For Republicans, the investigations into Clarence Thomas and his friendship with Harlan Crow, a Texas billionaire, are just pretexts for an attack on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.

“This assault on Justice Thomas is well beyond ethics,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week on Supreme Court ethics reform. “It’s about trying to delegitimize a conservative court that was appointed through the traditional process.”

“This is an unseemly effort by the Democratic left to destroy the legitimacy of the Roberts court,” he went on to say. “It’s put people at risk. It’s put their personal safety at risk.”

Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa accused Democrats and their “allies in the liberal media” of waging “a crusade to threaten to pack and smear the courts.” And Senator Mike Lee of Utah described the questions about Thomas’s conduct as “attacks” that are “undermining the rule of law, endangering the security of the justices and their families, […]