Clarence Thomas



…Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt. I’m not a nut. Clarence Thomas is a radical wingnut, homophobe, diversity hire, and member of the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS). He is also the second African American to be elevated to the Supreme Court (he succeeded the first, Thurgood Marshall). In his early years, he was seen as little more than an echo of Antonin Scalia (as of 2014, Scalia and Thomas voted together 91% of the time), the most conservative member of the court. However, over the years, Thomas has become more vocal and started staking out positions often further to the right than even Scalia.

Justice Thomas hasn't been big on giving the world glimpses into his thought processes. With alarming consistency, he cosigned whatever Nino said, with no further comment. Like a solar eclipse or the bloom of a corpse flower, the release of an actual opinion from Justice Thomas is a rare event noteworthy for that fact alone. Perhaps we should all be grateful the man does not attempt self-expression on a more regular basis. (Gay marriage is worse than slavery!

Confirmation controversies
If it wasn't clear to everyone at the time, it's since become clear that Thomas lied to the Judiciary Committee when he stated that he never sexually harassed Anita Hill. The evidence amassed by investigative journalists over the years is simply too great to claim otherwise.

George H.W. Bush could've nominated Chris Rock to the SCOTUS and gotten him on the bench, as he was still high on his post-Gulf War victory and approval ratings. Unfortunately, Thomas was less qualified than Chris Rock to be nominated for the court. It's almost as if it was a purely-political appointment designed to help wage the GOP's culture wars without any regard to the court's proper function or purpose.

During his confirmation hearings, a former clerk of his, stepped forward and claimed to have been sexually harassed by Thomas. Conservatives blasted her, even calling her "a little bit slutty and a little bit nutty." Many liberals rallied to her defense, especially women's groups. In the end, despite a Democratic majority in the Senate, Thomas was approved for the Supreme Court. Many said that Ted Kennedy, a high-ranking member of the Judiciary Committee who played a key role in spiking the nomination of the similarly extreme conservative judge Robert Bork just a few years earlier, was personally unable to do anything about Thomas due to his own marital issues in that area.

Well-he-did-not
On February 22, 2006, he spoke from the bench. He didn't say a word from there to any lawyer until 2013 when he responded to Justice Scalia's comment about a lawyer attending Yale Law school. Thomas said, "Well, he did not." Although some say he purposely said that, others think he was really making a side joke to Antonin Scalia. Whatever it is, Thomas has not asked a question from the bench in court. For over 10 years he has done nothing but stare at the ceiling. Thomas' written record is quite voluminous, so one can find out what he thinks (and it's quite ugly). It may be that he just chooses not to ask questions because he doesn't want to know the answers as his mind is already made up. It is a nice ceiling. So, in fifty years, when your grandchildren ask you, "Did Clarence Thomas do a good job?" you can answer "Well, he did not."

Corruption — So What!
Thomas is perhaps the most corrupt Supreme Court justice in recent memory. He has spent 20 years filing false financial statements, a crime that he will likely never be convicted of due to his position of power and the political gridlock in Congress. Furthermore, he did not recuse himself from the Citizens United case despite Citizens United having spent $100,000 on his behalf to support his nomination to the court.

Virginia "Ginni" Thomas (Clarence Thomas's wife) received $686,589 in salary from the right-wing Heritage Foundation between 2003 and 2007. He failed to disclose this originally, answering "none" on a form asking about his spouse's non-investment income. The Los Angeles Times and Common Cause reported about it in 2011. Clarence Thomas claimed that this was "inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions", which Bob Edgar of Common Cause called "implausible".

Thomas is a close friend of real estate magnate a major Republican donor, member of the American Enterprise Institute, and donor to the Federalist Society; this relationship, and the gifts and largesse Crow has showered on Thomas, has caused ethical concerns as far back as 2011. In April 2023, it was revealed that during Thomas's Supreme Court tenure, Crow frequently took Thomas on private luxury trips using his private super-yacht and his private jet airplane to places like Crow's private resort in the Adirondacks, visits to the Bohemian Grove, and other locations around the world. These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas's financial disclosures, potentially violating the law. Additionally, in May 2023, it was revealed that Crow had paid at least some of the private boarding school tuition fees for a grandnephew of Thomas named Mark Martin (whom Thomas had taken custody of); this also was not disclosed in the annual financial statements of Thomas. Thomas originally did disclose some of these gifts from Crow; however, he ceased disclosing them after the Los Angeles Times reported on them in a 2004 article. Thomas also failed to disclose a 2014 real estate deal in which Crow purchased multiple properties from Thomas and his family.

Crow is also a Hitler fetishist, which does not in-and-of-itself make him a Nazi. He has a room in his house that is full of original Hitler artifacts, including an autographed copy of Mein Kampf. Although the items are stored in a museum-type setting, as would befit a billionaire, there is essentially no context or curation, leaving the casual viewer to draw their own conclusions about intent. According to one viewer, there was one painting "done by George W. Bush next to a Norman Rockwell next to one by Hitler," in what could charitably be described as a kitsch triptych.

On July 9 2023, the New York Times published a report detailing Thomas's membership in the Through this organization, Thomas had reportedly received benefits from a broad cohort of wealthy and powerful figures, many of them major donors to conservative causes. Such figures included executives like  and  Reportedly Thomas had granted this society unusual access to the Supreme Court facilities, in that an annual awards ceremony was hosted in the courtroom every year. The society also helped bankroll a hagiographic documentary about Thomas made in response to the controversies over Anita Hill's allegations.

Shortly after the New York Times report, another story came out in the Guardian where several lawyers who had business before the Supreme Court made payments to Rajan Vasisht, Thomas's aide from July 2019 to July 2021, via These lawyers included a Federalist Society member named Patrick Strawbridge, who at the time of the article had recently successfully argued in the Supreme Court to end affirmative action admissions at universities. The purported purpose of the payments seemed to refer to a Christmas party Thomas hosted in 2019. However, the fact that a Supreme Court justice was collecting money from lawyers in private practice that had business before the court was seen by some legal experts as very ethically questionable, regardless of the purported purpose.

Thomas for president?
In 2012, some Republicans, not thrilled with the crop of candidates, began suggesting that should the nomination come down to a brokered convention, Thomas would be a possible choice for president. .

Moonlighting
Thomas was one of many Supreme Court Justices to have officiated at a wedding, his gig being the marriage of Rush Limbaugh and "aerobics instructor" Marta Maranda Fitzgerald on 27 May 1994. The wedding was held in Thomas's home in Virginia. The couple divorced in 2004. Thomas also attended Limbaugh's next wedding to Kathryn Rogers in June 2010, but he was not working that one, just partying.

Better displays of Thomas


On 18 June 2015, Thomas joined his Supreme Court liberal colleagues in ruling in favor of Texas rejecting license plate designs that feature the Confederate flag. A Texas board found "a significant portion of the public associate the Confederate flag with organizations advocating expressions of hate directed toward people or groups".

Thomas has also argued that the federal government cannot ban medical marijuana, although he believes this for reasons of state's rights and not because he personally favors the policy.

Black nationalist
Nostalgia usually burnishes the past in sunlight; Thomas's nostalgia is bathed in darkness. Corey Robin, in his book The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, argued that Thomas's ultra-conservatism is fundamentally rooted in black nationalist ideas, specifically a belief that racism is too deep-rooted in the white American psyche to even try to correct, leading him to conclude that black people should be establishing self-reliance separate from white America and that measures supporting racial integration ultimately amount to "white paternalism" that leave black people worse off. Thomas's black nationalism is one that is misogynist and sees the role of the black woman as subservient to the black man.

Thomas's views of the Constitution are rooted in a tension between what Robin calls the "White Constitution" (the original Constitution of 1787 plus the Bill of Rights of 1789) and the "Black Constitution" (the Constitution through the three Reconstruction amendments). This tension supports Thomas's idealized view of his grandfather's time. Myers Anderson, who raised him as his son, spent most of his life (and most of Thomas's formative years) in the Jim Crow South where the Reconstruction amendments had been effectively nullified. Thomas's dystopian view of African American life is that all that is needed to protect the African American family is the First (particularly commercial speech) and Second Amendments (gun ownership) and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Nonetheless, these protections did nothing to protect African Americans from the 1921 Tulsa race massacre that wiped out an entire African American business district or from the long and ugly history of lynchings. Thomas has written in SCOTUS judgments that the Eighth Amendment ("no cruel or unusual punishment") does not apply to states and that the Eighth Amendment only applies to penalties (time served) and not to how prisoners are treated after they are incarcerated. Given the high rates of African American imprisonment, this is effectively a States' rights-type argument that enables white supremacy. In Thomas' worldview, the harsh punishment and policing that he supports helps to protect African American neighborhoods from crime, it is a sort of immanentizing of dystopia.

Anti-vaxxer
Thomas wrote the dissenting opinion in the New York healthcare worker lawsuit that demanded a religious exemption to the COVID-19 vaccination mandate. In the dissent, Thomas repeated the anti-vaxxer claim that "all available COVID–19 vaccines because they were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children." While it is true that vaccine research has based upon the HEK cell line that originally came from an aborted fetus, it is also true that the vast majority of modern medicines are based on research on the HEK cell line, so it is likely that Thomas himself has benefited from these medicines and vaccines. Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch signed onto this anti-science opinion.

Anti-abortion
In Thomas' concurring opinion in Box v. Planned Parenthood, he falsely claimed that the modern birth control movement was linked to the American eugenics movement, further intimating that it was a form of the black genocide conspiracy theory. Thomas repeated these false claims in his concurring opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson that struck down Roe v. Wade, disregarding stare decisis.

Black and white together
♫Black and white together. ♫We must love one another. Thomas was among the first group of African Americans to integrate into the College of the Holy Cross in 1968. Thomas and his classmates formed the Black Student Union. One of the points in their manifesto was: The black man does not want or need the white woman. The Black man's history shows that the white woman is the cause of this failure to be the true Black man. Thomas was known to be particularly strident about anti-miscegenation, even to the point of verbally harassing interracial couples on campus. Thomas was, in fact, opposed to interracial marriage up until he met his white second wife-to-be, This might not be so remarkable by itself; over time, people fall in love, change their minds, become less strident, etc.. However, Thomas has overall maintained his masculinist black nationalist worldview while his wife has increasingly become involved in far-right politics, including associating with white nationalists ( spreading a deep state-type conspiracy, and paying for bus transportation to the rally preceding the almost all-white 2021 U.S. coup attempt.

Clarence has referred to his marriage to Ginni as extremely close politically, stating in 2011: We are equally yoked, and we love being with each other because we love the same things. We believe in the same things. So, with my wife, and with the people around me, what I see, I’m reinforced that we are focused on defending liberty. So, I admire her and I love her for that because it keeps me going. This raises the corruption issue again because Ginni Thomas is now being investigated for her involvement in trying to overturn the 2020 U.S. presidential election by trying to influence then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, indicating QAnon ideology and using schizofascism. Clarence Thomas has already refused to recuse himself on a January 6 coup attempt case before the Supreme Court in which he was the sole dissenter, and it seems unlikely that he would do so should a case directly involving his wife come before the court.

Ginni Thomas was on Turning Point USA's advisory council as of 2017. Despite rumors to the contrary, there is no evidence that she paid for >80 TPUSA-sponsored buses to go to Washington for the coup.

Hypocrisy
But for them, God only knows where I would be today. These [affirmative action] laws and their proper application are all that stand between the first 17 years of my life and the second 17. Thomas is a long standing critic of affirmative action, writing that they "may have been motivated, in part, by good intentions cannot provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution, the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race." When the Supreme Court ruled race based affirmative actions for university admission unconstitutional in 2023, Thomas was one of the Justices who supported that decision. However, Thomas was himself had previously benefited from affirmative action policies, only getting into Yale Law School because due to said university attempting to make ten percent of their incoming freshman class students of color that year. Due to this inconsistency, Thomas was declared the winner of the 1998 Doublespeak Award.

Originalism
With regard to the Constitution, Thomas regards himself as a strict adherent to originalism, that the Constitution should not be interpreted through the lens of modern times, but through the Constitution as it was in 1789. This is despite, as Thomas acknowledged, the fact that the Founding Fathers were racists and slaveholders. Thomas' record shows, however, that his originalism is episodic and hardly strict.

Scott Gerber, in his analysis of Thomas' jurisprudence, basically concluded that Thomas has a double standard: …Justice Thomas appeals to the ideal of equality at the heart of the Declaration of Independence when he decides questions involving race, but to the Framers’ specific intentions — as manifested in the text and historical context of the Constitution — when he decides questions involving civil liberties and federalism.

…

To make the point more directly, Justice Thomas approaches legal questions pertaining to race differently than he approaches legal questions pertaining to other matters. The irony in this conclusion is difficult to miss. After all, EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] Chairman Thomas established his reputation by arguing that Blacks should be treated the same as everyone else.