No one has said why Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was absent from Monday’s oral arguments.
The news of Thomas’s withdrawal from the public corruption case was disclosed by Chief Justice John Roberts not long after the court had commenced its Monday morning arguments. The court has frequently offered an explanation in the past, such as mentioning that a justice was unwell. There are occasions when those justices participate in arguments from a distance.
Several arguments in 2022 were skipped by 75-year-old Thomas, the senior associate justice on the high court, due to an ailment.
On Monday, when his colleagues heard arguments in two cases, Thomas was not there. The Supreme Court did not address a request for further information regarding his absence.
An investigation into potential violations of federal anti-corruption statutes was the primary focus of the first, which concerned a payment that the former mayor of Portage, Indiana, received from a city contractor. The second one included an Ohio jewelry store manager’s lawsuit against the police, in which he claimed that the cops lacked probable cause to arrest him for money laundering.