Clarence Thomas Is In Your Court, Stealing Your Jurisprudence

The Associate Justice in action...

I voted for George H. W. Bush in 1988.  I think he handled foreign affairs quite well and did a few laudable things domestically like the small nod towards fiscal sanity that represents the 1991 tax increases.  But foisting Clarence Thomas on us is the gift canker sore than keeps on giving.

Via the Grey Lady, we see that Thomas will soon celebrate the Fifth Anniversary of the last time he said anything during oral arguments before the Supreme Court.  From the article:

 “If Justice Thomas holds a strong view of the law in a case, he should offer it,” David A. Karp, a veteran journalist and third-year law student, wrote in the Florida Law Review in 2009. “Litigants could then counter it, or try to do so. It is not enough that Justice Thomas merely attend oral argument if he does not participate in argument meaningfully.”

From this is my principal problem with this particular aspect of Thomas's role on the Court.  Thomas is the nuttiest of the justices, offering opinions that are frequently down right bizarre.  He doesn't bother to engage the counsel for either side and then makes up some crazy nonsense.

If the Supreme Court constitutes the High Priesthood of the Constitution, Thomas is its Scientologist.

Thomas has ruled that the First Amendment does not apply to high school students.  I mean WTF?  Where does that even enter the conversation?  Where are civil rights cut off?  At the door of the school?  The classroom?  Are civil rights unavailable to minors?

Of course, Thomas's embarrassment doesn't end there.  For the past 15 years, he's basically been filing false tax returns and violating public disclosure rules, by not acknowledging his wife's income.  The fact that his wife is a highly paid conservative activist who is working on issues that often appear before the Court is just the icing on this unethical cake.  Thomas has - of course - never recused himself from any case that might involve his wife's work.  When ACA finally makes it before the Court, he will also not recuse himself, despite her hefty fees working to overturn it.

And of course, there is his confirmation hearing.  I take it as an article of the record that Thomas perjured himself in those hearings.  The presence of a second witness to Thomas's harassment is the clincher for me, but also the behavior of both Hill and Thomas since that time also persuade me that Hill was reluctant to come forward but had to, whereas Thomas lives in his own reality crafted by his finely honed sense of seething grievance.  And of course, David Brock's recanting of his role in slandering Hill plays a huge part in sealing Thomas's guilt.

Bush needed a prestigious, black, conservative judge to take Thurgood Marshall's seat on the Court.  He couldn't find any, so he went with Thomas.  Thomas has spent the last 20 years or so demonstrating his manifest contempt for everyone but those whom he agrees with, his contempt for argumentation - the soul of our legal system - and contempt for the cultural forces that were behind his high tech lynching the exposure of his pervy ways.

I disagree with Antonin Scalia on just about everything but spelling and math.  But I respect that he at least argues his point, engages others' arguments and rules on principals that he has defined over the years.

If Scalia is the brooding dark wizard of the conservative bench, Thomas is its troll under the bridge, muttering quietly to himself and feasting on the bones of his all consuming anger.