STENCH

A full-throated denunciation of a corrupt, thoroughly politicized Supreme Court in which the true chief justice is Clarence Thomas.

It was Brock, then a writer for right-wing publications, who coined the infamous slur on Clarence Thomas accuser Anita Hill, “a bit nutty and a bit slutty.” He’s been atoning ever since. Thomas, as recent news accounts have made clear, has no qualms about accepting gifts from wealthy supporters of extreme right-wing causes; nor will he recuse himself from cases that by all ethical standards he should not hear, including recent rulings on executive power and on the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack. The Court, writes Brock, became Thomas’s the minute Amy Coney Barrett took Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s seat on the bench in 2020: “[John] Roberts could no longer preside over a conservative court that respected precedent. This was no longer the Roberts Court.” The Court was really owned, Brock holds, by right-wing fixer and ultra-Catholic Leonard Leo, the source of so many of those gifts to Thomas: it was Leo, Brock chronicles, who essentially brokered the morally compromised Donald Trump’s acceptance by the Christian right with the understanding that Trump would appoint an Opus Dei–leaning, hard-Catholic justice, and so he did. Citizens United was an early test case, and with its victory, which allows Leo to make his contributions in secret, “the power of Thomas and Leo was only just ramping up—­and it would take years for anyone to survey the extent of the damage to the viability of the U.S. experiment in democracy,” Brock writes. The other conservative justices, notably Brett Kavanaugh—whom Brock accuses of multiple counts of perjury—are nearly as bad, but Brock is clearly focused on Thomas; he closes by laying out a convincing case for impeachment.

Critics of the current Supreme Court will find plenty of support in Brock’s aggrieved, well-documented exposé.