The left smears him for the opinions of his wife, Ginni, a standard never applied to other judges.
“We are long past the day when a wife’s opinions are assumed to be the same as her husband’s.”
So argued Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, in 2013. If the professor’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s been cited by seemingly every major media outlet since news broke last week that Virginia Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, sent text messages to Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows urging him to fight the 2020 election results.
The Los Angeles Times described Mr. Gillers as a “judicial ethics scholar,” and the New York Times dubbed him “one of the nation’s foremost legal-ethics experts.” But it turns out that the professor’s ethics, like those of a lot of liberal Democrats these days, are situational. In 2013 he was defending a decision by late-Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals not to recuse himself from a case involving the American Civil Liberties Union, even though Reinhart’s wife, Ramona Ripston, had served as executive director of the ACLU for Southern California.
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. He is the author of the recent book “The Black Boom.”
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal