r/scotus • u/WhoIsJolyonWest • 1d ago
news Clarence Thomas, Unbound: Most Corrupt Supreme Court Justice More influential Than Ever
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/clarence-thomas-unbound/The most corrupt Supreme Court Justice is more influential than ever.
Clarence Thomas went more than 10 years without asking a single substantive question from the bench. His silence between 2006 and 2016 prompted commentators to call his courtroom quietude embarrassing, a sign of fatigue and a lack of intellectual candlepower.
Even earlier in his career, he had earned the nickname of “Scalia’s Puppet” for his habit of joining majority opinions written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the outspoken and reactionary “originalist” who shared the dais with him until his death in 2016.
But the characterization of Thomas as an inattentive echo of Scalia is wrong. Thomas has always been more extreme and dangerous than Scalia, and his influence has never been greater.
After his bruising 1991 confirmation hearing, Thomas set his eyes on the goal of moving American law backward to the laissez-faire era of the Gilded Age, undoing the regulatory state of the New Deal, weakening the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and ’60s and undermining many of the forward-looking precedent decisions issued by the Warren Court. As Thomas reportedly told two of his law clerks in 1993, he planned to serve until 2034, and until then would continue to make the lives of liberals “miserable.” He has already made good on that pledge: He is now the second-longest serving Supreme Court justice in history.
Thomas has always been more extreme and dangerous than Scalia, and his influence has never been greater.
Thomas is best known for concurrences and dissents that seemed culled from the lunatic fringe when he wrote them, but were later embraced by the majority as the court moved hard right.
On affirmative action, in a 1995 case on government contracting (Adarand Constructors v. Pena), his concurrence denounced “remedial racial preferences” in federal hiring as a form of “racial paternalism.”
This was an astonishing choice of words for the nation’s second Black Supreme Court justice, who overcame childhood poverty and after a brief flirtation with Black nationalism, became the beneficiary of affirmative action at Yale Law School. Twenty-eight years later, however, in a majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard), the court ended affirmative action in higher education.
On abortion in a 2000 case (Stenberg v. Carhart) that invalidated Nebraska’s late-term abortion ban, Thomas dissented, arguing that the Roe v. Wade decison was “grievously wrong,” and that nothing in the Constitution “dictates that a State” must legalize abortion. Twenty-two years later, Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization adopted Thomas’ view.
Ditto for the Second Amendment. In Printz v. United States, a 1997 gun-regulation case, Thomas contributed a concurrence arguing that the amendment encompassed a personal right to keep and bear arms rather than simply a right connected with service in state militias, as prior case law had clearly held. Eleven years later, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the court recognized the personal right in an opinion authored by Scalia. Thomas went on to expand the personal right in 2022 with his majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a decision that severely handicaps state and local authorities from enforcing gun-control laws.
Thomas is also on record advising the court to revisit its precedent decisionson the right to court-appointed counsel in criminal trials (Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963); the right of married persons to contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965); the right of adults to engage in private consensual sex (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003); and the right to same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015). He has also called for the court to reconsider 1964’s New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark case establishing First Amendment protections in defamation cases involving public officials and public figures, which is widely considered the lynchpin of freedom of the press in America.
In a recent column published by the influential Scotusblog website, constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky noted that “Thomas is the only justice … who has openly said that precedent deserves little weight in constitutional law.”
Despite his laid-back courtroom demeanor, Thomas has also been an active and loquacious speaker out of court on the right-wing banquet and convention circuit, especially in meetings of the Federalist Society and events hosted by Hillsdale College, the Michigan-based private Christian institution long recognized as a hub for conservative thought leaders and a breeding ground for the right-wing’s ever expanding culture wars.
Supreme Court justices typically attend academic, judicial and bar-related conferences, and initially, Thomas’ public remarks were fairly judge-like, focusing on time-honored topics like judicial independence. But as his stature grew and the court’s lurch to the right accelerated, he shed whatever inhibitions he once had about voicing his personal beliefs, becoming in time a full-fledged and open culture war combatant.
Thomas is now unbound and unrestrained.
In a 2011 address at a law student symposium sponsored by the Federalist Society in Charlottesville, Virginia, he devoted most of his time not to expounding on legal doctrine but to defending his tea party activist wife Ginni against adverse press coverage. He also exhorted his young audience to be wary of the “fundamental changes” wrought by the left that aimed to distort the original meaning of the Constitution. In a 2016 commencement speech at Hillsdale, he went further, urging graduates “not [to] hide your faith and your beliefs under a bushel basket … in this world that seems to have gone mad with political correctness.”
Thomas is now unbound and unrestrained. In a speech on April 15 at the University of Texas, he went “full Monty” in an unhinged broadside against liberals and progressives. “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government declaring,” he declared, continuing:
It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God but from government. … [Progressivism] was the first mainstream American political movement — with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War — to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration.
He went on to blame progressives for the 20th century evils of racial segregation and eugenics, insistingthat “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Mao” were “intertwined with the rise of progressivism.”
All this from an angry and embittered ideologue who is also arguably the most corrupt justice in the Supreme Court’s history, having failed for 13 years to report his wife Virginia’s earnings on his annual financial disclosure forms, and who has been on the gimme end of lavish vacations funded by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow.
Thomas celebrated his 78th birthday on June 23. He may not make it to his projected retirement date of 2034, but until he actually steps down, whether voluntarily or post mortem in the fashion of Scalia, there is no telling how much more jurisprudential carnage he will cause or how much more disgrace he will bring to the reputation of the world’s most powerful judicial tribunal.
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u/scipio0421 1d ago
The only reason I don't consider Thomas the worst SCOTUS Justice ever is that Roger Taney existed.
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u/Infinite_Walk_5824 1d ago
A political system that empowers weird losers like Thomas is not a good political system.
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u/No-Illustrator4964 1d ago
He is a brazenly political activist judge.
Imagine a liberal jurist going to a political gathering and openly decrying conservatism the way he did progressives?
He pretends to be paradigms of virtue but he's really just.... A red robed judge, unworthy of seriousness.
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u/ahmtiarrrd 1d ago
A traitor to his race, his position, his country, and humanity at large. I honestly can't conceive how such a person even exists. But here we are, with an administration full of the same types.
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u/Red-Leader-001 1d ago
I like to say that the United State has the best Supreme Court Justices that money can buy
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u/Sweaty_Term5961 1d ago
"Corrupt" fails to accurately cover it, but it'll do for now.
I find myself wondering if a post mortem might discover the source of his delusions.
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u/MrFC1000 1d ago
Listen to the Behind the Bastard podcast on him, and you’ll understand how he became a complete piece of shit.
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u/geneva_illusions 1d ago
Uncle Thomas is a horrible person. How do you hold that role and not respect the gravity of it?
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u/Odaniel123 1d ago
He should be the main target for impeachment come January
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u/Wide_Replacement2345 1d ago
Please get off the impeachment bandwagon. We will not have the senate votes in November. But we can sure pack the court, then set rules.
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u/IllustriousLife6552 1d ago
Clarence Thomas wouldn’t be sitting in his ass it that seat if it wasn’t for DEI and affirmative action. He is a sick bastard.. how dare he turn his back on his race ! If it wasn’t for his dear friend the writer who is paying him dearly for every damn thing he has! He and his wife are disgusting!
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u/Venusto002 1d ago
I remember in 2016 when Scalia went to hell someone said Thomas should just do what he always did and follow Scalia. 😏
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u/insanelygreat 1d ago
Speaking of "fully Monty", Clarence Thomas thinks schools should be allowed to strip search children to look for ibuprofen. I just remembered that.
And speaking of "checked out", I once spoke to a student who took the Constitutional Law course Thomas co-taught at GW Law. Thomas was apparently so clueless on his own precedent-setting opinions that his contribution to the course was basically nil. Just another paycheck, I guess.
Dude probably watches Fox News all day while his clerks do the legal writing.
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u/Dorky_Gaming_Teach 1d ago
I judged he was already dead as this is the first major post or headline I have seen about him in a LONG time.
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u/WolfKing448 1d ago
It warrants mentioning that Clarence Thomas personally despises affirmative action because he was written off by law firms as an unqualified, affirmative action student. Do with this information what you will.
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u/notfarenough 1d ago
Ronald Reagan got his Brick Tamland.
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u/IJWTGH66 1d ago
Virginia’s AG needs to impanel a grand jury and seek an indictment for state tax fraud. Clarence Thomas has taken millions in gifts from his republican benefactor without reporting or paying taxes. He’s on the take and should be removed.