called Thomas “corrupt as hell” and said he should resign from the court.

This is, of course, not the first time that Mr Thomas has courted controversy.

During his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, led by then-Senator Joe Biden, he faced accusations of sexual harassment from Anita Hill. Then last year, stories in The Washington Post abounded about how Mr Thomas’s wife Ginni Thomas tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. To many conservatives, all of this scrutiny has turned Mr Thomas into a martyr for their cause. (The fact he is also one of the most prominent Black conservatives also allows them to claim liberals are being hypocritical when they speak about racial equity).

Despite the outrage, Mr Thomas will likely avoid any measures of accountability largely because nobody has a vested interest in doing so.

First and foremost, any impeachment proceedings would need to begin in the House of Representatives, which Republicans currently control. Given that Mr Thomas is one of the biggest stalwarts on the court for originalism, the specific ideology that many conservatives espouse when interpreting the US Constitution, they have no vested interest in doing so.

Even if, somehow, an impeachment were to miraculously go through the House, the votes would not exist to convict Mr Thomas. If it did convict him, Republicans would be allowing President Joe Biden to nominate a replacement, thereby ending the seminal 6-3 conservative majority.

Now that Democrats have 51 Senate seats, they would no longer have to worry about a tie in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which means it would be fast-tracked to the Senate floor. All of that makes Republicans incredibly unlikely to take any measures that could lead to his downfall. Impeachment has and always will be a political question and the politics don’t favor Republicans deposing a justice.

That leaves Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts as the only person who could impose some kind of penalties against Mr Thomas for his alleged improprieties. But as the ProPublica story notes, while a federal code of conduct governs how lower-court judges conduct themselves, Mr Roberts has said the Supreme Court merely “consults” the code of conduct, essentially allowing the court to self-police.

Since Mr Roberts has chosen not to reprimand Mr Thomas in the past, even given the blatant conflicts of interest with his wife being a prominent conservative activist, it is safe to deduce he won’t punish Mr Thomas.

Tthis comes at a time when the Supreme Court faces a legitimacy crisis. Trust in the court as an institution has reached an all-time polling low. The court’s rightward lurch, partially facilitated by Mr Leo and Mr Thomas becoming one of its elder leaders, has made many people believe jurists are politicians in robes. Last year’s leak of the Dobbs v Jackson decision further deteriorated its image.

Of course, if nobody wants to impeach justices and the votes aren’t there, then the court can continue as is. But it will no longer hold the venerated status within the country it enjoyed for decades.