Clarence Thomas

Found via res ipsa loquitur at Rising Hegemon, The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin reviews Clarence Thomas' autobiography in an article titled Unforgiven: Why is Clarence Thomas So Angry?. Here are some insightful bits:

A touchstone of Clarence Thomas’s career on the Supreme Court has been his hostility to what he calls élites.

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This theme is expanded upon in Thomas’s new memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son” (Harper; $26.95). In his book, Thomas is clear about whom he blames for the pain of his confirmation hearings, when he had to defend himself against Anita Hill’s accusations. “In one climactic swipe of calumny,” Thomas writes, “America’s elites were arrogantly wreaking havoc on everything my grandparents had worked for and all I’d accomplished in forty-three years of struggle.”

Triumph over the élites, Thomas writes, took faith in God and, especially, courage. This, too, has been a longtime theme for him, and he elaborated upon it in the annual Francis Boyer lecture of the American Enterprise Institute on February 13, 2001.

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On this night, in other words, Thomas, while celebrating the courage to speak unpopular truths, was telling some of the most powerful people in the worlds of government, business, and finance precisely what they wanted to hear—that affirmative action was bad, that black people didn’t want or need their help, that government did more harm than good. Be not afraid. Indeed, throughout his judicial career Thomas has, in the name of anti-élitism, shown a distinct solicitude for certain kinds of élites—say, for employers over employees, for government over individuals, for corporations over regulators, and for executioners over the condemned. Thomas’s tender concern for the problems of the powerful reveals itself, in the end, as a form of self-pity.

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For almost eight years, Thomas seems to have done a competent job running the E.E.O.C. Reagan’s people had, in a model demonstration of affirmative action, looked beyond the traditional candidates for leadership positions, and taken a chance on Thomas, and he had done as well as any white executive could have been expected to do. But, as Thomas moved through the hierarchy of Republican Administrations, the paternalism didn’t seem to bother him anymore—or else he found it convenient to pretend that it did not exist. Thomas’s rhetoric against traditional civil-rights dogma became more strident, even as he became an ever more prominent beneficiary of it. In other words, Yale and Reagan treated him the same way, but he hates one and reveres the other. Thomas never acknowledges, much less explains, the contradiction.

This omission becomes even more glaring when Thomas begins to discuss his judicial career. In 1989, he was hardly an obvious candidate for the court of appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is generally regarded as second in importance only to the Supreme Court. Just forty-one years old, Thomas had never tried a case, or argued an appeal, in any federal court, much less in the high-powered D.C. Circuit; the last time Thomas had appeared in any courtroom was when he was a junior attorney in Missouri; he had never produced any scholarly work; his tenure at the E.E.O.C., although respectable, did not mark him as a notable innovator in the federal bureaucracy. He was, in short, a black conservative in an Administration with very few of them. That’s why he got the job.

And that’s also why, in 1991, after Thomas had been a judge for just sixteen months, Bush named him to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court.

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As Thomas recalls the conversation with Gray, he said that the Bush Administration wanted “to avoid appointing me to what was widely perceived as the court’s ‘black’ seat.” But, of course, that is precisely what Bush did, and it is inconceivable that a young white lawyer who headed a modest federal agency would have been similarly rushed onto the Supreme Court. In the light of this conversation with Gray, though, Thomas declares that his race worked against him as a potential judicial appointee. It is hard to tell whether this is self-delusion or dishonesty.

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For Thomas, though, the confirmation hearings served as a metaphor for his larger struggles. “I refused to bow to the superior wisdom of the white liberals who thought they knew what was better for blacks,” he writes. “Since I didn’t know my place, I had to be put down.” Sixteen years later, the hearings remain a fresh wound. At the time, in his own testimony, he memorably called the hearings “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks,” and in his book Thomas expands on the comment: “As a child in the Deep South, I’d grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult, I was starting to wonder if I’d been afraid of the wrong white people all along. My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia but in Washington, D.C., where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.” After sixteen years’ reflection, to compare the actions of Anita Hill’s supporters with those of the K.K.K. reflects an inability to draw distinctions, not least because Thomas, unlike most of those targeted by the Klan, won his battle with his pursuers. Apparently, it did not feel that way to him. Thomas writes in his memoir, “Mere confirmation, even to the Supreme Court, seemed pitifully small compensation for what had been done to me.”

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"My Grandfather’s Son” scarcely mentions Thomas’s work on the Supreme Court. Before arriving at the Court, he had said little about what kind of Justice he would be; indeed, thanks to the Pin Point strategy, the pre-Anita Hill portion of his confirmation hearings had been close to a farce. Drawing a lesson from Robert Bork’s confirmation hearings, which had taken place four years earlier, Thomas declined to express his views on judicial issues, portraying himself as simply open-minded about matters of constitutional interpretation.

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Almost immediately after arriving on the Court, Thomas began expressing a quite well-honed judicial philosophy—one that reflects the most deeply felt ideology on the Court.

Thomas’s ideology is originalism; that is, he believes that the Constitution should be interpreted in accord with what he sees as the original intent of the framers. Eight months after Thomas joined the Court, in 1992, it issued its famous Casey decision, in which five Justices upheld what they called the “central holding” of Roe v. Wade, and thus preserved some constitutional protection for a woman’s right to abortion. In that case, Thomas joined Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion, which, on the basis of an originalist reading of the Constitution, called for Roe to be overturned. (Thomas had not shared with the Senate Judiciary Committee either his originalism or his hostility to Roe.)

The early alliance with Scalia has long prompted speculation that Thomas merely parrots the views of his fellow-conservative, but that has never been the case. Scalia calls himself a “faint-hearted” originalist, because contemporary conditions sometimes influence his reading of the Constitution. But there is nothing faint-hearted about Thomas’s approach. For example, as long ago as 1995 he was asserting that much of the New Deal, and thus much of the contemporary work of the federal government, was unconstitutional.

The article goes into depth about Thomas' life and job and is excellently well done. But just one thing to note: The Supreme Court's appointment is for life and he's only 59....