Justice Thomas in his Own Words
By Eric Segall
Justice Clarence Thomas is
our longest serving Supreme Court Justice. He first came into the public eye in
October 1991, when Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment. He dogmatically
denied the claims calling
his confirmation hearing a “hi-tech lynching.” He has been embroiled in
controversy ever since.
Many conservative Court
scholars believe
it is Justice Thomas, not the deceased Justice Scalia, who has been the most
important driving force behind originalist decision-making. Thomas has written solo
opinions challenging well-established Supreme Court doctrine in the areas of
gun control, the appropriate balance between church and state, and Congress’
powers to regulate the economy, among many others important swaths of
constitutional law. He has also recently been called
by one liberal commentator the “most important legal thinker in
America.”
Dozens of Thomas’ law
clerks have become federal judges, and his originalist statements about
constitutional interpretation have been largely adopted by the Federalist
Society, a conservative non-profit that is now assisting President Trump in his
selection of Supreme Court Justices and lower court judges.
No one can deny Justice
Thomas’ influence on our law and politics since he became a Justice more than
25 years ago. Yet, there are numerous aspects of his career that are troubling
and mystifying. Here is Justice Thomas in his own words and votes.
A. Affirmative
Action and Race
Although Justice Thomas
has said
affirmative action helped him get into Yale Law School, he has minced no words
about his hatred for such programs. In Fisher v.
Texas I, the plaintiffs challenged the University of Texas’
limited used of racial preferences to fill out 25% of its class (the other 75%
was decided through a facially neutral top 10% program). At the time, the
University was roughly 50% white and 50% non-white. Justice Thomas compared
the University’s admission process to slavery and desegregation:
Slaveholders [also] argued that slavery was a ‘positive good’ that
civilized blacks and elevated them in every dimension of life …. In our
desegregation cases, we rejected arguments that are virtually identical to
those advanced by the University today …. The University’s professed good intentions cannot excuse its outright
racial discrimination any more than such intentions justified the now denounced
arguments of slaveholders and segregationists.
The reference to slavery is
extraordinary and needs no comment. As to segregation, the first
black student to attend the University of Texas did so in 1955. To Justice
Thomas, the intentions of people who in good faith wanted more racial diversity
on campuses in 2013 are no different from the intentions of people who wanted all-white
campuses in 1954. This is a shamelessly wrong false equivalence.
Justice Thomas also has
strong feelings about minority students attending elite universities. In Grutter v. Bollinger, he said this
about black students at the University of Michigan Law School: “The Law School tantalizes unprepared
students with the promise of a University of Michigan degree and all of the
opportunities that it offers. These overmatched students take the bait, only to
find that they cannot succeed in the cauldron of competition.” And in Fisher, he said that “Blacks and Hispanics admitted to the University as a result of racial
discrimination are, on average, far less prepared than their white and Asian
classmates…. As a result of the mismatching, many blacks and Hispanics who
likely would have excelled at less elite schools are placed in a position where
under performance is all but inevitable because they are less academically
prepared than the white and Asian students with whom they must compete.”
Justice Thomas relied on
controversial academic studies to make these bold claims. Moreover, who is he
to decide for minority students whether it is in their best interests to attend
elite schools? No one is forcing them to do so. And, it is also fair to ask
what any of this fiery rhetoric has to do with whether the 14th
Amendment precludes elite schools from seeking racial diversity by using racial
criteria.
Off the Court,
Justice Thomas has compared
his experiences in the segregated South to those at Yale Law School:
At least southerners were up front about their
bigotry: You knew exactly where they were coming from. Not so the paternalistic
big-city whites who offered you a helping hand so long as you were careful to
agree with them but slapped you down if you started acting as if you didn't
know your place.
Thomas is of course
completely entitled to resent the condescension that he says he faced at Yale, but again to suggest white liberal Yale law professors in the early 1970’s were
similar to white bigots during segregation is another matter altogether.
B. Gay
Rights
In one of the most
controversial dissents of the last fifty years, Justice Antonin Scalia said
the following about a Texas statute that criminalized consensual, private gay
sodomy: “The Texas statute undeniably
seeks to further the belief of its citizens that certain forms of sexual
behavior are ‘immoral and unacceptable…’ the same interest furthered by
criminal laws against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity.”
Scalia went on to say that the law was constitutional because “[m]any Americans
do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in
their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their
children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting
themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral
and destructive.”
Justice Thomas joined this horrific dissent without qualification. He
also wrote a short opinion explaining that, although he
agreed with Scalia that the law was constitutional, he would vote against this
law if he were in the legislature: “If I were a member of the Texas
Legislature, I would vote to repeal it. Punishing someone for expressing his
sexual preference through noncommercial consensual conduct with another adult does not appear to be a worthy way to expend
valuable law enforcement resources.” Apparently, Thomas’ objection to
punishing gays and lesbians for private, consensual sodomy is that other crimes
deserve more attention, not that gays and lesbians have a right to enjoy
private, consensual intimacy.
C.
Abortion
Although Thomas’ confirmation hearing is most famous for Anita Hill’s allegations
of sexual harassment, the part of the hearing about abortion is well worth
remembering. Thomas graduated from Yale Law School in 1974, one year after the
Court handed down Roe v. Wade. Seventeen
years later, Senator Patrick Leahy asked Thomas about what was at the time and still is
the most controversial constitutional law issue of the last fifty years.
Senator LEAHY. “Have you ever had discussion of
Roe v. Wade, other than in this room, in the 17 or 18 years it has been there?”
Judge THOMAS. “Only, I guess, Senator, in the
fact in the most general sense that other individuals express concerns one way
or the other, and you listen and you try to be thoughtful. If you are asking me
whether or not I have ever debated the contents of it, that answer to
that is no, Senator….”
Senator LEAHY: “So you don’t ever recall
stating whether you thought it was properly decided or not?
Judge THOMAS. “I can’t recall saying one way or
the other, Senator.”
"Senator, your
question to me was did I debate the contents of Roe v. Wade, the outcome in Roe v. Wade, do I
have this day an opinion, a personal opinion on the outcome in Roe v. Wade; and
my answer to you is that I do not."
Andrew Peyton Thomas’ biography of Justice Thomas alleges that William
Bradford Reynolds, conservative assistant attorney general under Ronald Reagan,
said that “I know we [he and Justice Thomas] discussed [Roe]. I think that he
thought little of Roe v. Wade. … [F]rom a scholarly standpoint, we were talking
about constitutional law, constitutional issues, and Supreme Court decisions. It
was clear he didn’t think much of it.”
Despite widespread reporting of Reynolds’s claims, it appears he has never
denied that this conversation took place. Therefore, there are only three
possibilities. Either Thomas had the conversation but didn’t remember it, or he
never had it, or he lied about it. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that
Thomas was telling the truth. That means a Supreme Court nominee never once
discussed the correctness of Roe or
formed an opinion about it, from the day he graduated law school in 1974 until
his confirmation hearing in 1991. Arguably, that itself should have been
substantially troubling to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In 1992, Justice Thomas’ first full year on the bench, the Court
reaffirmed Roe v. Wade’s conclusion
that women have a constitutional right to terminate their pregnancies in Planned Parenthood
v. Casey (albeit the Justices changed the legal framework protecting that right
from a trimester approach to the “undue burden” standard). Justice Thomas
joined the bitter and harsh dissents of Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Scalia arguing
that Roe should be reversed. Many
years later. Thomas summed up his views in a different abortion case:
My views on the merits of the Casey joint opinion have
been fully articulated by others (referring
to Scalia and Rehnquist). I will not restate those views here, except to
note that the Casey joint opinion was constructed by its
authors out of whole cloth. The standard set forth in the Casey joint
opinion has no historical or doctrinal pedigree. The standard is a product of
its authors’ own philosophical views about abortion, and it should go without
saying that it has no origins in or relationship to the Constitution and is,
consequently, as illegitimate as the standard (the trimester framework) it
purported to replace.
These views are similar to the 1992 dissents of Scalia and Rehnquist, which Thomas joined in full. Maybe Thomas’s views on abortion were only formed
after he heard arguments in the case, but it is still interesting that when
asked about Roe, he didn’t say he
couldn’t answer as has been the case for most nominees; he said he had not yet
formed an opinion. A year later, he voted to overrule it.
D.
Children
and Speech
The issue in Brown v.
Entertainment Merchants Association, was the constitutionality of a California law
banning the sale of violent video games to minors. The majority struck down the
law on the grounds, among other things, that violent games were protected
speech as to minors. Thomas disagreed, saying that “the practices and beliefs of
the founding generation” did not “include a right to speak to minors (or a
right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors’ parents or
guardians.” In a prior case, Thomas had said that children have no first
amendment rights in public schools.
As Ian Millhiser pointed out in his article on Justice Thomas’s importance as a legal thinker, Thomas believes that children have no speech rights separate from their
parents. Thomas “rooted” these views “in his belief that seventeenth and
eighteenth-century adults lorded over children like petty tyrants.
Millhiser correctly questioned why Thomas’s summary of the relationships
between children and parents in 1787 mattered to constitutional law. “That is,
even if Thomas is correct that the founding generation ‘believed parents to
have complete authority over their minor children and expected parents to
direct the development of those children,’ why does it follow that the founding
generation would have let the government
restrict children’s speech…?” Although we can all agree that children do not
have the same speech rights as adults, the notion that they have no speech
rights at all separate from their parents, teachers, and guardians, is quite
simply absurd.
Two critics of Justice Thomas’s conclusion about the complete lack of students’
speech rights in public schools said the following about his analysis of that
issue:
This is an extraordinary claim for many reasons, not the least of which
is the fact that public schools did not exist when the First Amendment was
drafted. Even by the time the 14th Amendment was adopted,
making the First Amendment applicable to the states, public schools were just
getting started…. Justice Thomas evidently believes the question of whether
students have free-speech rights should be answered by conducting an imaginary
séance with 18th- and 19th-century Framers and ratifiers,
who should be asked: Do you think public-school students have a constitutional
right to free speech while in school? This line of inquiry is about as
productive as asking an only child: Imagine you have a sister. Now, does she
like cheese?
E.
Originalism
Justice Thomas, first and
foremost, identifies himself as an originalist. During his confirmation
hearings, he clearly signaled
his originalist philosophy. In numerous important constitutional law cases,
Justice Thomas has said that the Justices should be guided by the
Constitution’s original meaning. For example, in United States v. Lopez, Thomas argued
that the Court should alter its commerce clause jurisprudence to greatly reduce
the power of Congress in order be “more faithful to the original understanding
of that Clause.” In McDonald v. City of
Chicago, in which the Court applied the Second Amendment to the states for
the first time, Thomas wrote a sole concurrence
arguing that it is the original meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause
of the 14th Amendment that allows the Second Amendment to restrict
state action, not the Due Process of the Fourteenth Amendment, an opinion which
if accepted by the rest of the Court could have major implications for
constitutional law. And, in U.S. Term
Limits v. Thornton, he strenuously argued,
in dissent, that the Constitution’s original meaning allows the states to place
term limits on members of Congress, a conclusion rejected by the majority
opinion.
Yet, despite Justice
Thomas’s constant refrains about the importance of the Constitution’s original
meaning to constitutional interpretation, he has regularly voted to strike down
state and federal laws without any mention of originalist evidence. For
example, he has voted to strike down every campaign finance law (state and
federal) and every affirmative action program (state and federal) that has come
before him without once relying on ratification era sources. He joined with the
other conservative justices to invalidate the key provision of the Voting Right
Act despite the opinion’s silence on historical sources. This list could go on
and on. Justice Thomas’ failure to harness originalist evidence for these major
constitutional law decisions, and there are many more, speaks louder than those
opinions where he claims such evidence supports his decisions.
As I detailed in a prior work,
Justice Thomas’ America looks like this: Americans possess a right to own guns but no right to abortion; no city, state or federal government
may take racial criteria into account where trying
to address our racist past and current racial problems; gays and lesbians are strangers to equal rights under the law; Congress is prohibited from addressing serious economic issues that
plague our country; corporations may spend as much money on elections as they want
because money is speech and corporations are people; the President of the
United States may fight terrorism without any constitutional check from the other two
branches of government; states may place term limits on members of Congress; and the rights of
majority religions constitute constitutional trump
cards
authorizing discrimination against minorities and traditionally disadvantaged
groups.
Perhaps Justice Thomas
reached all these conclusions based on his good faith examination of 1787, 1789, and
1868 sources. But if so, it is surprising that so many of his opinions contain
no such summary or evidence. Moreover, the sum of all these votes looks
surprisingly similar to the Republican Party Platforms both in 1992 and today.
Maybe that’s just a coincidence--or maybe not.
Justice Thomas often
cloaks his right-wing extremism in originalist musings and obviously
deeply-felt personal experiences. Regardless of how he came to his political
views, however, his consistently partisan votes as a Justice are unlikely to
change with more experiences or more historical analysis. He will almost
certainly support the far right in our political and cultural wars for as long
as he remains a Supreme Court Justice.