Justice Thomas Appreciation Page

Justice Thomas News

2009-10-23T18:03:00.000-07:00

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) -- Clarence Thomas, the justice long known as the silent member of the Supreme Court, criticized his colleagues Friday for badgering attorneys rather than letting them speak during oral arguments.

Thomas - who hasn't asked a lawyer a question during arguments in nearly four years - said he and the other eight justices virtually always know where they stand on a case by reading legal briefs before oral arguments.

"So why do you beat up on people if you already know? I don't know, because I don't beat up on 'em. I refuse to participate. I don't like it, so I don't do it," Thomas said during an appearance before law students at the University of Alabama.

From the Tuscaloosa News:

United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas would have made a good stand-up comedian.

University of Alabama School of law students roared with laughter throughout Thomas’ lecture Friday afternoon that was more of a question and answer session.

Thomas, 61, lowered his already deep voice and answered one question with a Nick Saban impression.

“It’s a process,” he replied to a query about his decision-making process. “You’re not perfect, you’re always analyzing yourself. I could be a good coach.”

* * * He was nominated in 1991 by President George H.W. Bush after serving for just a year on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

“I argued against it, I’d been on the Court of Appeals long enough,” he said. “But when the president calls you, the words out of your mouth are ‘Yes, Mr. President.’”

He first spoke at the school in 2005.

“Last time, I was more on the junior side,” he said. “There are things you learn after 18 years. You’ve seen just about all that you’re going to see,” he said. “Most cases are permutations of the same issue.”

Many of the students’ questions were about Thomas’ path to where he is now and what kind of advice he would give a young law student.

Thomas grew up in Pin Point, Ga., a rural settlement outside Savannah in coastal Georgia that was founded by freed slaves after the Civil War. He spoke Geechee, or Gullah, language until he was a teen.

“I found law school difficult. You see my old textbooks, and you’ll see that the textbooks won,” he said. “My journey was in many ways very unhappy and enormously difficult.”

. . .

Thomas said that he preferred to hire law clerks from modest backgrounds.

“There are too many up there who think they should be there because they’re from an elite background,” he said. Students laughed when he described how former Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who died in 2005, could get things done with a glare.

“He was more of a father figure of the World War II generation,” he said when asked how Rehnquist differs from Chief Justice John Roberts. “Chief Justice Roberts is a contemporary.” . . . .

Justice Thomas at W&L University

2009-10-17T11:37:00.001-07:00

Here's a video of Justice Thomas's 10/2009 speech at Washington & Lee University, titled "Lincoln for the Ages: Lessons for the 21st Century":

Another Justice Thomas graduation speech

2009-06-02T09:32:00.000-07:00

From the Northern Virginia Daily:

Justice Clarence Thomas addresses grads on life

By Linwood Outlaw III -- loutlaw@nvdaily.com

FRONT ROYAL -- More than four decades have passed since Clarence Thomas, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was a young high school student on the brink of entering the real world.

However, Thomas says there are some things about those days that you never forget.

"Graduation was my favorite day of school," Thomas joked as he addressed Randolph-Macon Academy's Class of 2009 at the military school's annual commencement at the Melton Memorial Gymnasium on Saturday morning. "I still believe that graduating from high school is a very special day."

Thomas, the ceremony's keynote speaker, told students that "life can be hard," and that "it will be up to you to make as many good decisions as possible." Thomas urged them to stay positive, and to always value the "three F's": faith, friends and family.

"Life is not easy. It's not easy for any of us. It will probably not be fair. And, it is certainly not all about you," said Thomas, 60, a member of the Supreme Court since 1991.

About 90 students received their high school diplomas from the 117-year old, co-ed boarding school on Saturday. Many of the graduates have been accepted to prestigious four-year universities, and others will continue their military studies at schools such as Virginia Military Institute and The Citadel. In all, the graduates earned more than $3 million in merit scholarships for post-secondary education, school officials said.

Tae Ho Lee, the senior class valedictorian, said he thinks of his peers at Randolph-Macon Academy as family.

"Let's keep in touch, and I wish you the best of luck in the future. Class of 2009, we're taking over," he told his peers.

Lee plans to attend the University of California at Berkeley.

Maj. Gen. Henry M. Hobgood, president of the academy, said he expects great things from this year's graduating class.

"I think they take [with them] the great academic background [of this school]. And probably more importantly, the thing that will stick with them the rest of their lives is preparation for life," Hobgood said. "Our school is all about character and all about good values. And that's what makes a person in the long run."

Randolph-Macon's Class of 2009 has many unique qualities, Hobgood said.

"Every graduating class is different. This one is unique because it's very diverse," he said. "They're very capable. [They have] a lot of academic success, a lot of athletic success. But mostly, they're just a class that has great character. And I think they're going to do well in life. I mean, it's a very unusual class in that regard. I'm very proud of each one of them."

Some of the students come from foreign countries such as Arabia, Korea, China and Spain.

The graduates were overcome with joy after the ceremony as they embraced their families and took pictures outside the gym.

Eliana Eitches, 17, an honors student who plans to attend Columbia University in New York, said she "definitely matured a lot" while attending Randolph-Macon Academy. "I sort of got serious about school, got serious about studying. And then I accomplished my goal, which was to go to Columbia," said Eitches, who received about $500,000 worth of scholarships.

Chase Beatty, 18, was a busy man during his three-year stay at the academy. He played on the varsity football team and ran track. Beatty was also a member of Cadre, the student leadership of the Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps. Earlier this year, he successfully earned his private pilot certification.

Beatty said Randolph-Macon "was a tough experience," but that he takes away "a more grown sense of myself, a bigger sense of my character and what I want to do with my life."

"It's just helped me to take steps in the right direction. It's given me a solid foundation to build on," said Beatty, who plans to attend The Citadel in South Carolina in the fall.

"I consider this as step one. I've just got many more steps to go. It's a staircase."

Slate Columnist Praises Thomas

2009-06-02T09:31:00.001-07:00

This is a first: Dahlia Lithwick, the liberal Slate legal columnist who is usually seen distorting facts in order to mock conservatives, takes an opportunity to praise Thomas:

The temptation to smack back and argue that we deserve to seat Sotomayor because Thomas was a lousy affirmative-action pick who turned into a third-rate justice is hard to resist. But it's flat wrong. Liberals achieve nothing by suggesting that Thomas' elevation to the high court was preposterous on its face or that his tenure there has been a disgrace....

Claims that Thomas is too stupid to ask questions and in constant peril of embarrassing himself at the court are just not that different than claims that Sotomayor is mediocre. Nobody who has followed Thomas' 18-year career at the Supreme Court believes him to be a dunce or a Scalia clone. Whether you accept Jan Crawford Greenburg's claim that Thomas' constitutional theories are so forceful that they have shaped Scalia's or you believe the more common view that Thomas has a deeply reasoned and consistent judicial philosophy that differs dramatically from those of the court's other conservatives, accusations that he's been a dim bulb are just false. They also reveal that the name-calling that originates now, during the confirmation process, engenders a mythology that can never be erased.

Thomas high school graduation speech

2009-06-02T09:27:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Examiner:

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas spoke before several hundred graduating seniors on Monday and commended to them the same timeless values he said had led him to their podium.

“It is never wrong to do what is right,” he told Gaithersburg’s Quince Orchard High School class of 2009. “Hard, but never wrong.”

The rare public appearance began with a conversation on a flight from Omaha, Neb., to Washington, D.C.

Quince Orchard football star Terrence Stephens was returning from a recruiting trip at the University of Nebraska. Thomas, a die-hard Cornhusker fan, recognized him immediately. The young man had no idea who Thomas was.

“It was scary because this guy who I didn’t know was telling me all about myself,” Stephens said.

But he was polite and entertained Thomas’ uncommon obsession, which springs in part from his marriage to a Nebraskan. And that made all of the difference. In the months since, Thomas has become a mentor to Stephens. And it was the school’s top jock who invited the 17-year justice to speak before his graduating class.

Thomas urged the graduates to honor traditional values of humility, hard work and gratitude. “Always have good manners — they will open doors,” he told the graduates.

“Stay positive,” he said. “There will be many around you who are cynical or negative or know-it-alls or bitter. These attitudes are cancers of the spirit that do nothing worthwhile, and rob one of the spirit to prosper.”

He reminded them of their place, even as they felt on top of the world.

“Life is not easy for any of us. It will probably not be fair, and it certainly is not all about you,” he said. “The gray hairs and wrinkles you see on older people have been earned the hard way, by living and dealing with the challenges of life.”

And he brought laughter by confessing no familiarity with modern indulgences like text messaging or Twitter, or even Facebook.

Thomas asked them to be grateful. He told a story of his eighth-grade teacher whom he thanked many years later, and stayed in touch with until her death. Among her favorite possessions was a framed photo with Thomas.

His voice broke slightly as he recalled words she told him near her death: “This goes in my coffin with me.”

“Thank your parents and teachers and all who helped you,” Thomas said. “A simple thank you will do wonders.”

It’s a message he has already begun to instill in Stephens. “I’m so thankful — he has already offered me so much,” the young man said. “Now, he wants me to keep helping myself, so that he can keep helping me.”

"We Didn't Know He Was Clarence Thomas"

2009-06-02T09:24:00.000-07:00

From NBC Washington:

ustice Thomas -- who otherwise never misses court -- skipped a SCOTUS session to speak at the graduation of his travel companions.

High school seniors Terrence Stephens and Jason Ankrah, star football players at Quince Orchard High School in Gaithersburg, Md., were sitting on a plane returning from a recruitment session at the University of Nebraska when they struck up a conversation with the man sitting next to them.

Two Gaithersburg high school football players made friends with their travel companion on a recent flight back from Nebraska -- except they didn't know...

Their seat-mate just happened to be a major Cornhuskers fan.

When they started chatting, Stephens and Ankrah didn't have a clue they were holding court with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

"I was amazed this guy knew so much about us as football players and as people," said Stephens. "That was shocking. I felt honored to be known by someone of his caliber. He was just a regular old guy, sitting in coach, which really shocked me."

By the time the plane landed, the students had figured out who Thomas was, and they promptly told their principal they wanted to invite Thomas to give the keynote speech at their high school graduation. Of course, Principal Carole Working didn't exactly think Thomas would take them up on it. But he showed up at the high school on Monday.

"These young men had no idea who I was as I formed my first impression. I was just another stranger to them. They were wonderful ambassadors for your school and for their fellow students," said Thomas at the Quince Orchard graduation ceremony.

When Stephens and Ankrah arrived on-stage to receive their diplomas, they were both embraced by Justice Thomas.

Ankrah will be playing football for Nebraska next year, but Stephens will be attending Stanford. The justice said he doesn't have any hard feelings over that.

View more news videos at: http://www.nbcwashington.com/video.

Justice Thomas Speech

2009-04-17T13:29:00.000-07:00

Here is a PDF of his speech and Q&A session at the Bill of Rights Institute, March 31, 2009.

Justice Thomas Speech at Washington and Lee

2009-03-17T09:14:00.000-07:00

On March 16, 2009. Here is the audio.

And here are three accounts, one with a short video:

Justice Thomas: Americans Little Disposed to Sacrifice and Self-Denial

By Debra Cassens Weiss

Justice Clarence Thomas says Americans today are less willing to sacrifice during hard times, and he lays the blame on the “self indulgent, me generation” of the 1960s.

In a speech yesterday at Washington and Lee University, Thomas recalled the messages he heard over and again as a child, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports. "Learn to do without," he was told. "Prepare for a rainy day," and "No one owes you a living."

"These days, there seems to be little emphasis on responsibility, sacrifice and self-denial," Thomas said, according to the Times-Dispatch account. "Rarely do we hear a message of sacrifice, unless it is used as a justification of taxation of others or a transfer of wealth to others."

Thomas recalled President John F. Kennedy’s famous speech and said the words no longer ring true. “Today the message seems to be, 'Ask not what you can do for yourselves and your country, but what your country can do for you.' "

Thomas thinks that needs to change, the Associated Press reports in its account of the speech. "Our country and our principles are more important than our individual wants," Thomas said.

Supreme Court Justice Thomas visits Washington & Lee

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas doesn't make a lot of public appearances but he did Monday night at Washington and Lee University.

This was a homecoming of sorts for Justice Thomas.

He spoke at Washington and Lee before he became a Supreme Court justice and his son attended VMI back in the 90's.

"I have nothing, but fond memories of the time I came and spent here at VMI and here in Lexington," says Justice Thomas.

Justice Thomas touched on a number of topics during his speech inside Lee Chapel.

He says while most Americans appreciate the constitution they don't exactly know what's in it.

"It is at least as easy to understand that great document as it is to understand a cell phone contract," says Thomas.

Justice Thomas also believes too many Americans expect too much from their government.

"The message today seems more like ask not what you can do for yourselves or your country, but what your country must do for you," says Thomas.

It's not everyday you get insight into the Supreme Court.

Thomas says justices base their decisions on what the original framers intended, not their personal opinions.

He criticizes judges who do.

"What restrains us from imposing our personal views and police preferences on our fellow citizens under the guise of constitutional interpretation," says Thomas.

During a question and answer period with the audience, Thomas was asked a lot of questions.

One dealt with whether the constitution allowed slavery.

"I don't think there was any question slavery was constitutional. Was it moral? No. Was it wrong? Yes, but it was there," says Thomas.

Thomas spoke to a crowd of nearly 300 people.

He received a number of standing ovations.

For now, the above story has a video report.

Americans not inclined toward sacrifice, Justice Clarence Thomas says

By Rex Bowman

Published: March 17, 2009

LEXINGTON -- Values eroding, Thomas says 'Little emphasis' on sacrifice, self-denial, justice says at W&L

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas told a crowd at Washington and Lee University yesterday that today's Americans seem little disposed to sacrifice during hard times -- even if the government asked them to do it.

"These days, there seems to be little emphasis on responsibility, sacrifice and self-denial," Thomas told about 300 people gathered in the Lee Chapel on campus.

Thomas is not a frequent public speaker, but last week he spoke at Howard University, and he said he came to W&L yesterday at the request of Robin Wright, a senior from Little Rock, Ark. Wright's mother is a federal district judge in Arkansas.

During his speech, Thomas contrasted the values Americans learned during his boyhood with today's values, which he suggested are more selfish and lead people to look too much to the government for help.

Growing up, he said, he constantly heard, "Learn to do without," "Prepare for a rainy day" and "No one owes you a living."

"Those truths permeated our lives," he said, so President John F. Kennedy's call for service resonated with everyone. "It all made sense."

"Today we live in a far different environment," he said, laying the blame on the "self-indulgent 'Me' generation of the 1960s."

"Rarely do we hear a message of sacrifice, unless it is used as a justification of taxation of others or a transfer of wealth to others."

Though Thomas mentioned no particular federal policies or politician, his criticism comes as President Barack Obama's administration is wrestling with a deepening recession and spending hundreds of billions of dollars to put people to work. Conservatives have lambasted the Obama stimulus package as a step toward socialism.

"Today the message seems to be, 'Ask not what you can do for yourselves and your country, but what your country can do for you,'" Thomas said.

Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court Liberal?

2009-03-17T09:13:00.001-07:00

That's the Los Angeles Times headline:

Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court liberal?
In a decision last week against the drug company Wyeth, it was the court's most conservative justice who most harshly criticized a Bush administration legal policy.
By David G. Savage

March 8, 2009

Reporting from Washington — The Supreme Court opinion that drew the most praise last week from a proudly "progressive" constitutional law group was written by perhaps the court's staunchest conservative, Justice Clarence Thomas.

Thomas would have gone further than the court's liberals in a decision that allowed injured patients to sue drug makers. In a 24-page concurrence, he said the court should have declared that judges have no authority to void state consumer-protection laws based on "agency musings" from Washington.

In this instance, Thomas was referring to the musings of the George W. Bush administration and its drive to limit lawsuits against manufacturers.

"We think Justice Thomas got it exactly right," said Doug Kendall of the Constitutional Accountability Center. "A key part of our constitutional system is respect for the states in protecting the health and welfare of their citizens."

Thomas has never been shy about breaking with conventional wisdom -- even when it is the conservative consensus. Over the years, he has spelled out a distinctive approach in several areas of the law. And his views do not always yield predictably conservative results.

Four years ago, for example, the court, with Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy in the majority, upheld the power of federal agents to raid the homes of Californians who grow marijuana for their personal use -- legal under state law but not federal law. Thomas disagreed.

In earlier opinions, he disputed the broad reach of federal regulatory power, a view welcomed by some business groups. In the marijuana case, Thomas repeated the same view, but this time on the side of Angel Raich, an Oakland woman who challenged the federal raids.

"If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything," Thomas wrote in dissent. " . . . Our federalist system, properly understood, allows California and a growing number of other states to decide for themselves how to safeguard the health and welfare of their citizens."

Thomas is often alone on the current court as a steady advocate of limited federal power and respect for states' authority.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. are more inclined to side with federal authorities. Usually Thomas is squarely in the conservative camp with Roberts and Alito when a state's criminal laws are being challenged. He and Scalia rarely vote to limit a state's use of the death penalty.

But in some business cases, Thomas has split from his conservative colleagues.

The case decided last week, Wyeth vs. Levine, involved the recurring conflict between federal regulations and state liability law. Business groups -- and the Bush administration -- maintained that federal regulation of products should "preempt" or trump state laws.

Diana Levine won a $6.7-million Vermont jury verdict after part of her arm was amputated. She said drug maker Wyeth failed to fully warn the public about the danger of injecting the anti-nausea drug Phenergan. If it mixes with arterial blood, it can cause gangrene and lead to amputation.

The warning label said "extreme care" should be taken when injecting the drug. It did not warn against giving it by injection.

Wyeth appealed the verdict, arguing that jurors should not be permitted to "second-guess" the federal regulators who approved the drug and its warning label.

Roberts, Scalia and Alito agreed with Wyeth. Even if the Food and Drug Administration's decision was wrong, it should prevail, they said.

"After today's ruling, however, parochialism may prevail," Alito wrote for the dissenters.

The court's majority, led by Justice John Paul Stevens, said Congress did not intend to take away the right of injured patients to sue drug makers. Levine's jury verdict was affirmed.

Thomas went further and said the court should lay down a marker.

"I have become 'increasing[ly] reluctan[t] to expand federal statutes beyond their terms through doctrines of implied preemption,' " he wrote, quoting himself in an earlier Supreme Court case.

Unless Congress spells it out in the text of the law, Thomas said, the consumer's right to sue under state law should be protected.

Justice Thomas Speech

2008-10-24T11:56:00.000-07:00

From a Georgia newspaper:

Justice Thomas Extols the Need to Listen

The U.S. Supreme Court justice least likely to speak up during oral arguments told lawyers gathered in Atlanta on Thursday that judges should spend more time listening and less time talking.

"I believe quite strongly we, as judges, need to take the approach we're here to solve difficult problems, not debate with lawyers," said Justice Clarence Thomas.

Speaking on the 17th anniversary of the day he took his seat on the Supreme Court, the Georgia native delivered a wide-ranging 30-minute talk and participated in a panel discussion on professionalism at the 11th Circuit Appellate Practice Institute.

He spoke before a crowd of about 200 at the State Bar of Georgia headquarters in Atlanta.

Thomas said that he made 30 to 40 oral arguments before appellate courts while practicing law in Missouri, and he was always impressed by how intently the judges listened to arguments.

"They seemed to be soaking up what I was saying," he said.

That behavior was in stark contrast to that exhibited by members of Congress during the 60-plus Capitol Hill hearings Thomas said he attended while working at the U.S. Department of Education and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the 1980s.

"Those hearings were different than a court hearing -- you were badgered, you were cajoled," Thomas said.

Instead of being probative, "questions were designed for sound bites, to elicit a laugh," he added.

Thomas also emphasized the importance of well-written briefs when dealing with any higher court. It's the brief, not the oral argument, where the heavy lifting is done, he said.

Well-written doesn't mean long, he added.

"Do not assume that a judge is reading only your brief this week," he said.

"I always wrote a brief thinking: This is the last thing this judge wants to read," Thomas continued, provoking laughter from the audience.

"We overemphasize the oral advocacy," Thomas said during a panel discussion that followed his remarks.

"The written advocacy is far more important," he said.

In nine of 10 cases, the position he had when leaving the bench after hearing oral arguments is the same as when he first sat down.

"I do believe," Thomas said, "you can lose your case at oral argument."

Still, oral arguments are essential on a broader level, Thomas said.

"It's important for people in our society to feel they can have their say," he said.

In response to a question from an audience member about the high court's shrinking caseload, Thomas said the Supreme Court should hear more cases each year. When he joined the Court, the justices would hear about 120 cases a session.

"That is four cases a day. It kept you busy. It gave justices less time to ask questions."

The Court today hears about 80 cases a year.

Thomas emphasized civility in his remarks.

"It's not helpful to say, 'I'm right because that person is stupid,'" said Thomas. It's important to be respectful even when disagreeing, he said. When writing a dissenting opinion, Thomas said he tells fellow justices reading his draft, "If there is anything in there that offends you, it's out."

Not only is it unkind to disparage a fellow justice in an opinion, it is unwise.

"If you insult them,” Thomas said, “it is very difficult in close cases to sway them."

Justice Thomas Lecture at Manhattan Institute

2008-10-20T08:00:00.000-07:00

Justice Thomas delivered the Wriston Lecture at the Manhattan Institute in 2008. Excerpts are here:

The following is an excerpt from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's Wriston Lecture to the Manhattan Institute last Thursday:

When John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address, "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country," we heard his words with ears that had been conditioned to receive this message and hearts that did not resist it. We heard it surrounded by fellow citizens who had known lives of sacrifice and hardships from war, the Great Depression and segregation. All around us seemed to ingest and echo his sentiment and his words. Our country and our principles were more important than our individual wants, and by discharging our responsibilities as citizens, neighbors, and students we would make our country better. It all made sense.

Today, we live in a far different environment. My generation, the self-indulgent "me" generation, has had a profound effect on much around us. Rarely do we hear a message of sacrifice -- unless it is a justification for more taxation and transfers of wealth to others. Nor do we hear from leaders or politicians the message that there is something larger and more important than the government providing for all of our needs and wants -- large and small. The message today seems more like: Ask not what you can do for yourselves or your country, but what your country must do for you.

This brings to mind the question that seems more explicit in informed discussions about political theory and implicit in shallow political speeches. What is the role of government? Or more to the point, what is the role of our government? Interestingly, this is the question that our framers answered more than 200 years ago when they declared our independence and adopted our written Constitution. They established the form of government that they trusted would be best to preserve liberty and allow a free people to prosper. And that it has done for over two centuries. Of course, there were major flaws such as the issue of slavery, which would eventually lead to a civil war and casualties of fellow citizens that dwarf those of any of the wars that our country has since been involved in.

Though we have amended the Constitution, we have not changed its structure or the core of the document itself. So what has changed? That is the question that I have asked myself and my law clerks countless times during my 17 years on the court.

As I have traveled across the country, I have been astounded just how many of our fellow citizens feel strongly about their constitutional rights but have no idea what they are, or for that matter, what the Constitution says. I am not suggesting that they become Constitutional scholars -- whatever that means. I am suggesting, however, that if one feels strongly about his or her rights, it does make sense to know generally what the Constitution says about them. It is at least as easy to understand as a cell phone contract -- and vastly more important.

The Declaration of Independence sets out the basic underlying principle of our Constitution. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . . ."

The framers structured the Constitution to assure that our national government be by the consent of the people. To do this, they limited its powers. The national government was to be strong enough to protect us from each other and from foreign enemies, but not so strong as to tyrannize us. So, the framers structured the Constitution to limit the powers of the national government. Its powers were specifically enumerated; it was divided into three co-equal branches; and the powers not given to the national government remained with the states and the people. The relationship between the two political branches (the executive and the legislative) was to be somewhat contentious providing checks and balances, while frequent elections would assure some measure of accountability. And, the often divergent interests of the states and the national government provided further protection of liberty behind the shield of federalism. The third branch, and least dangerous branch, was not similarly constrained or hobbled.

Since Marbury v. Madison the federal judiciary has assumed the role of the interpreter and, now, final arbiter of our Constitution. But, what rules must judges follow in doing so? What informs, guides and limits our interpretation of the admittedly broad provisions of the Constitution? And, more directly, what restrains us from imposing our personal views and policy preferences on our fellow citizens under the guise of Constitutional interpretation?

To assure the independence of federal judges, the framers provided us with life tenure and an irreducible salary -- though inflation has found a way around the latter. This independence, in turn, was to assure our neutrality and impartiality, which are at the very core of judging -- and being a judge. Yet, this independence can also insulate a judge from accountability for venturing beyond the proper role of a judge. But, what exactly is the proper role of a judge? We must understand that before we can praise or criticize a judge. In every endeavor from economics to games there is some way to measure performance.

As important as our Constitution is, there is no one accepted way of interpreting it. Indeed, for some commentators, it seems that if they like or prefer a particular policy or conduct, then it must be constitutional; while the policies that they do not prefer or like are unconstitutional. Obviously, this approach cannot be right. But, it certainly is at the center of the process of selecting judges. It goes something like this. If a judge does not think that abortion is best as a matter of policy or personal opinion, then the thought is that he or she will find it unconstitutional; while the judge who thinks it is good policy will find it constitutional. Those who think this way often seem to believe that since this is the way they themselves think, everyone must be doing the same thing. In this sense, legal realism morphs into legal cynicism. Certainly this is no way to run a railroad, not to mention interpret the Constitution. . . .

Let me put it this way; there are really only two ways to interpret the Constitution -- try to discern as best we can what the framers intended or make it up. No matter how ingenious, imaginative or artfully put, unless interpretive methodologies are tied to the original intent of the framers, they have no more basis in the Constitution than the latest football scores. To be sure, even the most conscientious effort to adhere to the original intent of the framers of our Constitution is flawed, as all methodologies and human institutions are; but at least originalism has the advantage of being legitimate and, I might add, impartial.

UPDATE: C-Span has posted the video here.

Justice Thomas and Football

2008-09-26T11:06:00.000-07:00

From the University of Georgia newspaper:

The football team was paid a supreme visit on Thursday as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas attended the Bulldogs' practice.

Thomas was seen going down the elevator at the Butts-Mehre building as reporters were coming in for head coach Mark Richt's pre-practice news conference.

"He's here, man, that fires me up," Richt said. "I just met him and that was fun. He's a very delightful man and just in the small time you're with him, you can tell he's a very humble man, considering who he is."

Thomas will be in attendance this Saturday at Sanford Stadium when Georgia hosts Alabama. Thomas is a native of Pin Point, Ga., and is a self-proclaimed Georgia fan, even though the Bulldogs are not his No. 1 favorite.

However, Richt would not divulge the one team Thomas likes more than Georgia.

"He's a Georgia fan but I don't know if I should tell anyone but he has a No. 1 team ahead of Georgia. He told me not to tell anybody so I won't. But it's somebody way far away from here and in a different conference."

Wendy Long Book Review

2008-06-25T10:33:00.001-07:00

Wendy Long, a former clerk for Justice Thomas, has this lengthy book review of several books about and by Justice Thomas. The review appears in the Claremont Review of Books.

Bearing Witness

By Wendy E. Long
Posted June 23, 2008

Books discussed in this essay:

My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir, by Clarence Thomas

Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas, by Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher

Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court, by Jan Crawford Greenburg

The Supreme Court Opinions of Clarence Thomas, 1991-2006: A Conservative's Perspective, edited by Henry Mark Holzer

First Principles: The Jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas, by Scott Douglas Gerber

Justice Clarence Thomas introduces his memoir, My Grandfather's Son, as "the story of an ordinary man to whom extraordinary things happened." That's the only part he got wrong. As his autobiography makes clear, it is the man who is extraordinary, not the circumstances. "The freest black man in America," Shelby Steele calls him. "The greatest living American," says Bill Bennett. To these, we should add the essential American: the black man on the center stage of our public life who has dared to say he loves America, and loved her from her start, even when that love seemed painfully unrequited.

In the 17 years since Justice Thomas took his seat on the Supreme Court, various friends, adversaries, journalists, and scholars have tried to tell his story. But, as he explains in his memoir (quoting the late William F. Buckley, Jr.), "Only the man who makes the voyage can speak truly about it." The most recent spate of books on Thomas—some released within months of his own memoir—prove to varying degrees that he and Buckley are correct. My Grandfather's Son is beautifully written, evocative, and jarring in its candor about the lowest points in his life—the bigotry he encountered, his struggles with alcohol, finances, his first marriage and divorce, the loss and rediscovery of his faith, and of course, his Senate confirmation saga. It's the full story of Thomas's life up to the moment he joins the Supreme Court. (As a sitting Justice, he can't go further and discuss matters on the Court.)

Daddy's Son

Only Thomas can really tell the story suggested by his book's title, which centers on the man who raised and molded him: his maternal grandfather, whom he called "Daddy." Myers Anderson, the relentlessly disciplined, hard-working, Catholic convert and ultimate tough-love parent—"dark, strong, proud"—was "the one hero in my life," writes Thomas. "What I am is what he made me." Thomas's biological father merely "sired" Clarence and his two siblings; their mother divorced M.C. Thomas in 1950, two years after Clarence was born. After their shanty in Pinpoint, Georgia, burned down when Thomas was six, he moved with his mother to a tenement in Savannah, which he describes as "hell": "[o]vernight I moved from the comparative safety and cleanliness of rural poverty to the foulest kind of urban squalor." Earning ten dollars per week for housekeeping, receiving zero child support, and refusing to go on welfare, Thomas's mother decided to send her sons to live with her father and his wife, who lived in a cinder block house painted a "gleaming white."

Daddy told the boys that if they learned how to work, they could live as well as he did, and that would be their "inheritance." The boys' first job, he said, was to get a good education. "It would be too generous," Thomas writes, to call Daddy himself "semiliterate"; he "struggled mightily with the newspaper and the Bible, and once he mastered a passage of Scripture he would read it over and over again." But Daddy's self-reliance is a piece of the segregated South that liberals today like to forget. He exhorted the young Clarence to learn, keep the faith, never give up, and never mind what other people do, say, or think. His staunch refusal to view himself as a victim was summed up in his advice to Thomas to "play the hand you're dealt." The cover photograph on My Grandfather's Son shows Thomas, apparently looking at the (off camera) bust of Myers Anderson that sits in his Supreme Court chambers, bearing as its inscription one of his favorite sayings to Clarence: "Old Man Can't is dead. I helped bury him."

In Savannah, Georgia, the boys worked every day after school and all day Saturday with Daddy in his fuel-oil delivery business, and in summers, on a farm in nearby Liberty County (where they built a four-room cinder block house with their own hands), plowing, planting, cutting wood, cleaning fish, skinning animals, killing chickens, all the while fighting off heat, gnats, flies, mosquitoes, and snakes—the last of which reappear metaphorically in the book. As a boy, Thomas learned that Georgia rattlesnakes, while deadly, at least give some advance notice of their attack. He later reflects that they were like the Southerners who were "up front about their bigotry"; at least "you knew exactly where they were coming from." Worse were the water moccasins, which strike without warning. He thinks of them when he encounters "paternalistic big-city whites" who "pretended to side with black people while using them to further their own political and social ends, turning against them when it suited their purposes."

Daddy had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1949 (the year after Thomas was born), and faithfully brought the boys to the pre-Vatican II mass where they learned their Latin responses by heart and served as altar boys. The nuns at Catholic school taught them that "God made all men equal, that blacks were inherently equal to whites." Young Clarence learned—at the age when children can drink in such truth—that God loves him infinitely, that he was the equal in God's eyes of any other man, and that every man's rights flow from God, not from any earthly master. This, combined with Daddy's lessons in discipline, work habits, and self-denial, formed Thomas's soul. Still, when a restive Clarence once told Daddy that "slavery was over," he replied: "Not in my house."

Later, Thomas strayed from his grandfather's principles. In the 1960s at Holy Cross, he became an angry black radical. He left the Church. When "the beast of rage...slipped its leash," or when the mounting injustices and humiliations seemed unendurable, he was consumed with anger and despair. But the story of My Grandfather's Son is how Thomas comes full circle, returning to the roots that Daddy nurtured. It is a story of incredible triumph, always tinged with the great sadness that Thomas never fully reconciled with Daddy before his death. Thomas's poignant response to this—vowing "to live my life as a memorial" to his—suggests a path for anyone who did not fully appreciate his parents until they were gone.

High-Tech Lynching

The brutal honesty of the memoir is all the more remarkable because most public figures are far more guarded in writing about themselves; their memoirs are designed to further political or other ambitions. But Thomas wrote his book to "bear witness" to what Daddy and others have done for him, to tell his story accurately and not "to leave the telling to those with careless hands or malicious hearts," and to inspire those who might identify with some part of his story and need hope, as he did, to go on. And unlike most other public figures, Thomas really can write. Literature transported his young mind beyond the segregated South while at the same time helping him to understand it. He studied Latin as a teenager and English literature in college. As an adult, his "interest in Churchill kindled a love of reading for its own sake."

Of course, Thomas's most famous utterance was his statement before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee:
I think that this hearing should never occur in America.... And from my standpoint, as a black American...it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you, you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured, by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.
In My Grandfather's Son, we learn how those words came together only moments before they were delivered to the Senate and the nation, as a drained Thomas lay on a couch in the dimmed light of early evening in Senator John Danforth's office. He must have been thinking, he writes, of Atticus Finch's closing argument in To Kill a Mockingbird, about how the white mob's purpose was to keep a black man in his place, when he seized Danforth's legal pad and scrawled, "HIGH-TECH LYNCHING."

Thomas and his advisors knew any nomination that President George H.W. Bush made to the Supreme Court in 1991 was going to be highly politicized. They knew that Democratic senators, with the aid and encouragement of liberal interest groups, would try to use the confirmation hearings to "Bork" Clarence Thomas—a verb that had entered the lexicon four years earlier when the same coalition, using smears, innuendo, and outright lies, had defeated Reagan Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. But no one knew the ferocity with which liberals would attack a black man who strayed from the ideological plantation. Thomas met with board members of the NAACP—"a waste of time," he notes—and the organization, predictably, announced its opposition to his nomination quickly thereafter, "apparently at the insistence of the AFL-CIO." The NAACP "was in effect giving a green light to the various groups that opposed my nomination, tacitly assuring them that it was now all right for them to smear a black man."

The post-nomination courtesy calls with senators revealed a similar dynamic at work. Alabama's Howell Heflin (who was commonly referred to as "courtly," but whose manner reminded Thomas of "a slave owner sitting on the porch of a plantation house") asked Thomas to return for further meetings, "but it soon became evident that his sole purpose in continuing to meet with me was to find reasons to vote against me." Bob Packwood was "direct," saying he simply could not vote for Thomas because the senator's "political career depended on support from the same women's groups that were opposing" the nomination. Al Gore said he'd vote for Thomas "if [Gore] decided not to run for President." And Fritz Hollings confessed that in order to support Thomas he'd first have to resolve "a political problem with the NAACP in his home state of South Carolina." Thomas recalls, "Strange as it may sound, I appreciated that kind of honesty" from senators who would "admit their real reasons for voting against me instead of making up some transparent excuse."

Thomas describes hauntingly the feeling he had after five days of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in which Democratic senators had "pummel[ed] me with loaded questions," including attempted traps involving abortion and natural law. Everyone assumed that the hearings were over. He had been through a political meat-grinder, and "after two and a half months of constant preparation and unrelenting attacks," he and his wife Virginia promptly left Washington to try to relax in the quiet resort town of Cape May, New Jersey. But Thomas "couldn't shake the feeling that for all the intensity of their effort, my opponents were still holding something in reserve."

Sordid Tale

Having followed the humiliations and heartbreaks that had brought Thomas to this point in the book, the reader can begin to understand what it was like to be in his shoes as the events described at the beginning of the ninth chapter—aptly titled "Invitation to a Lynching"—unfolded. The same deadly farce had been played out before in the lives of others, in history and in literature, so many times, in so many ways. It had played out in smaller ways—almost rehearsals—in Thomas's own life: the childhood in the Jim Crow South, where his friends told him to let go of his "foolish dreams," because "‘[t]he man ain't goin' let you do nothin'"; the seminary, where a classmate's response to the shooting of Martin Luther King, Jr.—"[t]hat's good, I hope the son of a bitch dies"—ended both Thomas's vocation to the priesthood and his "youthful innocence about race"; the devastation, after compiling a record of high achievement at Holy Cross and Yale, of finding it impossible to get a law firm job because his Ivy League degree was "tainted" by racial preference. (Finally, a young Missouri Attorney General named John Danforth hired Thomas as a staff lawyer in St. Louis. When Danforth was elected to the U.S. Senate, Thomas followed him to Washington, where he caught the attention of the Reagan Administration.)

It seemed unthinkable, yet at the same time all too predictable. One day, two FBI agents arrived at his house, and "started asking questions before I could close the door behind them." Did he know Anita Hill? Had he made sexual advances to her? From that moment, it was clear Thomas would have to prove a negative. He recalled Franz Kafka's The Trial: "Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning." His enemies thought they had found the perfect weapon to destroy him.

Ironically, in preparing for his first round of confirmation hearings, Thomas had penciled in Anita Hill as a "liberal whom I could call as a witness on my behalf should it become necessary." Others have told pieces of the story before (some blatantly false), but to hear it finally from Thomas himself—it all makes sense. Hill was a liberal. Thomas knew this all along; in her first interview with him for a position at the Department of Education in 1981 (he was the assistant secretary for civil rights), she had told him that she "detested" Ronald Reagan. But Thomas's close friend Gil Hardy (a black buddy from Holy Cross) had asked him to "help a sister" who was leaving Hardy's law firm. Hill had told Thomas she could not get a recommendation from the firm because she had been sexually harassed there. So he found a way to hire her as a non-political appointee. Though her work was only "adequate," and though she had been "touchy and apt to overreact," he continued to help her, at Hardy's insistence, and allowed her to follow him in 1982 when President Reagan named him chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

When Thomas appointed Allyson Duncan, another black woman and "a consummate professional whose work had been consistently outstanding" as his EEOC chief of staff in 1983, Hill "stormed into" his office to protest that she had not been promoted. Hardy again pleaded with Thomas "to be patient with her." Thomas soon after saw an opening to recommend Hill as a law professor in her native Oklahoma, and she accepted. But she continued to call Thomas over the years that followed, and the last time he remembered seeing her, she insisted on driving him to the airport after a speech she'd asked him to give in Tulsa.

Just days before the full Senate was scheduled for the final vote on Thomas's nomination, the supposedly confidential FBI report with Hill's wild allegations was leaked to the national media. In his memoir, Thomas describes meeting, via news reports,
for the first time an Anita Hill who bore little resemblance to the woman who had worked for me at EEOC and the Education Department. Somewhere along the line she had been transformed into a conservative, devoutly religious Reagan-administration employee.... But truth was no longer relevant: keeping me off the Supreme Court was all that mattered. These pieces of her sordid tale only needed to hold up long enough to help her establish her credibility with the public. They fell away as the rest of the story gained traction in the media, just as the fuel tank and booster rockets drop away from a space shuttle once it reaches the upper atmosphere.
Defiance of Facts

Immediately after the release of my Grandfather's Son, the national media grabbed the news hook to repeat Hill's allegations and to pronounce that the "he said, she said" remains a mystery. But a rigorous journalistic assessment of the Hill tale was nowhere to be found. A case study in this failure of critical, objective journalism is Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas, released just months before Thomas's own book. Authors and Washington Post reporters Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher fail to grapple with fundamental points about the Hill tale that don't add up. In 16 years, no one has ever offered a plausible explanation why Anita Hill, a Yale-educated lawyer and avowed liberal, would leave the equivalent of a civil service job at the Department of Education to follow Clarence Thomas to the EEOC if she were being sexually harassed. No one, including Hill, has explained why she would continue to contact Thomas, repeatedly and insistently leaving telephone messages, including her hotel room number, inviting him to her law school in Oklahoma to speak, and insisting on driving him to the airport, if her allegations were true. No one has ever cited a case of sexual harassment where the plaintiff behaved as Anita Hill did following the alleged harassment. And the Senate testimony attempting to corroborate her own testimony was full of holes. Susan Hoerchner, Hill's main witness, had a record of liberal activism and, when interviewed by Senate staffers, contradicted Hill's testimony as to when the alleged harassment took place. Hill's attorney, who was also advising Hoerchner, called for a break when the discrepancy emerged. After the break, Hoerchner had a "failure of memory" that became her storyline at the hearings. Hill gave the FBI the names of two other employees who she said would corroborate her story. Neither did.

Of the three women who provided statements supporting Hill, Thomas had fired two of them for poor job performance and had declined to reappoint the third after she failed the bar exam. The overwhelming number of professional women who worked side-by-side with Clarence Thomas over the years, including pro-choice women, Democrats, liberals, and feminists, said Hill's story was flatly inconsistent with what they knew of him. Pam Talkin, Thomas's EEOC chief of staff, testified that her boss
was adamant that the women in the office be treated with dignity and respect. And his own behavior towards women was scrupulous. There was never a hint of impropriety, and I mean a hint. Never a gesture, never a look, never a word, never body language. None of these things that we women have a sixth sense about.
Talkin and the other women who testified similarly before the Senate committee were not allowed to do so until 2 o'clock in the morning.

A Man of Principle

Merida and Fletcher try to paint Thomas as a tormented figure, "uncomfortable" in both the "white world" and the "black world." They tout the countless interviews and original research they conducted to figure out which is the "real" Clarence Thomas: the "magnetic" figure who strikes up friendships wherever he goes, the "ideological" figure who is a "hero of the conservative right," or the "despised" figure who is a traitor to his race and to liberal ideals, a sellout, an Uncle Tom.

Although the first two portraits are true to different degrees, Merida and Fletcher clearly favor the third, and they twist every opportunity to portray Thomas as an Uncle Tom who, among other things, schemed to get on the Supreme Court, even lying to civil rights groups about his views. This assertion, like so many in their book, flies in the face of fact: for more than a decade, Thomas had hidden his views from no one, and battled not only with the civil rights establishment but with his fellow Reagan Administration officials.

Supreme Discomfort's snide, breathless tone may be gathered from tabloid excesses like this: "Even in his cloistered, rarefied world as a member of the most important judicial body in existence, Thomas will always be black and he knows it." Such statements are embarrassing, not only for two black journalists, but particularly when held up against the depth and nuance expressed in My Grandfather's Son.

Because the authors of Supreme Discomfort are so wedded to their "Uncle Tom" thesis, they latch onto the liberal establishment line that although Thomas was the beneficiary of affirmative action all his life, now that he's climbed to the top of the heap he has pulled up the rope behind him, and would deny the same advantage to other blacks. Yet they acknowledge that "race did not appear to play a role in Thomas's acceptance to Holy Cross" and that "Yale officials cannot say whether Thomas would have been admitted to the prestigious law school without affirmative action" because by the time he was admitted, the university had refined its affirmative action efforts, admitting minority applicants only if it believed they could do the work and thrive at Yale. Interestingly, this goes precisely to Thomas's criticism of affirmative action as it came to be practiced more broadly in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s: that it resulted in minority students being accepted into schools and environments where they could not thrive, just in order to satisfy grand theories about minority admissions or to provide a "diverse" environment that would somehow enhance the white folks' experience, irrespective of the effect it would have on the minority students.

Merida and Fletcher also repeat the canard that Thomas is a "flunky" of Justice Antonin Scalia, even as Thurgood Marshall was dismissed as the "lackey" of Justice William Brennan. Neither Marshall nor Thomas has ever been regarded as an "intellectual force," they say—though they are careful not to make that assertion themselves (instead invoking the frequently unattributed, unfootnoted comments of others). They note that both pairs of Justices voted together 90% of the time, and smugly conclude, "no one has ever suggested that Scalia and Brennan followed the lead of their black brethren."

By lumping Thomas and Marshall together in this way, they make the truth more difficult to untangle. On the other hand, they insulate Marshall from justifiable criticism, twisting and mischaracterizing facts to obscure the claim's absurdity with respect to Thomas. The fact is, Marshall did follow Brennan, "consistently and predictably," as Supreme Court historian Henry Abraham, among others, has noted. Marshall was not the only—though probably the most reliable—Justice whom Brennan mustered to create many of the 5-4 majorities whose decisions live in the annals of judicial activism. On the other hand, Scalia, unlike the diplomat Brennan, frequently writes only for himself and, while Scalia is renowned for many things, coalition-building is not one of them. He and Thomas have come out on opposite sides of important constitutional cases, such as First Amendment protection for anonymous political speech, forfeiture of cash under the Eighth Amendment's "excessive fines" clause, and the wholly intrastate, medical use of cannabis as permitted by state law. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), Scalia invoked Blackstone and English common law to argue that the president did not have the power to detain Yaser Esam Hamdi; Thomas instead analyzed the issue in light of the principles of executive power outlined in The Federalist, concluding that such military decisions of the commander-in-chief can't be second-guessed by the Court.

And even when Scalia and Thomas agree on the outcome, they sometimes employ separate reasoning, writing their own dissents and concurrences, as Thomas did in United States v. Lopez (1995), in which he called into question the Court's precedents holding that Congress can legislate not only to regulate commerce "among the several States," as the Constitution prescribes, but also in areas where there is merely a "substantial effect" on interstate commerce. Another example: although both Scalia and Thomas have dissented from the misguided line of cases holding public expressions of religion to violate the Constitution, only Thomas has explained the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment as the framers understood it, as a "federalism provision" that "protects state establishments from federal interference." Overall, Thomas is more willing than Scalia to reexamine flawed precedents and return straight to the Constitution's text and principles. In the words of one legal scholar, "when it comes to enumerated federal powers," only Thomas is "willing to put the mandate of the Constitution above his...own views of either policy or what would make a better constitution than the one enacted." No one ever said that about Thurgood Marshall.

Quiet Conviction

Fortunately, another journalist—one with legal training, unlike Merida and Fletcher—has taken the time to investigate the charge that Thomas merely follows Scalia. Jan Crawford Greenburg, a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School and an ABC News legal correspondent, researched the papers of the late Justice Harry Blackmun and conducted scores of interviews of the law clerks present during Thomas's early terms on the Court. Her book, Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the Supreme Court, shatters the myth that Thomas follows Scalia's lead. It goes even deeper than the refutations already provided on this point by other authors, such as journalist Ken Foskett, Thomas biographer Andrew Peyton Thomas (no relation), and law professor Scott Gerber. Greenburg's research reveals that Thomas was a powerful, independent voice on the Court, with his own thoughts about the Constitution and judging that diverged in significant respects from Scalia's.

For example, Greenburg reveals that at Thomas's very first conference (the meeting where the Justices exchange views, in order of seniority, on the cases argued that day), the Justices unanimously agreed in Foucha v. Louisiana (1992) that a Louisiana law was unconstitutional in allowing the state to confine to a mental institution an inmate found not guilty by reason of insanity, after doctors concluded he was no longer insane. But the next day, Thomas went to Chief Justice William Rehnquist and said he would be the lone dissenter. When Thomas circulated his written dissent to the Court, Rehnquist and Scalia quickly switched their votes and joined him, persuaded by his argument that Foucha had no constitutional right to be released even if it made sense as a policy matter. Justice Anthony Kennedy switched his vote, too, though he wrote his own dissent. The case, which was unanimous before Thomas spoke up, was decided 5-4.

Almost immediately, Thomas again was the sole dissenter. In Hudson v. McMillian (1992), a prisoner had been beaten by guards and claimed he had been subjected to "cruel and unusual punishment" in violation of the Eighth Amendment. Blackmun's notes reflect the shock in the conference at Thomas's lone position. But when Thomas circulated his dissent, arguing that a prison guard's actions, however wrong, are not the equivalent of official punishment meted out by the state, Scalia promptly switched his vote, persuaded again by the force of Thomas's reasoning.

Thomas has often been criticized for not speaking during oral argument, when other Justices interrupt each other and pepper the lawyers with questions. Incredibly, Merida and Fletcher devote an entire chapter, "Silent Justice," to this subject, surveying at seemingly endless length everyone from high school students visiting the Supreme Court to former Reagan Solicitor General Charles Fried. Thomas has explained publicly, more than once, that there are very few questions that need to be asked once a Justice has done a thorough job reading all the briefs in the case. Almost all of the questioning is for sport among the Justices, or to put on a show for the media.

View of the Founding

In the chapter on Marshall and Thomas, Supreme Discomfort touches upon the most significant difference between the only two black Supreme Court Justices in our nation's history. Marshall believed that the Constitution "was defective from the start" because it permitted slavery and did not allow women to vote. In 1987, as America celebrated the Constitution's bicentennial, Marshall asserted that the American Founders
could not have imagined, nor would they have accepted, that the document they were drafting would one day be construed by a Supreme Court to which had been appointed a woman and the descendent of an African slave. We the people no longer enslave, but the credit does not belong to the Framers. It belongs to those who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of liberty, justice, and equality, and who strived to better them.
In other words, the credit belongs not to the founders, but to Marshall and to others like him.

Thomas was "chief among the condemners" of Marshall's bicentennial speech, according to Merida and Fletcher. The authors defend Marshall, insisting that he "spent considerable time thinking his speech over" and "ran it by renowned historian John Hope Franklin, who...wrote the mega-best-selling history of African Americans, From Slavery to Freedom." But the fact that Marshall had put so much thought into the speech—that it was not an off-the-cuff statement of an aging justice—only makes clearer that Marshall detested and misunderstood the American Founding.

The condemnation of the founding as defective for its treatment of blacks and women is not unique to Marshall; perhaps its most vehement recent expressions belong to Barack Obama's pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. And Obama's own campaign stump line, "We are the ones we've been waiting for," means essentially what Marshall said: the founders got it wrong, but we enlightened liberals are fixing things up.

The contrast to Clarence Thomas's view could not be more stark. Thomas describes in My Grandfather's Son how he deliberately set out, beginning in 1986 as chairman of the EEOC, to explore with Claremont Institute scholars Ken Masugi and John Marini "the natural-law philosophy with which the Declaration of Independence, America's first founding document, is permeated." Recounting the tutorials of some 20 years ago, Thomas writes,
if all men are created equal, then no man can own another man, and we can only be governed by our consent. How, then, could a country founded on those principles have permitted slavery and segregation to exist? The answer was that it couldn't—not without being untrue to its own ideals.

If Thurgood Marshall and his ilk had had their way—if the North had refused to compromise with slavery in 1787, if the Three-Fifths Clause had never been written—no United States would have existed, and slavery could never have been put, as Lincoln said, "on the course of ultimate extinction." Thomas explains:
The Founders made the political judgment that, given the circumstances at the time, the best defense of the Constitution's principles and, ironically, the most beneficial course for the slaves themselves was to compromise with slavery while, at the same time, establishing a union that, at its root, was devoted to the principle of human equality.

Other Opinions

In his newly revised and expanded book, The Supreme Court Opinions of Clarence Thomas, 1991-2006: A Conservative's Perspective, Brooklyn Law School professor emeritus Henry Mark Holzer provides a sympathetic, indeed reverential, take on the Justice's official oeuvre, but unfortunately the book at times appears to reflect more of Holzer's views than Thomas's. To his credit, Holzer characterizes the Constitution as implementing the Declaration, but he makes some dubious statements that surely should not be attributed to Thomas, such as that the principles of the Declaration "were virtually unknown in the history of man." Thomas himself has discussed the natural rights of life, liberty, and property in the thought of John Locke and others upon whom the founders drew. The book does contain excerpts from many of Thomas's most constitutionally significant cases, but the choice of excerpts is narrow, and the editing diminishes them further, as does the analysis (or lack of it). The reader would be better advised simply to read Thomas's opinions for himself.

A more scholarly and complete book examining Thomas's Supreme Court opinions is Scott Gerber's First Principles: The Jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas. First published in 1999 as a review of Thomas's first five terms on the Court, it was expanded and republished in 2002. Gerber, a professor of law at Ohio Northern University, calls himself a "classical liberal" and undertakes a truly dispassionate study, taking pains to avoid weighing in either for or against Thomas's work. He avoids the term "Justice Thomas's judicial philosophy," which is fitting, because, as Thomas himself explains in his memoir, at the time of his nomination "I didn't have one."

Thomas still resists the idea that he has a "judicial philosophy." He just does his best to decide cases on the bases of the Constitution's text and principles and the laws enacted by the branches of government accountable to the "consent of the governed." Quoting Thomas's Senate testimony and speeches, Gerber takes the time to explain the Justice's stance, better labeled "judicial neutrality." Thomas articulated more fully, and several years earlier, the same posture of judicial neutrality for which John Roberts won so much acclaim at his own Senate confirmation hearings in 2005, when he described a judge as an "umpire" in a ball game. As Thomas put it,
If we are to be a nation of laws and not of men, judges must be impartial referees who are willing at times to defend constitutional principles from attempts by different groups, parties, or the people as a whole, to overwhelm them in the name of expediency.... A judge does not look to his or her sex or racial, social, or religious background when deciding a case.... [A] person must attempt to exorcise himself or herself of the passions, thoughts, and emotions that fill any frail human being.... Otherwise, he is not a judge, but a legislator, for whom it is entirely appropriate to consider personal or group interests.

Gerber's balanced, scholarly study should be reprised, and soon—taking into account not only Thomas's opinions of the past five years, but also his memoir and Greenburg's research in the meantime. It would be even better if Gerber, or someone else, would produce a compendium and analysis of Thomas's opinions based not on standard legal categories such as "federalism" and "civil rights," but on the themes that emerge from his defense of the Constitution over the last 16 years on the Court: themes such as the necessity of good education for the success of the American regime of self-government, and the idea that the right to keep the property that one has earned by the sweat of one's brow is a first and fundamental freedom.

Thomas has said that the Justice's job of protecting the Constitution and the principles that underlie it "is not a game of cute phrases and glib remarks in important documents" but rather is a "deadly serious business." Whether the American experiment in self-government endures will depend, in large part, upon whether the Constitution can be preserved against the depredations of judicial activism. And that, in turn, just might depend upon whether the principles outlined in the opinions of Justice Clarence Thomas continue to persuade members of the Supreme Court and his fellow citizens.

"I've never doubted the greatness of a country in which a person like me could travel all the way from Pinpoint to Capitol Hill," Thomas writes. My Grandfather's Son is an amazing tale that can embolden us all as we face the hardest moments in life, and give us hope for the future of our country and her principles.

Justice Thomas Graduation Speech

2008-05-30T16:03:00.001-07:00

From the Washington Times:

Thomas inspires boys school grads
Justice speaks to class of 18
David C. Lipscomb THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Friday, May 30, 2008

It was no ordinary occurrence for no ordinary students at no ordinary school.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas - accustomed to commanding audiences of thousands at major universities - instead delivered a commencement address last night for 18 graduating middle-school boys at the highly regarded Washington Jesuit Academy in Northeast.

Washington Jesuit is a tuition-free private boarding school for underprivileged but academically promising youths run by the Jesuits - an influential order of Catholic priests legendary for centuries of educational excellence. Inspired academic instruction is but one feature of a boy's life at the school.

Within Washington Jesuit's walls, at least, character counts, and it showed in the eighth-graders' polite demeanor last night.

"It is truly up to each of you to decide what type of building block you will become with your actions," Justice Thomas told the class of primarily black students during his speech.

Like his audience, Justice Thomas came up the hard way - raised in impoverished Pin Point, Ga., and abandoned by his father - but he benefited mightily from a Jesuit education at Holy Cross College. The former seminarian was nominated to the court by President George H.W. Bush in 1991.

Allison Shelley/The Washington Times Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas meets with the graduating class at Washington Jesuit Academy, including (from left) Demitrius McNeil, Marcus Cain and Olushola Shokunbi. Demitrius, 14, said he could relate to Justice Thomas' rise from poverty.

He was sworn in after perhaps the most bitter Supreme Court confirmation fight in memory. A former head of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he is the only black on the court.

"Remember that life is not easy for any of us, it probably won't be fair and it certainly isn't all about you," he said. "The gray hair and wrinkles you see on older people have been earned the hard way."

The students wore navy sport coats, white and green barber-striped ties and khakis. They gave firm handshakes and made eye contact as they spoke with Justice Thomas about their plans for high school, college and life.

The justice returned the gestures and encouraged each boy with firm pats and a few words such as "congratulations" and "don't stop now."

"It's an honor [to meet the justice]. It's very inspiring that he got past segregation," said valedictorian Airton Kamdem, 14, of Silver Spring. Airton will attend Georgetown Prep in North Bethesda for high school.

"It's a pleasure," said Demitrius McNeil, 14, of Fairfax. "I grew up in a bad neighborhood so I can relate [to Justice Thomas]. It's about making something out of your life." Demitrius will go to Gonzaga College High School in Northwest this fall.

Justice Thomas praised the school for helping prepare academically promising but underprivileged students for the time when they will enter a more competitive collegiate environment, up against students born with more advantages.

"When I was coming up, there was a problem with throwing young people into the fire on the collegiate level without preparing them ... they can't win," he said. "In this situation, they now can win."

The school, which is near Catholic University, was founded in 2002 and helps the boys succeed with small class sizes, 12-hour school days and an 11-month school year.

The academy says only about 11 percent of its students enter the school reading at their grade level, but 95 percent of them graduate doing so. The school also boasts double-digit improvements in students' standardized tests scores after two years.

There are only 38 alumni, but all are in high school and nearly all are in college preparatory programs.

School President William B. Whitaker said the speech was important to the students because Justice Thomas' life shows that anyone can achieve greatness.

"A lot the boys think they can't, they won't," Mr. Whitaker said. "But we try to encourage them and say 'you can, you will and you should.'

Allison Shelley/The Washington Times Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas meets with the graduating class at Washington Jesuit Academy, including (from left) Demitrius McNeil, Marcus Cain and Olushola Shokunbi. Demitrius, 14, said he could relate to Justice Thomas' rise from poverty.

Justice Thomas Speaks at UGA

2008-05-12T07:46:00.000-07:00

From Online Athens:

Thomas tells grads of goal blocked by injustice
By Blake Aued
Sunday, May 11, 2008

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the fifth Georgian to serve on the high court, would have been the first black University of Georgia graduate if he'd had his way.

Thomas wanted to be a Bulldog, but segregation stopped him, he said Saturday during his commencement address at Sanford Stadium.

"Forty-one years ago, when I graduated from high school in Savannah, attending the University of Georgia was not an option," he said. "Thankfully, much has changed in my lifetime. Knowing what I know today, I would go to school here in a heartbeat. Georgia is home, and Georgia is where I belong."

. . .

He credited his grandparents, relatives and friends - farmers, yard workers and maids, mostly - in his native Pin Point for raising him right.

"They went along with their lives doing their best with what they had, knowing all the while that this was not necessarily fair," he said. "They played the hand they were dealt, and through it all, they were unfailingly good, decent and kind people, whose unrequited love for our great country and hope for our future were shining examples for all of us to emulate in our own struggles."

The controversial justice spurned politics, jurisprudence and the usual lofty rhetoric of commencement speakers. Instead, he praised old-fashioned virtues like faith, gratitude, honesty, discipline, politeness, punctuality and sincerity.

"Look, many have been angry at me because I refuse to be angry, bitter or full of grievances, and some will be angry at you for not becoming agents of their most recent cynical causes," he said. "Don't worry about it. No monuments are ever built to cynics."

Thomas recalled when the socialist writer Michael Harrington spoke at his own commencement in 1971. But Thomas said he was more worried at the time about paying off his student loans and his upcoming wedding than about Harrington's message.

"He seemed to be exhorting us on to solve the problems of poverty and injustice," Thomas said. "As important as that was, I, like most people sitting here today, was focused on solving my own problems, so I would not become a problem for or a burden to others."

Some faculty and students criticized UGA President Michael Adams' selection of Thomas to deliver the commencement address. About 1,200 people signed an online petition opposing the choice. Thomas was accused of sexual harassment during his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings, and a rash of harassment scandals has plagued UGA lately.

But he received a standing ovation Saturday, and graduates said his speech's humor and homespun wisdom resonated with them.

"A lot of the things he said are the same things my mother and auntie say all the time," psychology and pre-med major LaKeithia Glover said.

. . .

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, left, shares a laugh Saturday with University of Georgia President Michael Adams during commencement ceremonies in Sanford Stadium.

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Thomas gives grads familiar advice

By Jeffry Scott
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/11/08

Athens —- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the commencement speaker before the 2008 graduating class of the University of Georgia, said when he graduated from high school 41 years ago, attending UGA "was not an option" because schools in the state were still largely segregated.

But then Thomas, who grew up in Pin Point, outside Savannah, told the approximately 3,500 graduating students gathered on the field at Sanford Stadium on Saturday that he was happy to be back at the school, where he gave the law school commencement address in 2003.

"Georgia is my home," he said. "Georgia is where I belong."

In recent weeks the UGA administration had come under criticism from some faculty members for inviting Thomas, because of allegations of sexual harassment brought against him 17 years ago during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings before the U.S. Senate.

There were no fireworks Saturday, either outside the ceremony —- where there were no protests —- nor in the text of his address, which was heavy on chestnuts of wisdom such as "I urge you to do the best to be your best."

Thomas, who seldom gives interviews and has been criticized for not asking questions from the bench —- he once went two years and sat in on 142 cases in the Supreme Court without speaking in the courtroom —- seemed uncomfortable straying from his prepared text.

At least twice he misread what was written, and doubled back to correct himself. But he was offering wisdom, not inspiration.

"The rewards of self-indulgence are not nearly as great as the rewards of self-discipline," he told the students.

He spoke highly of the lessons his grandparents taught him and how only in his later years he has come to realize the value of those lessons.

He recalled how 30 years ago a janitor who worked in the U.S. Senate saw Thomas was troubled and pulled him aside to tell him he needed to be strong and unselfish to benefit others.

"He told me 'Son, you cannot give what you do not have,' " Thomas said.

When he left the podium, Thomas, who spoke for 22 minutes, received a standing ovation.

Faculty Embarrass Themselves

2008-05-05T06:56:00.000-07:00

At the University of Georgia. See here:

As is the case with most conservative speakers at those pesky liberal bastions (aka colleges), the choice of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as the University of Georgia's commencement speaker has inspired a "reaction that ranges from surprise to infuriation," the Red and Black reports. "Many would consider him a divisive figure because of his voting record and the past allegations of sexual harassment with Anita Hill," said a psychology professor.

The speaker announcement caps a year of sexual harassment scandals on the Georgia campus (three professors have resigned since September because of sexual harassment complaints). But it also comes at a time when faculty members believe the school has made progress on the issue. "What a slap in the face this is to everyone who has been working to bring to light the realities of sexual harassment at [the university]," said the women's studies director.

The President of the University of Georgia defends the choice to invite Justice Thomas:

Clarence Thomas: Suitable speaker at UGA? Yes

By MICHAEL F. ADAMS
Published on: 04/25/08

The University of Georgia has never had, and will never have, I hope, a political litmus test for the speakers who appear at commencement or other events. Associate Justice Clarence Thomas has been generous and gracious with his time and in his support of UGA. In 2006, he spoke at the Blue Key banquet here and received the Blue Key Service Award. At the invitation of Dean David Shipley, he spoke at the School of Law's commencement ceremony in 2003. He has lectured in both the law school and the Honors program, and has given hours of his time in his Washington office to talk with UGA Foundation Fellows.

He has been very helpful to UGA law students who have aspirations to clerk in the Supreme Court. He has also joined me in Sanford Stadium to cheer on the Bulldogs.

As a native Georgian, Justice Thomas has honored his home state with his service on the Supreme Court, and we are honored that he accepted the invitation to speak at commencement. He is welcome on this campus anytime, as is any other sitting or former justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

The tradition of free and open discourse on a university campus is one of the fundamental tenets undergirding all that we do in academe. It is important for our students to hear a wide variety of voices and reach their own conclusions about the important issues of the day. Last year, Associate Justice Stephen Breyer participated in the three-day retrospective on the 30th anniversary of the inauguration of Jimmy Carter. Just last month, we welcomed five former secretaries of state for a round-table discussion sponsored by the School of Law and the School of Public and International Affairs; two of them served Democratic presidents and three served in Republican administrations.

On a single day in April 2006, we hosted former President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, who participated in the dedication of the Coverdell Center, and former Sen. John Edwards, a Democrat, who was campaigning for the presidency.

The roster of recent commencement speakers demonstrates a variety of points of view, as it should. We have hosted Georgia governors of both parties; Ted Turner; Time Magazine Editor in Chief John Huey; U.S. Sens. Phil Gramm, Zell Miller and Saxby Chambliss; U.S Rep. Sanford Bishop; and Clark Atlanta University President Walter Broadnax.

At a large academic institution, opinions will always differ regarding the choice of commencement speaker, but each of us should remember that graduation day is a day for the students, those who have completed their academic work and are looking forward to careers or graduate school.

Commencement is truly a grand, celebratory occasion at the University of Georgia, and our focus on May 10 in Sanford Stadium will be on the accomplishments of the 4,000-plus bright undergraduates who will graduate that morning.

Michael F. Adams is president of the University of Georgia.

Commencement Speech at High Point University

2008-05-05T06:55:00.000-07:00

An article:

Supreme Court justice speaks at HPU commencement
By Nancy H. McLaughlin
Staff Writer
Sunday, May. 4, 2008 3:00 am

HIGH POINT — If Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas were to package Saturday's commencement speech at High Point University into an inspirational book about learning everything needed for life, he could call it "Those old folks are right."

"Good manners will open doors that nothing else will open," Thomas told graduates seated on the manicured lawn of the private college. More than 600 diplomas were awarded on a morning fraught with sporadic wind bursts heavy enough to upend stacks of printed programs.

Other advice from Thomas: "Remember the rewards of self-indulgence are not nearly as great as the rewards of self-discipline. Remember that life is not easy and probably will not be fair."

"When I was younger and acted as though I knew everything, the older people knew better. ... The older I have gotten, the smarter they have become," said Thomas, who became a jurist of the country's highest court when most of the HPU graduates had not even begun first grade.

"Chief among those who have grown in stature is my grandfather, who seemed small and irrelevant when I sat where you sit," Thomas said of his own graduation day.

"Today, he is the greatest man I've ever known."

. . .

In his remarks, Thomas would go on to describe a life shaped by faith, discipline and the power of positive thinking.

"I was 9 years old when I met my father," Thomas said. "The point is not to complain, but rather to say: Just because it starts a certain way doesn't mean it has to end that way."

. . .

Justice Thomas to Speak at University of Georgia

2008-04-19T17:34:00.000-07:00

From Athens, Georgia:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas will return to the University of Georgia next month to deliver the address at the university's undergraduate commencement exercise.

Thomas, 59, was the commencement speaker for the UGA School of Law in 2003, and also has addressed the UGA Blue Key Awards Banquet and visited with students and faculty in the law school.

Thomas, who has been on the Supreme Court for 16 years, will be the main speaker at the May 10 commencement, which is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. in Sanford Stadium. If the weather is bad, UGA will split the graduation into two ceremonies, at 9:30 and 11:30 a.m., and move them into Stegeman Coliseum.

Wall Street Journal Interview

2008-03-22T11:19:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal has an interview with Justice Thomas:

Clarence Thomas
Mr. Constitution

By DAVID B. RIVKIN and LEE A. CASEY
March 22, 2008; Page A25

Clarence Thomas leaps from his chair. He retrieves a wire coat hanger from his closet for a demonstration -- the same demonstration he gives his law clerks. He bends it and says: "How do you compensate? So, you say well, deal with it. Bend this over here. Oh, wait a minute, bend it a little bit there. And you're saying that it throws everything out of whack. What do you do?"

He holds up a twisted wire, useless now for its original purpose and the point is made. "If you notice sometimes I will write just to point out that I think that we've gone down a track that's going to cause some distortion, then it's quite precisely because of that. I don't do things that I think are illegitimate in other areas, just to bend it back to compensate for what's already happened."

Interpreting the Constitution is the Supreme Court's most important and most difficult task. An even harder question is how to approach a Constitution that, in fact, is no longer in pristine form -- with the Framers' design having been warped over the years by waves of judicial mischief. There is an obvious temptation to redress the imbalance, which Associate Justice Thomas decisively rejects. Thus his coat hanger metaphor.

So is the most controversial Supreme Court justice an "originalist" when it comes to Constitutional interpretation? He says he doesn't like labels, though he does admit to being a "meat and potatoes" kind of guy.

Upon entering his spacious office overlooking the Capitol Dome in Washington, D.C., the first thing to catch your eye is his Nebraska Cornhuskers screen saver. Mr. Thomas never attended the University of Nebraska, or even lived in the state. He's just a fan. His office is also decorated with pictures of the historical figures he admires, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Booker T. Washington, Thomas More and Winston Churchill, and he speaks of them with knowledge and passion. Watching over all is a bust of his grandfather atop Mr. Thomas's bookcase -- its countenance as stern as a Roman consul. There is little doubt this man was the driving force in Mr. Thomas's life -- a fact he confirms, and which is reflected in the title of his recently published memoir, "My Grandfather's Son."

Mr. Thomas faced one of the most destructive and personally vicious Supreme Court confirmation hearings in American history -- described at the time by Mr. Thomas himself as a "high-tech lynching." Mr. Thomas's opponents smeared his character and integrity. To this day, disappointed and embittered, they feel entitled to insult his qualifications, intelligence and record.

In 2004, when Mr. Thomas's name was floated as a possible replacement for ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist, then Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid called him an "embarrassment" to the Court, and attacked his opinions as "poorly written."

In point of fact, Mr. Thomas's opinions are well-written, displaying a distinctive style -- a sure sign that the Justice and not his clerks does most of the writing.

As for his judicial philosophy, "I don't put myself in a category. Maybe I am labeled as an originalist or something, but it's not my constitution to play around with. Let's just start with that. We're citizens. It's our country, it's our constitution. I don't feel I have any particular right to put my gloss on your constitution. My job is simply to interpret it."

In that process, the first place to look is the document itself. "And when I can't find something in that document or in the tradition or history around that document, then I am getting on dangerous ground. Because that's when you drift so much more towards your own policy preferences."

It is the insertion of those policy preferences into the interpretive process that Mr. Thomas finds particularly illegitimate. "People can say you are an originalist, I just think that we should interpret the Constitution as it's drafted, not as we would have drafted it."

Mr. Thomas acknowledges that discerning a two-hundred-year-old document's meaning is not always easy. Mistakes are possible, if not inevitable, as advocates of a malleable "living constitution," subject to endless judicial revision, never tire of pointing out. "Of course it's flawed" agrees Mr. Thomas, "but all interpretive models are flawed."

Simply following your own preferences is both flawed and illegitimate, he says. "But if that is difficult, does that difficulty legitimate just simply watching your own preference?" By doing that "I haven't cleared up the problem, I've simply trumped it with my personal preferences."

Mr. Thomas has also been criticized for his supposed lack of respect for precedent. Even his fellow conservative, Justice Antonin Scalia, was reported by a Thomas biographer to have claimed that Mr. Thomas just doesn't believe in "stare decisis." Latin for "let the decision stand," stare decisis is an important aspect of the Anglo-American system of precedent -- deciding new cases based on what the courts have done before and leaving long established rules in place.

Mr. Thomas, however, is less absolute here than his critics suggest. He understands the Supreme Court can't simply erase decades, or even centuries, of precedent -- "you can't do it."

At the same time, he views precedent with respect, not veneration. "You have people who will just constantly point out stare decisis, stare decisis, stare decisis . . . then it is one big ratchet. It is something that you wrestle with." History would seem to vindicate Mr. Thomas and his insistence on "getting it right" -- even if that does mean questioning precedent.

The perfect example is Brown v. Board of Education (1954), where the Supreme Court overruled the racist "separate but equal" rule of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which permitted legally enforced segregation and had been settled precedent for nearly 60 years.

It is the Plessy dissent of Justice John Marshall Harlan to which Mr. Thomas points for an example of a Justice putting his personal predilections aside to keep faith with the Constitution. Harlan was a Kentucky aristocrat and former slaveowner, although he was also a Unionist who fought for the North during the Civil War. A man of his time, he believed in white superiority, if not supremacy, and wrote in Plessy that the "white race" would continue to be dominant in the United States "in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power . . . for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty."

"But," Harlan continued, "in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among its citizens."

That, for Mr. Thomas, is the "great 'But,'" where Harlan's intellectual honesty trumped his personal prejudice, causing Mr. Thomas to describe Harlan as his favorite justice and even a role model. For both of them, justice is truly blind to everything but the law.

More than anything else, this explains Mr. Thomas's own understanding of his job -- a determination to put "a firewall between my [PERSONAL\]view and the way that I interpret the Constitution," and to vindicate his oath "that I will administer justice without respect to person, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all of the duties incumbent upon me as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States."

This insistence by the Justice on judging based upon the law, and not on who the parties are, presents a stark contrast with today's liberal orthodoxy. The liberal approach -- which confuses law-driven judging with compassion-driven politics, enthused with a heavy distrust of the American political system's fairness -- was recently articulated by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, who emphasized the need for judges with "heart" and "empathy" for the less fortunate, judges willing to favor the disempowered.

Born in rural Georgia in 1948, Mr. Thomas and his brother were mostly raised in Savannah by their maternal grandparents. His grandfather, Myers Anderson, believed in work, and that rights come with responsibilities. According to his book, Mr. Anderson told the seven-year-old Clarence that "the damn vacation is over" the morning he moved in.

Says Mr. Thomas: "Being willing to accept responsibility, that sort of dark side of freedom, first -- before you accept all the benefits. Being ready to be responsible for yourself -- you want to be independent. That was my grandfather." Anderson also taught his grandson to arrive at his conclusions honestly and not "to be bullied away from opinions that I think are legitimate. You know, not being unreasonable, but not being bullied away."

For a man who has been subjected to a great deal of vitriol, Mr. Thomas manifests remarkable serenity. He rejoices in life outside the Court, regaling us with stories about his travels throughout the U.S., his many encounters with ordinary Americans, and his love of sports -- especially the Cornhuskers, the Dallas Cowboys and Nascar.

Mr. Thomas isn't much bothered by his critics. "I can't answer the cynics and the negative people. I can't answer them because they can always be cynical about something."

Mr. Thomas speaks movingly about the Court as an institution, and about his colleagues, both past and present. He sees them all, despite their differences, as honorable, each possessing a distinctive voice, and trying to do right as they see it. Our job, he concludes, is "to do it right. It's no more than that. We can talk about methodology. It's merely a methodology. It's not a religion. It is in the approach to doing the job right. And at bottom what it comes to, is to choose to interpret this document as carefully and as accurately and as legitimately as I can, versus inflicting my personal opinion or imposing my personal opinion on the rest of the country."

And why doesn't he ask questions at oral argument, a question oft-posed by critics insinuating that he is intellectually lazy or worse? Mr. Thomas chuckles wryly and observes that oral advocacy was much more important in the Court's early days. Today, cases are thoroughly briefed by the time they reach the Supreme Court, and there is just too little time to have a meaningful conversation with the lawyers. "This is my 17th term and I haven't found it necessary to ask a bunch of questions. I would be doing it to satisfy other people, not to do my job. Most of the answers are in the briefs. This isn't Perry Mason."

Messrs. Rivkin and Casey served in the Justice Department under President George H.W. Bush.

Justice Thomas Highway in Georgia

2008-03-13T08:19:00.000-07:00

In Georgia news:

ATLANTA (AP) -- Here's how some legislation fared on "crossover" day at the Georgia state Capitol:

* * *

The interchange of I-95 and I-16 would be named after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, under a measure that passed unanimously. Thomas is a native of Pin Point, near where the two highways meet.

Justice Thomas Interview with EWTN

2008-01-05T14:54:00.000-08:00

Raymond Arroyo of the Catholic channel EWTN interviewed Justice Clarence Thomas in mid-December on his program "The World Over." Audio of the program is available here, and you can download the entire file by clicking here. It's the Dec. 14, 2007 interview. This was tricky to find, however, because EWTN's website incorrectly states that Arroyo had interviewed a Father John Berg. That label is incorrect. It's an hour-long program; Justice Thomas's interview starts at about 9:22 and lasts the rest of the hour.

This website explains the mislabeling:

Many who watched "The World Over" on Friday, December 14th, expected to see the interview with Fr. Berg but were instead treated to a rare interview with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The taped interview with Justice Thomas was quite extensive, and apparently a last-minute decision was made by EWTN to postpone the broadcast of the interview with Fr. Berg to a later time so that the whole interview with Clarence Thomas could be aired within one show.

Justice Clarence Thomas Speaks at Reagan Library

2007-12-19T07:27:00.001-08:00

From the Ventura County Star:

Dana Rene Bowler / Star staff

Justice Clarence Thomas escorts former first lady Nancy Reagan after speaking to a sold-out crowd Tuesday night at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley.

Thomas inspired by U.S. soldiers
Justice answers questions in Simi

By Anna Bakalis (Contact)
Wednesday, December 19, 2007

There are times when Clarence Thomas wishes he could take his wife and go home to Georgia, leaving his seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

But then he meets soldiers who came back from the war in Iraq with missing limbs and eyes, laid up in hospital beds with blood seeping through their bandages. Thomas realizes he wouldn't change a thing.

"I was ashamed of myself," Associate Justice Thomas, 68, said Tuesday at the Reagan Library. "If these kids can be in harm's way, defending our freedom and our country, it is not hard for me to stay in Washington."

Thomas was answering a question about what he would do if he weren't a justice on the nation's highest court. He spoke to a sold-out audience of about 700 in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum on Tuesday evening.

Thomas walked into the Presidential Learning Center arm in arm with Nancy Reagan, whom he acknowledged in opening remarks.

"You honor us in so many ways I can't express," Thomas said to Reagan.

His wife, Virginia Lamp Thomas, also was in attendance.

Though billed as a lecture, the event was more of a question-and-answer session, where the audience was asked to submit questions on cards that were later read by Duke Blackwood, the library's director.

Blackwood asked about the outcome of the 2000 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended the Florida recounts and allowed Florida to certify its vote.

"I think that decision was right," Thomas said to audience applause. "It's the correct legal analysis.

"Although I would have written a longer opinion," he quipped.

Thomas talked about Ronald Reagan and how the nation's 40th president bore similarities to his grandfather, who raised Thomas in Savannah, Ga., and offered him the guidance he is ruled by today, Thomas said.

"It's not about us," Thomas said. "It's about the principles we stand for — liberty, country, honor and integrity."

Thomas supports a strict interpretation of the Constitution and limits on the power of federal government in favor of states' rights, he said.

"It's not up to me to make up words in the Constitution that aren't there," he said.

In 1980, he changed his voter registration from Democrat to Republican so he could vote for Reagan.

"I didn't consider myself a Republican. But what he said and the way he said it reflected the way I was raised in Georgia."

* * *

Heritage Foundation Videos

2007-12-19T07:23:00.000-08:00

The Heritage Foundation has a special webpage with videos of Justice Clarence Thomas's recent speeches in New York, Atlanta, Omaha, Chicago, Dallas, and D.C.

Justice Thomas Speaks in California

2007-12-19T07:20:00.000-08:00

From the Orange County Register:

ORANGE – Clarence Thomas told an overflow crowd at Chapman University Monday evening that he never wanted to become a Supreme Court justice, or even a judge.

"There's not much that entices about the job," Thomas said, answering questions from the public that provided a rare glimpse of the man behind the office. "There's no money in it, no privacy, no big houses, and from an ego standpoint, it does nothing for me."

Thomas, 59, said the position is satisfying because he feels he's serving the public, and he's honored by it, "but I wouldn't say I like it."

"I like sports," Thomas said. "I like to drive a motor home."

Speaking to more than 1,000 people on the last leg of his tour to promote his book "My Grandfather's Son: a Memoir," published by HarperCollins in October, Thomas said he wrote the book as a tribute to his grandparents, who raised him.

His book describes his life as a child in segregated Georgia whose mother worked as a maid and whose father had abandoned the family.

He went to live with his grandparents and later considered becoming a Catholic priest, but ultimately graduated from Yale Law School and after bitterly contested Senate confirmation hearings earned a place on the nation's high court.

The book includes Thomas' first personal account of the impact on his life of the Senate hearings, in which his former aide Anita Hill testified that he had sexually harassed her.

The justice said he wanted to emphasize a message of hope in his book, to show how people can rise above their circumstances through work and determination. He added that he never considered himself "particularly talented," nor his life unusual.

Immigrants have been attracted to the book, he said, because they relate to the theme of overcoming adversity.

After a short, self-deprecating speech, Thomas spent half an hour responding to written questions from the audience, and later signed copies of his book.

Asked how his Roman Catholic faith impacted his job, Thomas said he did not let his religion influence his decisions on the court. He also said he was determined "not to be cajoled or enticed into doing wrong things" by flattery.

Some of his cases involve hard decisions that "pull at you as human beings," Thomas said. "Only people who don't feel pulled are people with no authority and those whose minds are already made up."

Thomas, whose visit was sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., drew standing ovations from the impressed crowd. When he first came up to the podium, to his apparent astonishment, a woman rose from the crowd and burst into an impassioned chorus of "You're Marvelous."

Thomas said sometimes he will just sit and read the Constitution to admire it as a document.

"Many people who can read the warranty of an iPhone have never read the Constitution of the United States," Thomas said, drawing laughter from the crowd.

Attorney Tim Sandefur was there, and offers these observations:

Yesterday’s event with Justice Clarence Thomas went really well; it was full of the electricity of admiration and joy that Justice Thomas seems to inspire in people, and I was very privileged to attend the VIP reception beforehand and get a chance to talk briefly with the Justice and meet up with some old friends.

The talk itself was attended by an overflow crowd—the Heritage Foundation even had to set up two overflow rooms for people to watch the talk on closed circuit television (and the line for the book signing afterwards was an hour long). I was lucky enough to get into the second row center, where I could see very well.

The show began with a brief and powerful introduction by Professor Don Booth that really set the tone for the evening. “I’ve been teaching here for 45 years,” he began. “And before that I was a student. And let me tell you. Forty eight years, two months, and one day ago [I don’t remember this exactly, but he did] I was sitting right over there—” here he pointed to the right side of the audience. “And up here on stage was Martin Luther King.”*

The audience instantly fell silent.

“And even then, he was urging us to judge people by the content of their character. Well, Dr. King, we’ve done that. And that’s why we’re here tonight.” The audience burst into loud applause.

Several other introductions were made, including Gene Meyer of the Federalist Society, Ed Meese, and John Eastman, who all sat alongside Thomas on the stage, and then the Justice came up to speak. Before he could get a word out, a woman in the audience called out to him. “Your honor! Your honor!”

Thomas stopped. “Yes?” he asked, simply.

The woman then began to sing, much to the shock and distaste of the audience at first, which would not have been surprised had there been hecklers to disrupt the event. But her singing wasn’t half bad. In fact, after a while, we noticed it was pretty good, and she was singing “You are too marvelous for words.” The audience just looked at one another, while Thomas, silent, stared at the woman, with a slowly growing smile. When she was done, we all couldn’t help ourselves; we burst into applause again.

“Well,” said Thomas, “I’m glad I have the pigmentation I do, because otherwise you would all see me blushing!”

Eastman, meanwhile, was blushing so hard he was hardly distinguishable from the scarlet curtain behind him.

Thomas then started into his brief talk, covering his life and his optimism and explaining why he wrote the book. Thomas has never been an electrifying speaker when reading from a prepared script, but he seems to know this, so he kept his prepared remarks quite brief, and moved on to the questions from the audience. Of these, a few stood out. When asked about how his religious faith affects his performance as a judge, he explained that of course it provides him with strength to worry about his work instead of public acclaim, but he then wound up with, “You know, a lot of the same people who worry that my religious views will dictate my judging are the same people who want me to use the color of my skin to dictate my judging.” That got a loud round of applause (as did virtually everything he said).

One person asked who his favorite authors are and his favorite books. Richard Wright, he said, of course, and Ralph Ellison—not a surprise to longtime admirers of Thomas—but he also likes Louis L’Amour novels. “And I had an Ayn Rand phase, and I still like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, sorry John...” (turning to Eastman). At this point, I felt the need to represent, so I cheered loudly, bringing another blush to Eastman’s face. (John Eastman is the easiest blushing man who ever lived.) “And I got about 90 percent of the way through Human Action before I gave up,” Thomas continued. “But Mises has a really good short book called Socialism, which is great.”

Asked if he enjoys judging, he answered, “I enjoy sports. I enjoy driving my motor home. Judging is what I do. I get a certain satisfaction from a job well done, but I don’t get up in the morning, ‘Oh boy, I hope we get a death case today!’”

One person asked why he doesn’t ask questions from the bench. A common question, Thomas answered as usual that he doesn’t think questions are really relevant. “This isn’t Perry Mason, you know. All the issues are in the briefs. When I started on the Court, it was a very quiet Court. And Harry Blackmun was very quiet. And when the Court started to ask more questions in his later years, Harry put his arms around me and said, ‘It’s just you and me now, Clarence.’ So nowadays I put my arms around myself and say, ‘It’s just me, Clarence.’”

He was asked what advice he would give high school students. He answered by remembering a sign on the desk of a friend that said “When you don’t know your way, it’s best to ask someone who’s coming back what it was like.” That’s good advice, because your elders are people who know what that road is like. “We’ve all been 17. None of you have been 59. And the second thing I would say is, it’s not all about you!”

I won’t go on too much in this vein, since I believe the Heritage Foundation will be posting video of the event on their website soon. Suffice to say it was a great time, and thanks to John Eastman particularly for helping to organize it and for getting me into the VIP Reception. It was a real blast.

*-All these quotes, of course, are from memory, so they aren't exact.

Justice Thomas in Florida

2007-12-13T09:49:00.000-08:00

Justice Thomas made a speech in Florida recently, and several newspapers covered the event. Here's a story from the Palm Beach Post, which also has a video:

When Clarence Thomas grew up in rural 1950s Georgia, he spent a lot of time along U.S. 17, watching cars with out-of-state tags pass through on their way to Florida.

"We wondered what they were doing down here," he recalled today, on a road trip of his own, to pitch his memoir, "My Grandfather's Son."

He was in his 30s before he made it to Florida, leaving Georgia first for the Northeast, to attend Holy Cross and Yale Law School and ultimately making his way through trials and tribulations to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now 59, after 16 years on the high court, Thomas described his journey from poverty in the segregated South as a tale of hope. "Just because it starts off badly, it doesn't have to end that way," he said. He referred to himself as "an ordinary person to whom extraordinary things have happened."

Speaking to a responsive, sellout crowd of more than 700 people, at a luncheon sponsored by the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches and Palm Beach County Bar Association, he brushed aside media characterizations of himself as "the angriest justice," as the New York Times recently called him.

"I do not intend to answer articles I didn't read and most of which I consider extremely irrelevant," he said.

"I can't afford to be angry," he added several minutes later. "When you're struggling, you can't afford to carry that millstone of anger with you. ÖYou gotta let it go. ÖI say that to younger kids who have issues with their parents: let it go."

Questions from the audience covered a range of issues. As for being considered an anomaly as a black conservative, he said people shouldn't peg ideology to skin color. Where he grew up, people were "traditional" and that's how he views his spot on the political spectrum, he said.

Asked how he can oppose affirmative action programs when he benefited from them in college admissions, he said people should pay more attention to the fact he was always an honor student, one who outperformed almost every other student at Holy Cross and Yale.

Among his other responses:

• Cameras in the courtroom: He expressed concern that they would detract from the process. "The dynamics of the room change when a camera shows up," he said;

• Quiet justice: Asked why he seldom comments or questions from the bench as his colleagues do, he said that historically members of the court did not engage in "this sort of chattering," especially since much of a case has already been hashed out at the appellate level. "The real question should be, 'Why the sudden change?'" he said;

• Racist system: Asked whether the disproportionate number of African-Americans in prison points to a racist system, he said that would be too simplistic an analysis and that more attention should be paid to root causes, from dropout rates to drugs and deterioration of family;

• Qualities of an effective jurist: The baseline is preparation and hard work, but the ability to make a decision is a key, he said. "You cannot have an indecisive judge. You need people who have courage to stand up for the right thing."

• How will history judge him? Whatever historians write about you, he said, "You're not going to be here to read it."

From the Palm Beach Daily News, which covers audience questions as well:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir (Harper) as a tribute to his grandparents, who, he said, instilled in him good values and a strong work ethic.

He also wrote the book to illustrate that you can overcome bad circumstances — such as growing up in 1950s Georgia amid poverty and segregation.

"It is a universal story of facing difficulties, challenges, enduring them and, hopefully, trying to overcome them," Thomas said. "Is there anybody in this room who's ever had a challenge and said, 'I can't face it?' We've all been there. And there's something inside of us which says 'I can make it.'

"That's what this book is about — that maybe there's a ray of sunlight above these clouds and maybe there'll be another day better than today."

Thomas received a standing ovation upon being introduced to the sold-out crowd of 720 at the luncheon meeting, which was co-sponsored by The Forum Club of the Palm Beaches and the Palm Beach County Bar Association. The event was held at the Kravis Center's Cohen Pavilion.

At age 7, Thomas and his 6-year-old brother were sent to live with his grandparents after his parents divorced and his young mother struggled to raise three children on $10 a week.

Thomas eventually graduated cum laude from Holy Cross College and went on to earn his law degree from Yale Law School.

"The initial writing was to, in so many ways, honor these people," Thomas said. "To give an accurate account of a life, my life, their lives, of the life they gave me. . . . I owed those two wonderful people to let the world know what they had really done. But I also owed people who are alive now, young kids, an explanation of what it took and why it's so important to continue doing well.

"I simply wanted others to see that through difficulties and challenges and criticism and negativism, there's a reason to hope," Thomas said. "It didn't look like there was any reason, but in retrospect there was a reason to hope."

Thomas worked on the book with his wife, Virginia.

"We hoped, Virginia and I, that this book would break through the noise in Washington, that din of ceaseless cynicism and that din of never-ending negativism that we have all too much of in our society," Thomas said. "It is a numbing kind of attitude in the society now. It is a cancer of the spirit, where there's a constant barrage of negativism and cynicism.

"The book is merely to provide some hope to those who would like hope and to provide accuracy about the life of an ordinary person to whom extraordinary things happened and for whom he's grateful to people like his grandparents who played such a major role in making that happen."

AUDIENCE QUESTIONS TO JUSTICE THOMAS

Questions posed by audience members to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at the Forum Club Wednesday:

Q: As a person of color growing up during the 1950s, your conservative beliefs seem to be atypical. How did you get your conservative beliefs?

A: I think it's not atypical and that's the point of the book. We are making very general assumptions about people based on the color of their skin. I don't know anything about your views and I will draw no conclusions about what your thoughts are based on the color of your skin. That is precisely what we thought was wrong with the treatment of blacks back in the '60s and '50s. One of the great things about education is it breaks down these stereotypes and prejudices. ... I was raised in south Georgia. And anyone who was raised in south Georgia at that time knows it wasn't called conservatism back then. It was called tradition.

Q: You have expressed opposition to laws that address race-based discrimination in school admissions. Is it your belief you were given unfair advantage when you were admitted to law school?

A: It's in the book and I'm going to leave it there because I'm tired of answering it. That's one more reason that, as a person, I find these programs offensive. I was always an honors student and the one question I'm rarely asked is, 'How is it that coming from where you are, you were consistently throughout your life an honors student and what is it about your life that allowed you to do better than most of your classmates at Yale or better than virtually all of your classmates at Holy Cross?' That is a question that I feel would be more helpful to these young people who are struggling against the odds.

Q: What do you think about broadcasting oral arguments for the Supreme Court?

A: I don't see how it helps our decision-making process. If it's not useful in deciding cases, I don't think we should do it. ... I'm not opposed to it because you don't want people to see what you're doing. There's nothing secret going on, but simply remember what we're there to do.

Q: Meeting you is very different than how the media has portrayed you. Why is there a difference in your persona versus your public persona?

A: I think the question isn't for me. I think the question is for the people who did the distorting. What is their interest in distorting? I know who I am ... and yet people for their own reasons have been hell-bent on creating an image that has nothing to do with me. I might disagree with you on three or four things. But why would you report, for example, that I'm angry, when I'm not angry with anybody? And if I were angry, you would see me angry. But that's just not been the case. Or some say I'm bitter. But what kind of person does it take to write an article like that? That sounds like a bitter, angry person to me.

Q: What qualities make an effective jurist?

A: Preparation, conscientiousness, hard work and some organization, and you also need the ability to actually decide things. You can't have an indecisive judge. . . In the end, you need people who have courage to stand up for the right thing. ... I don't think it's our job to be popular. It's our job to be right.

From the Sun-Sentinel:

WEST PALM BEACH - Recalling his own experiences at televised congressional hearings, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said Wednesday that cameras should not be allowed in the nation's highest court.

Stopping in South Florida on a nationwide book tour, Thomas also touched on race in America, judicial pay and his quiet presence on the bench during a question-and-answer session with a crowd of more than 700 at the Kravis Center.

Asked about broadcasting Supreme Court hearings, Thomas, a 16-year court veteran, noted he's testified more than 60 times before congressional committees, where cameras are allowed. Currently, only audio feeds record Supreme Court oral arguments.

"The dynamics of the room change considerably when cameras show up, and they don't change for the better," Thomas said. "I'm concerned it would result in some deterioration of what we do."

Thomas added there's "nothing secret going on" during arguments, but the test for allowing TV cameras should be whether it improves the way the high court conducts its business. "If it doesn't make our processes better, I'm very reluctant to do it," he said. "I simply don't see it improving on the way we do our job."

Thomas, 59, is promoting his new memoir, My Grandfather's Son. Thomas put in frequent plugs for the book, and 300 pre-signed copies were on sale in the lobby for $26.95 each. Event sponsors were the Forum Club and the Palm Beach County Bar Association.

The justice, known as a staunch conservative on the court, tackled some thorny issues during his speaking appearance, including race in America. Asked about high incarceration rates for blacks, Thomas responded that it's an "ostrich-like" approach to blame racism. He said a high dropout rate and a falling marriage rate are factors that don't often get considered because people are afraid of "blaming the victim."

"Let's go back to some of the causes of some of these things, or at least talk about it — you may not solve it," said Thomas, the only black Supreme Court justice. "I don't think we honestly discuss issues of race today."

Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito on Monday dissented from a majority opinion that gave judges more discretion in giving shorter sentences to people convicted of crack cocaine crimes. The decision had a strong racial dimension because the vast majority of crack offenders are black.

The suit-and-tie crowd at Wednesday's lunch warmly applauded Thomas, but some posed pointed questions, too. One asked Thomas whether, given his opposition to affirmative-action policies, he received an "unfair advantage" in his collegiate career at College of the Holy Cross and Yale Law School.

"I'm tired of answering that," Thomas shot back. "One question I've never been asked is ... How was it coming from where you came from [in rural southern Georgia], how were you consistently an honor student?"

Thomas defended his low-key approach to oral arguments. He's famously silent from the bench, as the other eight justices often pepper attorneys with questions during 30-minute oral argument allotments.

"This sort of chattering is all new," he said. "For 200 years, we were able to do it without all these questions ...Why the sudden change? I don't think all those questions are necessary. It's not Perry Mason."

On judicial pay, Thomas said his $195,000 salary is OK for his family, but that salaries for judges and justices that don't compare with private practice are "going to kill off our judiciary." He said judges often make one-tenth what they could earn at law firms.

Finally, from the Associated Press:

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said Wednesday that calling the American justice system racist oversimplifies a multifaceted problem, which involves the erosion of the American family, longer sentences and soaring high school dropout rates.

"To simply reduce it all to race is I think to blame reality," Thomas told a group of local leaders, lawyers and high school students.

Thomas, the only black Supreme Court justice, and Justice Samuel Alito on Monday dissented from a majority opinion that gave judges more discretion in giving shorter sentences to people convicted of crack cocaine crimes. The decision had a strong racial dimension because the vast majority of crack offenders are black.

In a broad-ranging question-and-answer session, Thomas also said Wednesday that television cameras should stay out of the Supreme Court's oral arguments and federal judges need higher salaries.

Thomas said cameras could taint the argument process.

"I don't see where it helps," he said. "The dynamics don't change for the better. And I'm concerned that it would actually result in some deterioration of what we do."

Asked why he is generally so quiet on the bench, Thomas said it is not his job to debate, but simply to listen.

"This sort of chattering is all new," he said. "I don't think all those questions are necessary. ... The meat of the case is in the briefs."

* * *

Mike Huckabee on Justice Thomas

2007-12-12T09:19:00.000-08:00

From a 1992 questionnaire:

When asked about the nomination hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Huckabee said: "I watched or listened to many hours of the Thomas hearings and was firmly convinced that the preponderance of testimony backed up Clarence Thomas."

Jeffrey Rosen on Justice Thomas

2007-12-12T09:15:00.000-08:00

Writing in The New Republic, Jeffrey Rosen has a lengthy and particularly nasty review of Justice Thomas's autobiography here. Sample sentence: "What made Thomas into a sputtering victimology-mongerer, constantly fulminating against his enemies and rehearsing every slight?"

Alan Jacobs responds to the review here:

Jeffrey Rosen’s long essay-review about Clarence Thomas in The New Republic is troubling in several respects -- even for someone who, like me, is not exactly a fan of Thomas’s judicial philosophy. After a great deal of relatively even-handed summary of Thomas’s career, Rosen moves at the end into indictment mode. Here’s a key passage: “We now understand that some of the most memorable passages in his judicial opinions — such as his searing account of the costs of affirmative action, which he calls a ‘faddish slogan of the cognoscenti’ that demeans its intended beneficiaries — are psychological in origin, attempts to get even with the ‘pretty people’ whom he thinks snubbed him in law school.” This is a classic example of the rhetorical move that C. S. Lewis called “Bulverism”: instead of trying to demonstrate that someone is wrong, you assume error and then proceed immediately to a psychological explanation for the error. It may well be that Thomas’s judicial opinions are heavily shaped by his own negative experiences; but that in itself doesn’t make them wrong; nor does Rosen demonstrate that Thomas is unique or even unusual in this respect. Using the logic that Rosen employs here you could with equal ease dismiss the political ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr. or Vaclav Havel or Gandhi.

I also think Rosen too quickly dismisses some of Thomas’s chief frustrations. “Thomas has overcome great hardships,” he writes, “but the world has also been remarkably good to him” — presumably by elevating him to the high status of Supreme Court Justice. In a sense this is true, and one would like to see Thomas acknowledge more often the power and, yes, privilege that has come his way. But I think Rosen seriously underestimates the world’s ability to present honors “in such a way as to render them bitter to the taste” — as Stanley Fish once wrote in a brilliant essay about academic politics. Surely the political world is even more adroit at such barbed recognitions. Thomas writes of his state of mind in 1968, “No matter how hard I worked or how smart I was, any white person could still say to me, ‘Keep on trying, Clarence, one day you will be as good as us,’ knowing that he, not I, would be the judge of that.” Knowing that he, not I, would be the judge of that — that’s the barb. And Rosen should be more cognizant of how sharp that barb can be, even when what the white man grants is a place on the United States Supreme Court.

Ross Douthat adds:

What Alan Jacobs said. I am by no means in the "Clarence Thomas, Real American Hero" camp, and much of Rosen's analysis seems to me astute. But I am persistently puzzled by the unwillingness of white male journalists, in particular - for whom a meritocracy-plus-affirmation action system of advancement provides constant validation, and constant confirmation that they're getting ahead on innate talent and hard work alone - to generate sympathy for a figure like Thomas, who feels, for not-incomprehensible reasons, that his successes have been won (as Jacobs puts it, quoting, Stanley Fish) "in such a way as to render them bitter to the taste." You don't have to like him or agree with him to understand, better than Rosen seems to, where his anger might be coming from.

I would also add, to Rosen's remark that "it is no more possible to feel pity for [Thomas] than for Britney Spears," that the comparison is ridiculous (persecution by the paparazzi is by no means comparable to the combination of segregationist racism, affirmative-action condescension and Uncle-Tom vitriol that has made Thomas the angry man he is today) and that even if it weren't I do feel pity for Britney Spears, and I'm a little puzzled by anyone who doesn't.

Scott Gerber review

2007-12-04T14:21:00.000-08:00

Law professor Scott Douglas Gerber -- author of First Principles: The Jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas -- has this review of Justice Thomas's autobiography. Actually, it's more like a review of all the other book reviews out there, which Gerber condemns for being too biased:

Unfortunately, however, almost all of the reaction to Justice Thomas's opinions and votes is partisan. As I detailed in First Principles, commentators are either "for" Justice Thomas or "against" him, in the crassest possible sense. The reaction to Justice Thomas's memoir, My Grandfather's Son, continues this disturbing trend. There are exceptions--David J. Garrow's review for Legal Times stands out among them--but they are few and far between.

Of course, most of the media is liberal. Consequently, the vast majority of the reviews of Justice Thomas's memoir have been negative. Space constraints permit me to discuss only a few.

Washington Post staff writers Michael A. Fletcher and Kevin Merida, co-authors of a recent unauthorized biography about Justice Thomas, didn't even wait until Justice Thomas's memoir was released before trashing it. (They claim to have "purchased" a copy of the book from "an area bookstore" three days prior to its October 1 release.) The opening sentence of their September 29th Post article, written with Robert Barnes, reads: "Justice Thomas settles scores in an angry and vivid forthcoming memoir, scathingly condemning the media, the Democratic senators who opposed his nomination to the Supreme Court, and the 'mob' of liberal elites and activist groups that he says desecrated him."

It's downhill from there. Most troubling is their comment that Justice Thomas "indicates he wrote [the book] himself." Who else do Fletcher, Merida, and Barnes think would have written it? To the best of my knowledge, reviewers don't make observations like that about books written by other Supreme Court justices.

* * *

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Toobin, author of a recent book about the Supreme Court, describes in a review published in The New Yorker how "Thomas's career looks like a model of how affirmative action is supposed to work, but that isn't how Thomas sees it." The review, entitled "Unforgiven: Why is Clarence Thomas so angry?," is accompanied by one of The New Yorker's famous illustrations. This one: a caricature of a "seething" Thomas.

Toobin gives Thomas little credit for earning on the merits his appointments as chairman of the E.E.O.C., judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and justice of the Supreme Court. Instead, Toobin asserts that Thomas was "given" each job "because he was black." For example, Toobin writes the following in discussing Thomas's appointment to the D.C. Circuit: "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 EEOC, 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."

What Toobin fails to mention is that, by 1989, Thomas already had established himself as the leading government authority in the United States on the document that articulates the political philosophy of our nation, the Declaration of Independence. Although Toobin might not characterize Thomas's speeches and articles on the relationship between the Declaration and the Constitution as "scholarly work"--assuming Toobin bothered to read them at all--the conservative legal movement certainly did. And while Toobin might try to downplay Thomas's eight-plus years of service at the EEOC --hardly a "modest federal agency," as Toobin calls it--President George H.W. Bush obviously disagreed. So, too, did the United States Senate, which confirmed, by voice vote, the President's nomination of Thomas to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Personally, as someone who has spent a large portion of his own professional life writing about the role of the Declaration of Independence in constitutional interpretation, I consider Clarence Thomas to have been the most qualified person President Bush could have appointed to the nation's highest court. Of course, this doesn't mean that race wasn't a factor in Thomas's appointment to the D.C. Circuit, let alone to the Supreme Court. But what it does mean is that Thomas had achieved far more during his professional career by both 1989, when he was nominated to the D.C. Circuit, and 1991, the year of his Supreme Court appointment, than liberal critics such as Toobin are willing to concede. Indeed, upon a fairer examination, Thomas's credentials compare quite well with those of other jurists who likewise have served on the D.C. Circuit and/or the Supreme Court during the past twenty years.

* * *

he list of negative reviews from the Left goes on--and some on the list make the reviews by Fletcher, Merida, and Barnes; Merida alone; and Toobin look judicious by comparison. For example, Jon Weiner writes in The Nation that Justice Thomas's memoir is a "howl of rage and pain"; Eugene Robinson opines in The Washington Post that "the presence of Justice Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court" is a powerful argument against affirmative action; and The New York Times, which has a history of editorializing against Justice Thomas, maintains that the "rage he harbors raises questions about whether he can sit as an impartial judge in many of the cases the Supreme Court hears."

* * *

I have devoted a surprising amount of time since the publication of my book about Justice Thomas's jurisprudence to trying to persuade people that it's possible to be neither "for" Justice Thomas nor "against" him. My objective is simply to read what he writes and do my best to assess it objectively. Sometimes this means I agree with him, and sometimes it means I disagree. Justice Thomas once paid me the highest compliment a scholar can receive when he stated publicly that he understands what I'm attempting to do.

This said, I must say that, to me, much of the reaction from the Left to Justice Thomas's memoir crosses the line of common decency. It's certainly permissible to disagree with Justice Thomas's judicial opinions. As I mentioned above, I sometimes do. However, it's not appropriate to express that disagreement through ad hominem attacks.

My Grandfather's Son is a moving portrait of a man who has overcome more obstacles than all of his critics combined. Of course, I reserve the right to continue to disagree with some of the opinions Justice Thomas issues on the Supreme Court. What I refuse to do, however, is to try to trivialize the remarkable life he has led.

Justice Thomas is not perfect, and he acknowledges as much in his book. His defenders need to stop suggesting he is beyond fault. His critics need to stop pretending they aren't.

What Justice Thomas Really Thinks About Oral Argument

2007-11-30T16:36:00.000-08:00

From US News and World Report:

There's a reason why Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas doesn't talk much from the bench: He thinks judges should be seen and not heard. "My colleagues should shut up!" he says. * * *

Asked at an event honoring Winston Churchill sponsored by independent Michigan school Hillsdale College if he would talk more from the bench to "give us relief" from the other chatty judges, Thomas said, "I don't think it's my job to give you relief." Thomas noted that through history, most top judges rarely asked questions. "What's changed? Have the laws changed? What's changed? And why are all these questions necessary? That should be the question," he demanded of the near epidemic level of judicial questioning at Supreme Court hearings.

He later characterized his "shut up" comment as simply "shock value," but then dug deeper into the issue. "I think that they should ask questions, but I don't think that for judging, and for what we are doing, all those questions are necessary," he said. "You don't have to ask all those questions to judge properly." Thomas compared judging to another profession where debate isn't aired in public. "Suppose you're undergoing something very serious like surgery and the doctors started a practice of conducting seminars while in the operating room, debating each other about certain procedures and whether or not this procedure is this way or that way. You really didn't go in there to have a debate about gallbladder surgery. You actually went in to have a procedure done. We are judges. This is the last court in a long line in our system. We are there to decide cases, not to engage in seminar discussions. Now, each of us has a different way of thinking about things. Some people like to talk it out. Some people enjoy the questioning and the back and forth. Some people think that if they listen deeply and hear the people who are presenting their arguments, they might hear something that's not already in several hundred pages of records."

Thomas said that once the cases get to the Supreme Court, there are no surprises left. "This is not Perry Mason."

Justice Clarence Thomas at the Federalist Society Convention

2007-11-22T08:25:00.000-08:00

Here's his speech delivered on November 15, 2007:

Justice Clarence Thomas at the Heritage Foundation

2007-11-19T08:52:00.001-08:00

A speech from Nov. 12, 2007:

Elsewhere on YouTube,

Justice Thomas speaks in Chicago, Part I:

Justice Thomas speaks in Chicago, Part II:

Laura Ingraham talks to Bill O'Reilly about Justice Thomas:

Sean Hannity talks to Justice Thomas, Part I:

Hannity, Part II:

Hannity, Part III:

Robert Bluey on Justice Thomas

2007-11-19T08:49:00.000-08:00

Robert Bluey has this column:

Ask Clarence Thomas what he enjoys doing and he’ll tell you about driving his RV across America or cheering for his beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers. That hardly sounds like the life of a U.S. Supreme Court justice, but in the case of Thomas, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

With his new memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” topping the New York Times best-seller list, Thomas has had the opportunity to connect with “real” Americans -- ordinary citizens who, he says, embody the true spirit of our great nation. His book tour has taken him from the East Coast to the Midwest and will reach Southern California next month.

Along the way, I’ve been fortunate to hear him speak twice -- once at a private dinner for bloggers and again last week at an event sponsored by The Heritage Foundation. I left both events feeling inspired and energized by Thomas’ positive attitude, sound advice and commitment to principles.

I wish every American had the opportunity to engage with Thomas in the same way. Hearing him speak about his remarkable life not only dispels the misperceptions painted by the media, but it also yields valuable insights about humanity and the state of our nation

My encounters with Thomas have produced some important lessons. The one that stood out last week came from his answer to a question about the level of political discourse in Washington -- something that has frustrated me since I arrived here six years ago. If anyone is qualified to answer this question, it’s Thomas, who called his confirmation hearing in 1991 a “high-tech lynching.”

Thomas chose to tell us about the importance of manners in society, particularly when raising children. For whatever reason, Washington politicians appear to lack those manners -- contributing to the coarse nature of politics.

“People in this town think it’s really cute to make little, nasty comments about people,” Thomas told the crowd last week. “That really makes you a big person because you just came up with some cute slur. That’s what gets over in this town for being genius.”

He said it would be unthinkable for such conduct to be tolerated in other professions. Take a hospital operating room, for example. “You would figure out a way to limp out of there, crawl or feel your way out. Now, if we would not allow that in the operating room, why do we think that’s a good way to choose who will have control of our nuclear arsenal?”

* * *

Justice Thomas at the Federalist Society Convention

2007-11-16T08:38:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post has this story, which is accompanied by this video:

Among friends, Thomas felt comfortable to air his many long-standing grievances with the world. "So much has been written about me, and most of it's wrong," he lamented. He protested "the monopoly of certain organizations and certain groups and media types" in Washington. He chafed at the notion of affirmative action at Yale Law School ("What were the benefits?" he asked. "Student loans?"). He sounded defensive when speaking about his silences: "One thing I've demonstrated in 16 years is you can do this job without asking a single question."

The Legal Times had this report of the event:

"I've been on the Court for 16 years -- it's kind of hard to say that. It's like, what happened to my life? Do I even have a life?" mused Justice Clarence Thomas in his address at the Federalist Society's 25th anniversary conference in Washington, D.C., Thursday.

Fifteen years earlier, he had addressed this same group, the Federalist Society, in the same ballroom in the Mayflower Hotel. And he said he was pleased to be back to talk about his recent memoir, "My Grandfather's Son."

"One of the reasons I wrote this book is that so much has been written about me, and most of it is wrong. Even when they mean well, it's still wrong," Thomas said.

The book chronicles in detail his path to the Supreme Court, revisiting his upbringing in Georgia, his years at Yale Law School, and his acid confirmation hearings. Thomas said he wanted to share his side, but also inspire others. And maybe warn them, too. He recounted how a Vietnamese woman and a black man had separately approached him after reading the book. Both had thanked him for telling their stories.

"There's so much about hope that is universal," he said.

Thomas took several questions written on note cards, beginning with this one: Is the job as wonderful as you thought it would be?

"First of all," Thomas said, "I never thought it would be wonderful. And second, I never thought about it. I was too busy trying to stay alive."

"You know, I have fun on my RV. I have fun watching football. This is more important than fun," Thomas said. "It's more in the nature of a mission."

At one point, he was asked, "Why do your colleagues ask so many questions during oral arguments?"

"I did not plant that question," the justice swore. "When you figure it out, let me know."

Thomas is the least chatty of the nine justices. He has said he prefers to let lawyers lay out their arguments with few interruptions, though some have interpreted his reticence as indifference.

"One thing I learned in the last 16 years is that you can do this job without asking a single question," Thomas said, to rousing applause.

Someone asked Thomas what he thought about the confirmation process for federal judges.

Thomas, recalling that the late Supreme Court Justice Byron White had told him he was nominated and confirmed in 10 days, said, "Now, if that system worked for 200 years, why did we change it?"

Another card asked in which environment he did his best thinking. "I think pretty well every place," Thomas said. "I try to be sober as a judge."

Thomas, straightening up, answered that he wrote the bulk of his book in his study at home. And when he's not alone, Thomas said he likes to test his thinking on others. In his chambers: "I love talking to my law clerks." In public: "I love talking to people on the streets, in Wal-Mart parking lots."

Emmett Tyrell on Justice Thomas

2007-11-08T20:27:00.000-08:00

Emmett Tyrell has an excellent review of Justice Clarence Thomas's new autobiography, and makes a good point about the dramatic dropoff in media coverage:

A few weeks back when Clarence Thomas's My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir first came out, there was a flurry of commentary on him and the book. From conservatives there was praise. From the liberals there was a vaguely concealed sense of shock. To them, he seemed sooo angry. Wait a minute. I thought they admired anger. Think of their approbation of the Angry Left. Now the hubbub has quieted down. In fact the book is hardly mentioned. This is typical of the circumstances today surrounding the publication of books. When a book that somehow matters comes out, there is a transient period of excitement, a mixture of hallelujahs or spitballs -- then complete silence.

* * *

If it is very good, a book should provoke thought and comment for a long while after its publication. In the case of Thomas's memoir, I shall be thinking about it and referring to it for a long time. It is one of the best books I have read in years.

* * *

All that the liberals reviewing this book have been able to talk about is its anger. Frankly, I saw very little anger. One of the amazing things about Thomas is his disposition. He is positive, resolute, profoundly decent, and cheerful. That the liberals miss this comes as no surprise. They are increasingly narrow. Thomas admits his failures and forgives his enemies. This is because Thomas is a profoundly religious man, who throughout his life has turned to prayer. My Grandfather's Son is a book about many things, among them spirituality, conservative ideas, modern politics, and race. In fact, Thomas's account of race in modern America is the most reliable I have ever read. Thomas has suffered prejudice from Southern bigots, from other blacks, and to this day from liberals of both races. He writes about it with no ax to grind but with a positive message to impart: one can suffer enormous injustice and not let the (expletive deleted) get you down. This is not a book about anger. It is a book about the satisfied triumph of a good man.

Review of Justice Thomas Book

2007-11-08T13:02:00.000-08:00

Not of the new autobiography, however. It's a review, just published in the liberal Commonweal magazine, of Kevin Merida's and Michael Fletcher's Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas, which was published seven months ago.

The review was written by Don Wycliff. Commonweal's website helpfully informs us that "Don Wycliff, a black man, is editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune." It's nice to be informed of that fact; otherwise, one might have assumed that Wycliff is white, as are the overwhelming majority of Commonweal's contributors.

In any event, it's a decent, albeit entirely uncritical, review. My main objections are to the opening paragraph:

His wrenching, soul-searing confirmation hearing notwithstanding, Clarence Thomas is so little known to most Americans that almost any decent biography of him would seem revelatory. Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher’s study of the man known as the “silent justice” of the U.S. Supreme Court is better than decent. It is deeply and carefully reported (though without the benefit of Thomas’s authorization or assistance), and written in measured, lucid, unbiased prose.

That "almost any decent biography" line seems a bit odd; it's as if Wycliff doesn't know that a much better and more thorough biography of Thomas was published several years ago (by Andrew Peyton Thomas).

Worse, the reviewer is overestimating the book's worth in that last sentence. As Orin Kerr points out:

I recently finished the book, and my take is mixed. The book's first half, which mostly covers Thomas's childhood and family, is pretty interesting. Merida & Fletcher interviewed tons of people, and the book offers lots information on Thomas that is hard to find elsewhere. The book goes downhill in the second half, which is more on Thomas as an adult and as a judge. Merida & Fletcher are not lawyers, and they tend to see conservative legal views as an expression of lack of sympathy for others. As a result, they get wrapped up in questions that will strike sophisticated readers as quite silly (such as, how could Justice Thomas be such a nice guy personally and yet endorse such uncaring views of the law?).

And as I've said before, the book's entire chapter on Thomas's silence at oral argument seems particularly unnecessary and unfair.

But enough bashing. The Commonweal review also makes some valuable points that are usually lost in the mainstream media:

Truth to tell, on some real political/judicial issues the gulf between Thomas and his prominent black critics is probably wider than that between Thomas and the ordinary black person. Take school desegregation and busing, for example. For most black people, there was a very practical logic behind school desegregation: The white majority will always make sure that their children receive what they need to get a proper education, so the best way to assure an equal education for black children is to make sure they are in the same schools and classrooms. At some point, however-and at least partly owing to the reasoning on which the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision was based-the established black leadership began speaking of desegregation and integration interchangeably, as an ideal to be celebrated for its own sake and worth pursuing regardless of the cost.

The cost, as often as not, was long bus trips for black children in pursuit of fleeing whites. If segregating black children because their race inflicted a sense of inferiority so grievous as to be, in the words of the Brown decision, “unlikely ever to be undone,” what would be the effect of chasing whites over ever-greater distances in the interest of an integrated-and thus, putatively equal-education? (Whites were, more often than not, able to arrange things so that their children did not have to ride those buses.)

Thomas considers that sort of thing foolish and he said as much when Ben Carson, the famous black neurosurgeon, confronted him on some of his controversial views. “I had heard what everyone else had: ‘This guy is a sellout. He doesn’t care about black issues,’” Carson told Merida and Fletcher. “But as I got to know him, I saw this was a complete lie.”

Hillsdale Interview with Justice Thomas

2007-11-08T12:42:00.001-08:00

From the website of Hillsdale College:

A Conversation with Justice Clarence Thomas

The following is excerpted and edited from an interview with Justice Thomas conducted in his chambers at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on September 19, 2007. Conducting the interview were Kaitlyn Buss, Daniel Burfiend, and Jillian Melchior, Hillsdale College seniors from the Herbert H. Dow II Program in American Journalism and the History and Political Science Department. Also present were Hillsdale president Larry Arnn and Hillsdale vice president and Imprimis editor Douglas Jeffrey.

The Honorable Clarence Thomas has been an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court since 1991. Prior to that he served as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, as chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and as assistant secretary for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education. Justice Thomas graduated cum laude from the College of the Holy Cross and earned a J.D. from Yale Law School before entering legal practice as assistant attorney general of Missouri and, later, as an attorney with the Monsanto Company. His new book is entitled My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir.

Q: Why did you decide to write My Grandfather’s Son?

CT: I’ve met with young people from all over the country, from different backgrounds—some with privileged backgrounds and some with less privileged backgrounds—and they all have tough problems, challenges and uncertainties in their lives. And often they think that I grew up wise and had a plan in life to get where I have gotten—that I had no doubts and uncertainties myself. Well, the truth is that I had plenty of uncertainties and doubts, and this book is my story. I was proud when my editor called me as the book was being finalized and said: “The great thing about this book is that it’s not the usual Washington book. It’s yours; you wrote it.” In fact, I did write it. And my hope is that young people who read it will find something in it they can identify with and learn from.

Q: I’ve noticed that you have a theme in your speeches about people who have influenced you, and now you’re trying to influence others in a similar way. Can you talk a little about who influenced you?

CT: The first line in the book is, “I was nine years old when I met my father.” That refers to my biological father. But my grandfather was my real father. I named the book My Grandfather’s Son because that’s who I am. My grandfather and my grandmother influenced me and made me what I am today. That’s why I always take offense when I hear it said that Yale or some other institution is responsible. I was already fully formed by my grandparents. Whatever was poured into this vessel came from their way of life, and from my grandfather’s independence, his insistence on self-sufficiency, his desire to think for himself even in the segregated South.

My father left when I was two, and up there on the wall you can see a photograph by Walker Evans of the Savannah neighborhood where my mother, my brother and I lived in one room. It doesn’t look like much of a neighborhood, does it? And when I went to live with my grandfather, I was seven. His name was Myers Anderson. And it was a different way of life that he had worked hard to make possible. He built his house, a cinderblock house. He made the cinderblocks. And he was proud of that. It had a refrigerator, a deep freezer, a hot water heater—I had never seen any of these things in my life. It was wonderful. And then he taught me the connection between having these things and work. Everything he had, he showed me how to get it the honest way.

One of my grandfather’s favorite sayings was, “Old Man Can’t is dead, I helped bury him.” I must have heard that a hundred times. Today we’ve grown comfortable with programs and theories, whether it’s affirmative action or something else. Centralized governments always love grand theories and five-year-plans. But no government program could have done what my grandfather did for me and for others who needed help. It’s the golden rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The golden rule can’t operate through a government program, it can only work between people.

I was talking to my brother once—my brother died eight years ago very suddenly, which was really devastating—but we were talking and we agreed that my grandfather was the greatest person we had ever known. And mind you, as young people there came a time that we rejected him. But he told us the truth about life. He taught us everything we needed to know to live in this world. And it remained with us. Even when people ask about my judicial philosophy, I can honestly say, to the extent I have one, it comes from my grandfather.

Q: In the photo of your grandfather, he looks like a very serious man. What was he like personally?

CT: Yes, he was serious, and he was tough. He wasn’t a mean man, but he was a hard man. He lived a hard life, and he was hardened by it. His life was marked by segregation, by no education, by having no father, by having his mother die when he was nine and going to live with his grandmother who was a freed slave. In a recent book, the authors said my grandfather was a wealthy man. And one of my cousins said when he heard this, “Has anybody found the money?” My grandfather owned two trucks and delivered fuel oil with one and ice with the other. His only employees were my brother and me, and we were little kids. Anything that he could do to make a living he did. And when the ice business was displaced by the refrigerator, we started farming. We repaired our own vehicles, we farmed our own land, we built our own fence line. We raised hogs, chickens, cows, and we butchered them. So he was not rich, no. But he was a frugal, industrious man. He believed that if you worked hard enough, you could have what you needed. If you were frugal enough, you could keep what you had. And if you had things, you could help other people who were in need. He believed that you work from sun to sun, and that was our life due to our fallen nature. Another of his favorite sayings was, “There’s nothing you can’t do with a little elbow grease.”

And the idea of taxation offended him. My first ideas about taxation had to do with the fact that we worked for everything we had. My grandfather would give whatever he could to relatives who needed it—to the elderly, to people with a lot of kids, to people who had fallen on hard times. We’d harvest food and take it to folks who needed it. But the idea of someone coming and exacting from us what we had worked for, he was offended at that idea.

Q: You mentioned that you had uncertainties and doubts and that you rejected your grandfather at some point. How did the lessons that he taught you carry you through?

CT: I went into the seminary at 16, intending to be a priest. During my last two years there, I was the only black student. I was raised Roman Catholic, and I am Roman Catholic today. But I got angry back in the 1960s. I turned my back on what I had been taught and I fell away from my faith. When I left the seminary my grandfather kicked me out of the house. So I’ve been on my own since I was 19. And then I was really angry. I got caught up in the anti-war movement in New England. I was really an angry black kid. And then in April of 1970, I was caught up in a riot in Harvard Square. At one point it was four in the morning and we were rioting, and there were tear gas canisters going off. And we made our way back to Worcester, back to the Holy Cross campus where I was going to college, and I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking, “What did I just do?” I couldn’t figure it out. And then suddenly I realized that I was full of hate. I remember going in front of the chapel and saying, “Lord, if you take this anger out of my heart, I’ll never hate again.” I hadn’t prayed in years, and that was the beginning of my process back. I went from anger and hatred to cynicism, and then to trying to figure things out. And over the years I came to see cynicism as a disease. So what I tell my clerks today is that I’m more idealistic than I’ve ever been. That’s the only reason to do the job. But it was a long struggle. I was something like the prodigal son, slowly making my way back to what I had abandoned.

The hardest part of my book to write had to do with the fact that I had been so angry and bitter—angry at whites, angry at the country, rejecting the church. But finally there came a time when I was at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—it was in February of 1983—and my grandmother was ill. And I saw my grandfather at the hospital and we embraced for the only time in our entire lives. And he looked at me and said that he had recognized that part of the conflict I had been through with him was that I was just like him, independent and strong-willed. I was his son, and it was as though you could see it in his eyes. And then a month later he was dead. And it was at that time—the spring and summer of 1983—that I re-embraced all that he had taught me. I had come full circle. And it was that summer that I decided I would live my life as a memorial to my grandparents’ lives. That’s why I was so upset during my confirmation hearings, because I saw what was being done to me as a desecration of that memorial. Ever since then, when people say that I’m a conservative or that I’m this or that, I say, “I’m my grandfather’s son.” If that means I am conservative, so be it.

Q: A lot of people tend to define you by your race and you don’t seem to. Why do you think that is?

CT: We’ve become very comfortable with making judgments about people based on immutable characteristics. And look what we’ve degenerated to—look what happened to the Duke lacrosse team, where because there are rich white boys and a poor black girl, so many people assumed an automatic narrative. What happens to the truth, then? How is that different from the stereotypes of the days of Jim Crow? I often say, “I don’t hire women law clerks.” People are shocked. But I don’t hire women law clerks—I hire the best law clerks. And it turns out that 30 percent of them happen to be women. If a woman graduates from law school and I say I’m going to hire her because I need a woman, that seems to me dehumanizing, and the job would be tainted. That’s my attitude.

Q: Do you think we ever will see each other as individuals?

CT: We used to have that as a goal when I was a kid and when we lived under segregation. And by the way, something that we often forget is that even under segregation, we were really patriotic. When I came back home with all that anti-war talk in the ’60s, my grandfather’s response was: “Boy I didn’t raise you like this. You went up North and they put all that damned foolishness in your head.” But my point is, I was raised to treat people as individuals. My grandfather would say about whites, “There’s good’ns, there’s bad’ns.” And about blacks, “There’s good’ns, there’s bad’ns.” The difference was good and bad, not black and white. And treating others and being treated ourselves as individuals was our goal.

I went to a seminary reunion about four years ago, and a white seminarian who was a year ahead of me in high school came up to me and said—here he is, almost 60 years old, and he had tears in his eyes—and he said, “Clarence, you taught me something in high school. You taught me that someone who didn’t look like me could be a better seminarian, a better person, a better athlete than I could.” And he said, “From the time I left the seminary, I’ve always treated people as individuals.” That was our goal back then.

Q: If you were talking to a group of college students and you were to give them the most important lesson that you learned from your grandfather, what would it be?

CT: There may be a disconnect between my world and yours, because when my grandfather was raising me, people didn’t talk about their rights so much. They talked about civil rights, yes, but they didn’t simply talk about rights and freedom. They talked more about the responsibilities that came with freedom—about the fact that if you were to have freedom, you had to be responsible for it. What my grandfather believed was that people have their responsibilities, and that if they are left alone to fulfill their responsibilities, that is freedom. Honesty and responsibility, those are the things he taught.

It’s the same thing in civil society. We’re too focused on the benefits of a civil society and we think too little about the obligations we have—the obligations to be civil, to learn about our history and our government, to conduct ourselves in a disciplined way, to help others, to take care of our homes. Too many conversations today have to do with rights and wants. There is not enough talk about responsibilities and duties.

Q: How do you think people in today’s generation can learn that kind of philosophy with such different upbringings and such a different culture?

CT: We all make choices. My wife is my best friend in the whole world. And she had a totally different upbringing from mine, but we have the same beliefs. How? I don’t think it’s necessarily the same upbringing that makes the difference. We have free will. We always have a choice between just doing whatever we feel like doing and doing what we are obligated to do. I’ve got a strong libertarian streak, but a good lesson I’ve learned is this: You can’t choose right and wrong, you’ve got to choose between right and wrong. There’s a wonderful encyclical by Pope John Paul where he talks about the mistake that Adam and Eve made. They thought they could choose right and wrong as opposed to choosing between the two. Modern nihilists and relativists think that we can decide or make up right and wrong. People like my grandfather understood that there was right and wrong, as certain as that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. And they made their choices between the two. I think anyone today can do the same thing.

Q: There seems to be a lot of negativity toward you in books and in the media. Is that lonely? And if so, how do you deal with it?

CT: When people used to criticize my grandfather, he’d say: “Well then, dammit, they’ve got a lifetime to get pleased.” That was it. He never spent any more time on it. Have you ever read the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson from 1896? That’s the case that upheld the idea of “separate but equal.” There was one dissent in that case, the dissent by Justice Harlan, who argued that the Constitution is colorblind. How lonely do you think he was after he wrote that? Do you think he was popular? It doesn’t mean he wasn’t right. I never set out to be unpopular, but popularity isn’t of high value to me. I set out to do my best to be right. I am who I am.

Q: What is your purpose in writing your opinions?

CT: What I try to do first in my opinions is to apply the Constitution. But also, I look on the Constitution as the people’s Constitution. And so I try to make the Constitution accessible again to people who didn’t go to Harvard Law School. Of course, some of it gets involved because you have to deal with a lot of case law. But I want people to understand what the cases are about.

As for how I think about my opinions, imagine a train with 100 cars. The cars are the previous cases dealing with some issue—the meaning of the Commerce Clause, for instance, or of the First Amendment. Often what our decisions do is just tack on a new caboose to the train, and that’s it. But here’s what I like to do: I like to walk through the 100 cars and see what’s going on up front. I like to go back to the Constitution, looking at the history and tradition along the way. Because what if there’s a flashing light on the dashboard up front that says “wrong direction”? What if we’re headed the wrong way?

My job is to apply the Constitution. And here’s a useful lesson: You hear people talk all the time about the Bill of Rights. But you should always keep in mind that the Bill of Rights was an afterthought. That’s why it’s made up of what are called amendments. It was not in the original Constitution. The rights in the Bill of Rights were originally assumed as natural rights, and some people at the time thought that writing them into the Constitution was redundant. Read the Declaration of Independence. We should always start, when we read the Constitution, by reading the Declaration, because it gives us the reasons why the structure of the Constitution was designed the way it was. And with the Constitution, it was the structure of the government that was supposed to protect our liberty. And what has happened through the years is that the protections afforded by that structure have been dissipated. So my opinions are often about the undermining of those structural protections.

People need to know about that. Many might say, “Well, they are writing about the Commerce Clause, and nobody cares about that.” But they should care about it. The same is true of the doctrine of incorporation. The same is true of substantive due process. People should care about these things. And I try to explain why clearly in my opinions.

Q: In your opinion in Morse v. Frederick—which had to do with whether a student had a right to hold up a sign saying “Bong Hits for Jesus”—you talk about the history of education, and about instilling a core of common values and how that’s a responsibility of schools. How do you respond to people who say that there isn’t a common set of values that schools should instill—that morality is relative?

CT: I did look at history, and more people should. There was an article in the Washington Times just today on how poorly our kids today understand civics. The title of it is: “Colleges Flunking Basic Civics Tests, Average is F in U.S. History.” There is our problem: We think we know a lot about our rights, but we know nothing about our country and about the principles that our liberty is based on and depends on.

Have you ever read Modern Times, by Paul Johnson? I read it back in the ’80s. It’s long, but it’s really worth the effort. One point it makes clearly is the connection between relativism, nihilism, and Naziism. The common idea that you can do whatever you want to do, because truth and morality are relative, leads to the idea that if you are powerful enough you can kill people because of their race or faith. So ask your relativist friends sometime: What is to keep me from getting a gang of people together and beating the hell out of you because I think you deserve to be beaten? Too many people think that life and liberty are about their frivolous pleasures. There is more to life. And again, largely what relativism reflects is simply a lack of learning.

Q: I read a quote where you said that you don’t argue ideas with brutes. Who were you referring to?

CT: Can a diehard Packers fan have a civil conversation with a diehard Bears fan right after a close game? That’s what I’m talking about. There are some people now who are so wrapped up in their interests that that’s all they care about. They don’t even read the opinions that I write. It is their interests that govern them, not the thought process or the Constitution. They’ve got to have their way or they’ll kill you—not physically, necessarily, but certainly with calumnies. There are people today who seem unable to transcend their interests to the point necessary to have a civil discourse.

CT: My grandfather was a man who understood implicitly, without education, what it meant to do right—as a citizen, as a father, as a person. This was a man who had every reason to be bitter—who wasn’t. A man who had every reason to give up—who didn’t. A man who had every reason to stop working—who wouldn’t. He was a man who had nothing but a desire to work by the sweat of his brow so that he could provide for those of us around him, and to pass on to us his idea of right. Another thing he said always stuck with me. When my brother and I went to live with him in 1955 as kids, he told us: “Boys, I’m never going to tell you to do as I say. I’m going to tell you to do as I do.” How many people can say that? And I asked my brother once, “Did he ever fail to live up to his promise?” No.

Q: Where do you think that you find the courage to make the unpopular stands that you do?

CT: I take my clerks to Gettysburg every year. They go over to stand where Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. Do you know that speech? He left it for us, the living, to finish the business. I take that very seriously. And my clerks get the point. We are here to further the business that Lincoln was talking about. And then you think also about the people who lost their lives there. Was that in vain? Will we allow the people who have fought our wars for our liberty to have died in vain? In recent years I’ve had some wounded vets here in my office, young kids who have come back from Iraq missing limbs, blinded, in wheelchairs. And people say that I take hits? Do I look wounded to you? These kids have given a lot more. What a price people have paid for us to be right here. I think of them like I think of my grandparents. One of the things I’m always trying to do is to make sure that everything they did was worth it—that if they were to appear right now they would say, “You’ve made our sacrifices worth it.” That’s all I want.

The Prayers of Clarence Thomas

2007-11-08T12:39:00.000-08:00

An article from the American Thinker:

But the media has largely overlooked another crucial aspect of the story: the role of prayer in Thomas's life. Perhaps because the media remains uncomfortable with public displays of faith, or simply because they don't get it, the word "prayer," does not appear in either the Post's or the New York Times' reviews of "My Grandfather's Son."

That is a curious omission, given the decisive place Thomas gives specific prayers in the narrative and the window that his choices open onto his character and life.

* * *

A very interesting article that discusses several prayers that Justice Thomas mentions in his autobiography.

Former Senator Jack Danforth on Clarence Thomas

2007-11-06T10:47:00.000-08:00

Newsbusters interviewed former Senator Jack Danforth, who helped Justice Thomas's nomination, and who later wrote a book about that ordeal ("Resurrection").

Now that Thomas has been reintroduced to the public by way of his new memoirs it is evident the media remain highly antagonistic to him, former Senator John Danforth has observed. The Missouri Republican is a long-time friend and mentor to Thomas. He played an instrumental role in securing confirmation 16 years ago.

"His media detractors portray him as some angry person, brooding quietly in the Supreme Court," Danforth said in an interview. "Well if you go to the Supreme Court building and talk to the people who work there you will find he's the most popular person in the building."

A Nexis search for news articles describing Thomas as being either "angry" or "bitter" in the monthly period immediately following the release of his book pulled up over 200 results.

This media portrait is out of step with reality Danforth argued.

"His detractors are going to savage him regardless of what he does," he said. "For years they savaged him for being silent, now that he's written a book and been on TV they savage him for being outspoken."

Those who know Thomas well are immune to the media distortion, Danforth said. This is true of friends and even colleagues who do not share his ideology, the former senator explained.

"I was at a White House dinner going back about four or five years and one of the most liberal justices on the Supreme Court was sitting at the same table where I was and this justice came up to me and said `thank you for giving us Clarence Thomas.' Now that was a liberal justice, it shows the degree of respect for him and affection, even from people who don't share his particular jurisprudence."

An Open Letter to Bill Cosby

2007-11-05T10:39:00.000-08:00

From Dutch Martin:

Dear Dr. Cosby:

I've always been a huge fan of your work as an entertainer, philanthropist, family man and example of what can be accomplished with hard work, sacrifice and a love of learning.

I supported your crusade to encourage low-income blacks to stop being victims and take responsibility for their own lives. Your message emphasizing parental responsibility rings truer now than ever before. I also recently rushed out to buy the new book you co-authored with Dr. Alvin Pousssaint, Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors.

Having said all this, I am deeply disappointed by your remarks about U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas on a recent edition of CNN's "Larry King Live." In particular, the following exchange makes me regret my purchase and clouds any future support of you: . . . .

Book Review

2007-11-03T16:36:00.000-07:00

A good book review from a blogger:

I rarely stay up till wee-hours in the morning reading a book, but I did so last night. At 1:30 a.m., I finished reading the final words in Clarence Thomas’ My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir.

Justice Thomas and a Georgia Interstate

2007-11-02T10:00:00.000-07:00

Some news from Georgia:

Savannah Interchange Would Be Named For Justice Clarence Thomas

(11/1/07) Senate President Pro Tem Eric Johnson, R-Savannah, will propose next year naming the I-95 and I-16 interchange in Chatham County for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

“Thomas has defended the U.S. Constitution from attack and protected the precious liberties of every American,” Johnson said. “This interchange should proudly display the name of our native son.”

Thomas was born in Pin Point, Ga., which is in Johnson’s senatorial district.

Justice Thomas in Baltimore

2007-10-30T07:02:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Howard Bashman, here's the Washington Post on Justice Clarence Thomas's visit to Baltimore, complete with a short video:

Blog Items

2007-10-27T12:23:00.000-07:00

From around the blog world:

1. A nice picture of Justice Clarence Thomas signing books in Dallas.

2. One blogger's account of seeing Justice Thomas speak:

On Sunday night, I attended a joint Heritage Foundation-Federalist Society event celebrating the publication of Clarence Thomas's memoirs. I have not yet read My Grandfather's Son, but I look forward to doing so, especially after Justice Thomas's talk.

The Justice stressed to an audience of nearly a thousand people that he was able to overcome a life of tremendous difficulties and challenges thanks to the mentoring and example of the nuns who taught him, the people of his hometown who urged him to get an education--because "once you get that in your head, no one can take it away"--and because of his grandfather's admonition to always "put one foot in front of another." The striking thing about the Justice's comments was that his life, while ultimately tremendously successful personally, was never planned. He encountered a series of failures that led to sterling triumphs. It is utterly fascinating that as he was sitting on the Court of Appeals, just before he was nominated to the Supreme Court, he was still plotting how he could get himself back to Georgia.

3. Another blogger's reaction to the autobiography:

There are two books I couldn't finish reading. The writing was too powerful and too moving.

The one I put down yesterday, Clarence Thomas' My Grandfather's Son and the other I put down years ago, Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters.

I can not explain in words the power either of these books had on me but the tears in my eyes, swelling up page after page and the anguish I felt made it impossible to continue reading. I can not bear my own suffering as I connect with the truth these two men speak.

My Grandfather's Son Website

2007-10-26T08:18:00.000-07:00

The official website for My Grandfather's Son has recently been updated and expanded to include a lot of resources and links. Here are some useful items that I found there:

1. An account of Justice Thomas's recent visit to Texas:

* * * On Oct. 23, 1,560 people gathered in a large ballroom at the Adam’s Mark Hotel in downtown Dallas to listen to a lunchtime chat by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who is on tour promoting his recently released memoir titled “My Grandfather’s Son.”

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank that believes in limited government, free enterprise, traditional values and a strong national defense, and the Federalist Society, a conservative legal network that believes in the principle of judicial restraint, sponsored the event, which according to the Heritage Foundation was the largest event it has staged outside of Washington, D.C., in its 34-year history.

Among the assembled were Texas Supreme Court Justices Nathan Hecht and Dale Wainwright, former White House Counsel and former U.S. Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, and 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Priscilla Owen. * * * Then Thomas and former Delaware Gov. Pete du Pont took the stage and seated themselves in high back chairs for what was designed to be an informal interview session— that is, with du Pont asking the questions (something Thomas is loathe to do from the bench) and Thomas answering the questions (something Thomas did quite comfortably and candidly). Thomas dealt with some preliminary questions about how cert petitions are granted. There was nothing conspiratorial about it, he said -- and convincing another justice to actually change his or her mind regarding a legal issue was “almost a Smithsonian moment.”

2. A link to Justice Thomas himself reading the introduction to My Grandfather's Son.

3. A link to an interview with Human Events:

I got to read your book in manuscript months ago, under a promise of secrecy. And it’s just been killing me because it was such a great book that I wanted to tell everybody all these stories about your grandfather.

Oh, he’s a great man.

Apparently he was an amazing person. . . . The first question I wanted to ask was, essentially, about the hardships that you went through. . . . It really comes through in the book that there’s a way in which the fact that your life was hard made it possible for you to accomplish things that you might not have been able to accomplish otherwise.

You know I have often said to my wife and to others, and certainly to young kids, that I was fortunate to have had misfortune in my life. One of the things it does for you is that it gives you -- it helps you build the kind of character traits you need to go on with your life. For example, you have a challenge that really seems almost impossible. But then you work through that challenge, and it sort of does something to you; it teaches you how to stick to things; it teaches you persistence; it teaches you patience. And if you don’t achieve what you want, or if something doesn’t happen and you have disappointment, you learn that you don’t always get what you want. That’s just a part of life. So I think misfortune -- when you survive it, and when you learn from it, and grow from it, actually turns out to be a benefit.

Now, part of what you lived through was segregation and poverty, terrible things . . . but part of what you lived through was that your grandfather was really tough on you. The stuff about how he really didn’t let you play with the bigger kids; he had you working hard all summer; he didn’t let you go out for sports. Today, somebody raising a kid like that, people would say, “He’s very controlling. Why is he so hard on those children?” Did he have to be that tough on you?

Well, you know, none of us would ever know that. How would we know? It was what it was. There were people who criticized him for being so hard on us, even in that time. And the thing that I dislike is when people say he was harsh. He was not harsh. But I want you to think a second about his life.

He never had a father. His mother died when he was nine. He went to live with his grandmother, who was a freed slave. She died when he was twelve or thirteen. He then goes to live with an uncle, who already has a house full of kids. He’s just another mouth to feed. As he always said, and I know I mentioned in the book, he was handed from pillar to post. And so he had a hard life. He had to make his way in the world and by the time he was a grown man, he could not write his name. And he eventually learned how to sign his name and learned how to read a little bit -- enough that he could barely function. And so think of the life that he had and how he had to make his way through the world. So it was a hard life and in turn he had to be a hard man.

But he was never harsh. And what is he leaving his grandsons? Or his boys, as he always called us. He sees a world that is very difficult on a lot of levels -- race, or just a part of human existence, he sees the need for education, the need to learn how to work, the need to have certain character traits that he learned from “Mother Wit,” as he always said, and so what’s the honest thing to do with two boys you care about -- you love -- when you know that the life ahead of them is going to be full of these challenges?

You teach them how to deal with it. And so I think in his own way, he was saying, “I am going to devote myself to teaching these boys.” And all these other things -- “this foolishness,” as he called it, playing sports, playing around, etcetera, has to go by the wayside.

Now I want you to contrast that -- if you look in the book, you’ll see that with my own son and his great-grandkids, he was a total pushover. He did whatever they wanted him to do. And how does he differentiate? He said that Jamal, my son, is “not my responsibility.” He said he’d already raised us. Jamal was my responsibility, not his. He could have fun with Jamal. But the way that he had to express his love for us was to discharge his obligation to raise us and prepare us for a life full of challenges. And so in his world, the way he was raised, what he saw ahead of him, yes, he had to do what he did.

And you know what? My brother and I -- and we’ve had, my brother and I had many conversations about this -- we were both grateful. And our bottom line was, how do you argue with success?

It is hard to argue with how it turned out. It seems like if the proof’s in the pudding, then . . .

Yeah, when my brother before he passed away, he just turned fifty, he was the president of a real estate management company.

I didn’t know that.

Oh, yes, my brother was, I mean he and I were very, very close. And eight years ago he passed away. He’d just turned 50 years old, and of course I was 51, and we were always, I mean you can see how close we were in age. And just to see your brother die. God. . . . He was there in New Orleans. There’s this cotton mart or something downtown, and he did the condos there. Then I think there was a Hilton Garden Hotel that they also did the -- he oversaw the development. That was one of his ideas; that was his brain child. That was my brother. . . . I don’t even know if it’s there after the flood, but he worked on all that. He was a genius when it came to that. And he also was a prodigious, prodigious worker. Where’d that come from?

So it really worked -- it rubbed off on you guys?

Oh, my goodness, that’s the whole point of the book. I titled my own book. I learned that lesson . . . I was toward the end of the manuscript when I came up with this title, My Grandfather’s Son, because I realized through it all something that my mother and relatives had been saying to me: “You’re just like your grandfather. You’re his son.” And that’s it.

* * *

So now that you have been a father, and you’re trying to give -- you know, people say, how much ever your mother loves you, she can’t really teach you to be a man -- you need a father to teach you to be a man, like your grandfather did for you. Does raising boys today give you some kind of perspective on what your grandfather did? Do you think it’s easier today, do you think it’s harder in current conditions? Do you think things have changed, or do you think it’s the same job, whenever?

Well, I think it’s probably, for everybody, raising kids has its challenges. But I think there was so much more back then that reinforced what he was trying to accomplish, and what our obligations were. You know, the nuns were very clear. They reinforced what happened at home. [Parents] didn’t have to come and fight with the teachers at school if they were doing something inconsistent with the way that they wanted us raised. The neighbors could tell us to go to the store and watch over us and discipline us and go and report on us, etcetera. So the society around us recognized, reinforced, and made sure that we complied with a certain way of living our lives.

It was kind of a united adult front?

Exactly. And I don’t think we have that kind of common culture or community today that we had before. And certainly -- maybe that’s a little too broad; we don’t have that kind of cohesion and coherence that we had before in outlook, where everybody’s on the same page almost. And some might be a little tougher than others, but they were generally all singing from the same sheet of music. So I can’t tell you whether it’s tougher.

My son, as I say in the preface, my son was always a better son than I deserved. He is a good guy. I mean, he was always compliant, and you know you had your challenges, but he did his homework, you could set your clock by him. He was independent. And today, he is such a good man.

Thomas' Early Education

2007-10-25T09:10:00.001-07:00

A column by Rick Martinez in the News & Observer:

Thomas' Early Education

Rick Martinez, Correspondent
I picked up Clarence Thomas' autobiography not to read about him, but to learn more about Myers Anderson, the type of man I wish we had more of these days. Anderson was Thomas' grandfather who took in the future associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and his brother after their mother gave up the boys because she couldn't afford to raise them -- and because she refused to go on welfare.

"The damn vacation is over," said Anderson to his new charges, and he meant it. From the moment the Thomas boys stepped onto their grandparents' porch with all their belongings, they entered a world of hard work, discipline and rules that demanded their respect. Thomas writes that deviation from those rules guaranteed sure, swift and painful punishment. If the boys didn't like the rules, Anderson was quick to remind them, the door swung both ways.

While most parenting experts today are horrified at that no-nonsense, authoritarian approach to raising boys, I long for it. Not out of a sense of nostalgia, but desperation.

Dr. Bill Cosby and Dr. Alvin Poussaint are on a high-profile crusade to reverse the low rate of graduation and high rates of out-of-wedlock births and incarceration that plague the African-American community. Their book, "Come On People: On the Path from Victims to Victors" is an open letter to fellow blacks to finally recognize that while systematic racism continues, the real enemy is from within.

Though directed at African-Americans, the book also speaks to Hispanics. Our statistics, though not as bleak, show disturbing trends.

Cosby and Poussaint's self-help directives, aimed at overcoming the destructive elements of black and Hispanic-American culture, are not new. They're just not practiced with the same seriousness and obligation as in past generations.

Educational achievement is a prime example. Despite lip service, the minority community's commitment to the work and discipline required to obtain diplomas just isn't there. Nothing else explains the parental apathy that tolerates high school dropout rates hovering around 50 percent. Classroom excellence wasn't an expectation in Myers Anderson's household, it was a demand. Missing a day of school was unthinkable. He told his grandsons that if they died he'd take their bodies to school for three days to ensure they weren't faking. I believe he would have done it.

When Clarence Thomas entered a seminary, his grandfather told him the only option to return home was as a priest. When Thomas quit because of the racism he encountered, Anderson kept his word and kicked him out of the household.

His grandfather was hardly unsympathetic to Thomas' experience. A card-carrying member of the NAACP, he often mortgaged his property to raise bail for jailed civil rights protesters. Anderson was simply a hard man who wouldn't tolerate failure under his roof.

Growing up, I knew kids whose fathers were this tough. I sometimes felt sorry for them, but at least they had fathers. In their book, Cosby and Poussaint urge men, rich and poor alike, to understand that once they father a child, parenting by example must be their priority. Being there isn't enough.

Anderson understood what that meant. Thomas writes that his grandfather never told him to "do as I say." Instead, he commanded that Thomas and his brother do as he did. That meant going to church and not getting drunk. A man of moderation, Anderson limited himself to one drink an evening. He said blacks had enough problems, so why add drunkenness? Most of all, living by Anderson's rules meant working, not just to make a living, but also to keep his grandsons out of trouble. When trouble began to creep into his neighborhood, Anderson built a farm on family land to keep the boys busy during nine summers.

He told his grandsons that if they learned to work, they could live well. Armed with only a third-grade education, he used discipline, determination and stamina to build a delivery business and eventually own rental property.

It was that example, not material goods, that Thomas and his brother inherited. Character, not wealth, proved to be Myers Anderson's legacy, one that included the belief that individual liberties are to be enjoyed and exercised, but only after personal responsibilities have been fulfilled.

Justice Clarence Thomas in Chicago

2007-10-24T11:08:00.000-07:00

An article about a speech there:

Thomas' life story, philosophy win admirers

October 23, 2007
STEVE HUNTLEY shuntley@suntimes.com

Beautiful early fall weather and a few days off from work promised the opportunity to do some outdoor chores around the house and enjoy what in most years is Chicago's best season. But that Friday morning in September 1991, I made the mistake of turning on the television and for the next several days didn't stray far from it as I, like the rest of the nation, was transfixed by the extraordinary Senate hearings over the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The anguish over the charges of sexual harassment alleged by Anita Hill make for painful reading in My Grandfather's Son, the new book Thomas wrote telling the story of his rise from poverty in Georgia to a seat on the nation's highest court. Reading about those tortured days recalls just how desperate liberal interests in Washington were to block the appointment of a conservative African American to the court. People who liked to think of themselves as champions of civil rights had drudged up the worst Jim Crow stereotype of a sexually menacing black man to try to derail Thomas' nomination.

Juan Williams, now an NPR commentator but in 1991 a columnist for the Washington Post, called it "indiscriminate, mean-spirited mudslinging supported by the so-called champions of fairness." Opinion polls in the days after the hearings showed that the public had seen through it and supported President George H.W. Bush's nomination of Thomas.

Neither his contentious confirmation hearing specifically nor Hill's name came up Sunday night when 960 people turned out in Chicago to hear Thomas talk about his book and answer questions from the audience in a forum sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society.

In a reference to the many challenges he faced in life that made him stronger, Thomas said he had been "very fortunate to have had misfortune in my life." The 59-year-old jurist went on to deplore the low level of civil discourse in this country and said it doesn't have to be that way. "For all the flaws we might have at the court, at least we're civil."

The conservative Heritage crowd greeted him warmly and clearly admired him. His remarks and answers to their questions about his life and judicial philosophy demonstrated why.

His discussions of legal issues drew applause time and again, like when he declared that the job of a Supreme Court justice was to rule "on what the law is -- not what it ought to be."

His observations on the tendency of some of his colleagues on the high court to look to legal rulings in other countries in forming opinions on American law were cutting. "How do you decide which country to reach out to?" he asked. Noting that justices don't look to China or Zimbabwe, Thomas said, "You reach out to countries that support your point of view." He called it "cherry picking other countries' jurisprudence to form ours."

One person in the audience noted that he had a reputation for not asking questions during oral arguments before the court. "I ask all the questions that need to be asked," Thomas responded. Saying most opinions are based on voluminous written briefs, he added, "There is no mystery, this is not Perry Mason" where questioning will reveal a culprit. He suggested that other justices ask too many questions, cutting into the precious 30 minutes allotted the attorneys for oral arguments.

Perhaps most revealing about Thomas the man were his comments about two things he requires of the clerks who work for him.

He has them watch "The Fountainhead," the movie based on Ayn Rand's novel celebrating uncompromising individualism. The message: Just because a million people say you're wrong doesn't mean you are wrong.

And each year he takes his clerks on a trip to the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg where thousands of soldiers fell in days and Abraham Lincoln found the words to explain what those men died for. Thomas described the purpose of this annual outing: "It's left to us to give value to the sacrifice of all who died for this country."

Clarence Thomas was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice 16 years ago today.

Critics of Clarence Thomas

2007-10-24T11:06:00.000-07:00

A short comment from an Arizona Republic editorial writer:

Critics of Clarence Thomas need to let go of anger

Oct. 23, 2007 12:00 AM
In reviews of the recent autobiography of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, numerous writers have noted the justice still clings to the anger he felt at his confirmation hearings. The "high-tech lynching," if you recall. Well. A former law clerk of Thomas' recently observed that it is the reviewers, no less than Thomas himself, who cannot seem to let go of anger. At his judgments. At his very confirmation. Wish I'd thought of that myself. They do need to let it go.

- Doug MacEachern, editorial writer

Jim Wooten on Clarence Thomas

2007-10-22T06:10:00.000-07:00

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Justice Thomas landed the right job for himself — and America

By Jim Wooten | Friday, October 19, 2007, 08:47 PM

But for the failure of any law firm in Savannah or Atlanta to offer him a job out of Yale Law School, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas would likely have wound up as a tax lawyer working corporate finance in the bowels of a big Southern law firm.

Praise thee, rejection.

“I didn’t go to law school thinking about living in New York or living in D.C.,” Thomas told The Atlanta Press Club last week. “I wanted to come back to Savannah” to work with the now-dissolved law firm of former state Rep. Bobby Hill. Though memories differ on whether the firm offered him a job upon his graduation from Yale, Thomas remembers rejection there and among the big firms in Atlanta. “That was a time of dashed hope and expectations and frustration,” he said. “To say I was frustrated is an understatement. I was absolutely despondent about it. It was one of those times I got to see just how difficult it was to deal with rejection.”

Critics hear Thomas talk about such memories and hear an angry and bitter man at the top of the world with a chip on his shoulder. That is not, frankly, the man who showed up in Atlanta last week, either at the press club luncheon or later at a book-signing sponsored by the Federalist Society and the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, both organizations that would champion the originalist philosophy Thomas brings to the court. At the Federalist-Heritage event, an adoring crowd of 900 people stood in a line that snaked around the walls of a banquet-size room waiting for a signed copy of “My Grandfather’s Son,” a remembrance of his grandparents’ life lessons.

It’s unfortunate that more of the Thomas critics don’t see — or actually hear — the man behind the caricature they have created. Thomas is, in my view, among the most wronged of the honorable public figures in American life. While there’s no value in revisiting his confirmation, the truth is that it was a smear directed at a man who held the “wrong” views for his skin color. He was the collateral damage of the abortion wars. He was asked at both events about the Anita Hill episode and why he’d revisited it in the book. “Well, if I left it out you would be asking me the opposite,” he told the press club.

Listening to a Southerner residing elsewhere talk about place, and the good people who lived there, is to feel an immediate affinity — as Georgians undoubtedly would with Thomas.

“So much written about the South and places like Savannah is written through the prism of what was wrong,” said Thomas. “Of course there was lots that was wrong. I don’t have to go over that. We all know. It was the ’40s and the ’50s and the ’60s. But there’s a lot that was good.

“Out in Liberty County, the family members there out on the farm, these people were good people. There was something about them. There was no sort of vision. There was no notion that they would be doing any more than the sort of hard labor that they had been assigned to, or had been assigned to them. And yet, they endured, they persevered and they stayed positive.

“There was something that needed to be said about them.” Over the years, he said, “I have thought that my grandparents were saying ‘remember us.’ This book is to leave a record of that. …”

“I would hope there is in this book something that would give hope to this young man sitting here or to someone who is going through struggle. Maybe there’s something when they’re sitting down and studying math and it’s hard and they can see that doors will be opened for me, or someone who has a disability, or someone who has a financial challenge, they can say, ‘look, it is going to be OK if I keep at it.’ “

A bitter man? That is, I think, a fantasy of the left, of critics who can never acknowledge that their political basis for trying to destroy his professional life was cheap and frivolous.

We can return later to the newsworthy observations, to his judicial philosophy, to the accounts of life on the bench.

But for this day, the man before us is a Southerner remembering home and people and place. “It’s home,” he said. “I truly miss home. … I left here, and I was trying when I stopped in Washington, D.C., in 1979, I was trying to get home.”

I am torn. No true Southerner who’s ever lived elsewhere could fail to understanding the yearnings to come back. I do. But he now serves America — and I want him there, on the U.S. Supreme Court, for always.

Justice Clarence Thomas Interview with Hugh Hewitt

2007-10-20T11:32:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Howard Bashman, here's a link to the full transcript of Hugh Hewitt's interview of Justice Clarence Thomas, and the audio is available here and here.

Justice Thomas in New York

2007-10-18T18:35:00.000-07:00

An account of his speech there:

Justice Thomas discuss Supreme Court frustrations in NYC speech

3:41 PM EDT, October 16, 2007

NEW YORK (AP) _ Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said Tuesday that people wrongly take shots at the court and he gets frustrated at times because he's unable to fully explain his positions.

"The perception of what we do is so different from what we actually do," Thomas told several hundred people at a luncheon in midtown Manhattan hotel to promote "My Grandfather's Son," his new book.

"Some of the discussions about what we do center around almost a political characterization of that. And it is not what we do," he said. "And I think it's an easy way to almost dismiss the importance of the court and the law as law."

Thomas, 59, said that was the saddest part of being a judge _ the misperceptions.

"So often you wish that you could sit down and explain to someone exactly what you are doing other than in your written opinion," he said. "But we don't have that opportunity to do press releases or come out and give press conferences about our work. So, it's frustrating when things are mischaracterized."

Thomas touched on a number of topics while answering questions from the audience. He talked about the difficultly of writing his book, which he described as a "long, lonely process" and the importance of written briefs submitted to court versus oral arguments.

"The real work is done in briefs," he said.

In response to another question, he said a threat to the Constitution was a lack of knowledge about it.

"I wonder how many people have even read the document, and maybe the greatest threat is we don't know how important it is or actually what's in it," he said. "If the Constitution is so important why do so many people know so little about it?"

Asked what he found most surprising about joining the court in 1991, Thomas said it was how civil the judges were "toward each other."

Then he added: "I was also surprised at how much work it was."

Justice Thomas in Atlanta

2007-10-18T18:33:00.000-07:00

An account of Justice Thomas's speech in Atlanta:

Clarence Thomas promotes new book in Atlanta

By JILL VEJNOSKA
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 10/19/07

Did Clarence Thomas need to have his head examined?

The Supreme Court justice, who's not exactly known for his openness, came back to his native Georgia on Thursday for an Atlanta Press Club luncheon. Meaning he'd be taking questions from an audience lousy with lawyers (Troutman Sanders was a sponsor) and, worse, pesky journalists.

Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Clarence Thomas speaking at Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va. last month. Breaking his 16-year public silence on his bitter confirmation hearings, Thomas writes in his new book that Anita Hill was a mediocre employee who was used by political opponents to make claims she had been sexually harassed.

"I've been in worse situations," Thomas chuckled while autographing a copy of his somewhat controversial new memoir, "My Grandfather's Son," before lunch. "I have had confirmation hearings."

As if anyone needed reminding of that surreal period in 1991 when his televised hearings turned into a "he said/she said" debate on Anita Hill's accusations of sexual harassment, one of the first audience questions Thursday concerned Thomas' decision to revisit it in his book.

"If I'd left it out, you'd be asking the opposite," Thomas, 59, responded tersely.

Bonhomie suffused the Commerce Club, where the Pin Point-born justice got a standing ovation before proclaiming he was "pleased to be back home in Georgia."

Thomas alternately tickled his listeners by recalling his first trip to Atlanta 40 years ago — like everyone else, he came here to catch a plane and rode the glass elevator at the [Hyatt] Regency "about 10 times" — and quieted them by recalling his inability to get hired by law firms in Savannah and Atlanta.

"One of the hardest times for me was wanting so badly to come back to this state," Thomas said. "I think in a strange way that had I not been rejected in Atlanta, I certainly wouldn't be standing up here today talking to you all."

Not that this is the same Georgia he left behind. Asked if he thought there will be a female chief justice of the Supreme Court during his lifetime, Thomas pointed out the current chief, John Roberts, is only 52. Then he turned the Q&A tables:

"Did you ever think you'd live long enough to see a black female chief justice of the state of Georgia?" Thomas asked rhetorically, meaning current Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears. "It is absolutely historic. If that can happen in the sovereign state of Georgia, I think it can happen over the entire United States, and it can happen with respect to the presidency."

Thomas responded to a question about "misconceptions" about him by denouncing suggestions that he took his cues on decisions from conservative Justice Antonin Scalia: "Obviously what that's based on is that I'm black and supposed to think a certain way."

He laughed, hard, when asked which of his fellow justices he'd least like to argue a case before.

"I am not answering that," Thomas protested. "You've got to remember, I've got to go back to work!"

Don't be surprised if he gets there by motor coach. Thomas seemed happiest when talking about taking incognito king-of-the-road trips in his RV. Once, soon after the controversial court ruling that decided the 2000 presidential election, Thomas said, a trucker in Brunswick stared and asked, "Anyone ever tell you that you look like Clarence Thomas?" Responded the limelight-loathing justice: "Uh, yes."

"And he said, 'I'll bet it happens all the time, huh?' And that was it," Thomas recalled, roaring at the memory.

After all, he's been in worse situations.

Thomas Rejects Notion He Follows Scalia

2007-10-18T18:14:00.000-07:00

That's the title of an Associated Press article today. This hasn't been news to anyone who has paid attention to the Supreme Court for, oh, about the past 15 years or so. But apparently it's news to the AP:

ATLANTA (AP) -- Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas condemned suggestions that he follows the lead of fellow conservative Antonin Scalia, telling an audience Thursday the notion is based on a racial stereotype.

The current court's only black justice said critics accuse him of picking up cues from Scalia, an Italian-American known as the court's most conservative member.

"Obviously, what it's based on is that I'm black and I'm supposed to think in a certain way," said Thomas, responding to an audience member's question about how he arrives at his judicial opinions. "And there's no way, since I'm not supposed to think that way, that I can come up with that myself, so I must be following somebody. You make your own judgments about that line of reasoning."

* * *

No question provoked a quicker response from Thomas than when he was asked which of his fellow justices he would least like to argue against.

"I'm not answering that," he said to laughter. "You got to remember when this whole book thing is done, I've got to get back to work."

Women Who Testified Against Anita Hill, Part XI

2007-10-17T06:21:00.000-07:00

Here's another woman who testified against Anita Hill:

[Statement of Ms. Holt, Management Analyst, Office of the Chairman, EEOC]

MS. HOLT: Mr. Chairman, Senator Thurmond, and members of this committee: My name is Diane Holt. I am a management analyst in the Office of the Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

I have known Clarence Thomas for over ten years. For six of those years, I worked very closely with him, cheek to cheek, shoulder to shoulder, as his personal secretary. My acquaintance with Judge Thomas began in May of 1981, after he had been appointed as Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education.

I had been the personal secretary to the outgoing Assistant Secretary for several years. Upon Judge Thomas' arrival at the department, he held a meeting with me, in which he indicated that he was not committed to bringing a secretary with him, and had no wish to displace me. Because he was not familiar with my qualifications, he made no guarantees, but gave me an opportunity to prove myself. That is the kind of man he is.

In May of 1982, Judge Thomas asked me to go to the EEOC with him, where I worked as his secretary until September of 1987.

I met Professor Hill in the summer of 1981, when she came to work at the Department of Education as attorney advisor to Judge Thomas.

After about a year, Judge Thomas was nominated to be Chairman of the EEOC. He asked both Professor Hill and myself to transfer with him.

Both Ms. Hill and I were excited about the prospect of transferring to the EEOC. We even discussed the greater potential for individual growth at this larger agency. We discussed and expressed excitement that we would be at the right hand of the individual who would run this agency.

When we arrived at the EEOC, because we knew no one else there, Professor Hill and I quickly developed a professional relationship, a professional friendship, often having lunch together.

At no time did Professor Hill intimate, not even in the most subtle of ways, that Judge Thomas was asking her out or subjecting her to the crude, abusive conversations that have been described. Nor did I ever discern any discomfort, when Professor Hill was in Judge Thomas' presence.

Additionally, I never heard anyone at any time make any reference to any inappropriate conduct in relation to Clarence Thomas.

The Clarence Thomas that I know has always been a motivator of staff, always encouraging others to grow professionally. I personally have benefited from that encouragement and that motivation.

In sum, the Chairman Thomas that I have known for ten years is absolutely incapable of the abuses described by Professor Hill.

Justice Thomas in Atlanta

2007-10-16T18:57:00.000-07:00

Mark your calendars for this live Internet video event from the Heritage Foundation:

Reception with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas
Atlanta, October 18th

Live Broadcast

The live broadcast begins at 7:00 p.m. Eastern time

David Garrow Review

2007-10-15T11:31:00.000-07:00

David Garrow, a liberal, has a fair-minded review of Justice Clarence Thomas's autobiography, including some harsh comments aimed at other reviewers:

Clarence Thomas’ brutally self-critical autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son, bears little resemblance to most early accounts of the book’s contents.

For instance, only at Page 241 — well past the 80 percent mark in a 289-page book — does Thomas reach the subject of Anita Hill’s charges that threw his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings into turmoil. * * *

Yet My Grandfather’s Son is plenty newsworthy, even if initial reviews and commentaries have “missed the lede,” as journalists say when stories fail to highlight what’s most important. In fact, those accounts have missed multiple ledes.

NO PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Let’s start with one that’s not all that obvious. Thomas’ son, Jamal — who’s now a 34-year-old options trader for Wachovia Securities in Richmond, Va. — was born while the justice-to-be was a newly married second-year student at Yale Law School. Jamal figures in this memoir most prominently when Thomas describes the subsequent dissolution of that marriage, after which Jamal eventually lived full-time with his father. But Thomas also recounts that, soon after Jamal’s birth, TV news footage of black schoolchildren being bused into the vociferously hostile white neighborhood of South Boston led him to make a remarkable vow: “I swore on the spot never to let Jamal go to a public school.”

Thomas kept his pledge, though in later years his personal finances repeatedly left him scrambling to pay Jamal’s private school tuition bills.

Top public officials need not send their children to public school, but a personal aversion toward public education as intense and long-standing as Thomas’ — apparently irrespective of state, district, or particular school — is a noteworthy attitude for a jurist who regularly confronts cases that present a wide range of public schooling issues. * * *

‘COMFORT IN THE BOTTLE’

The most dramatic “missed lede” from Thomas’ memoir is his insistently confessional accounts of a drinking problem that began during his undergraduate years at the College of the Holy Cross and lasted until 1982, when he gave up alcohol entirely.* * *

But this story is just one example of the intense, soul-bearing self-examination to which Thomas relentlessly subjects himself in this memoir. To call My Grandfather’s Son “emotionally revealing” would be the understatement of the year, and fatuous op-ed columnists who insistently declare that Thomas is just bitterly wallowing in self-pity have either failed to read this book or possess an undeclared bias that overwhelmed their critical faculties.

LIVING WITH THE GUILT

Any reader who comes to this book without a pre-existing animus toward Thomas will likely feel tremendous empathy for his life story, even if the reader’s legal views — like this reviewer’s — differ from Thomas’ on everything from abortion to the commerce clause to gay equality. * * *

* * *

Thomas’ performance as a justice has earned the respect of almost every unbiased Court observer. As liberal Supreme Court practitioner Thomas Goldstein recently wrote, Thomas’ “unflinchingly honest” opinions reveal how “he is thinking big and tackling the serious questions in constitutional law to which the Court has not given a fresh look in decades.” One need not agree with Thomas’ answers, or with his view of public education, to appreciate how My Grandfather’s Son will remain a classic work of African-American autobiography long after op-ed columnists’ catty comments are forgotten.

Justice Clarence Thomas Interview with Newsweek

2007-10-15T06:32:00.000-07:00

Newsweek has an interview with Justice Clarence Thomas:

Weymouth: Why did you write the book?
Thomas: It started when my brother died. I suddenly realized I'm the last person in the house. There's nobody left who is going to tell the story. We both revered our grandfather. We were his biggest cheerleaders.

Although he didn't sound so nice when he kicked you out of his house.
I think he did the right thing. I think it was a kick in the pants. He used to go off in the woods by himself—he always said he was hunting but he rarely came back with anything—and I think it was just to think and to, as he used to say, "mull things over." I often wonder now how many times he second-guessed himself for doing that.

So you wanted to tell your story.
I had to tell it. Because there are people who [had] told portions of it but some of it was wrong. They'd say that I went to college on a "Martin Luther King Scholarship." I didn't. I was a transfer student. People have their own template and they impose it. I just wanted to tell the story as best I could—checking back with my mother and some of my relatives to make sure I didn't overstate anything. I have this hope that maybe in telling it there will be something in there for somebody who is still trying to live their life—especially some kids.

The court today seems so divided. It seems like the votes are always 5 to 4.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that the court doesn't get along. [We get] along just fine as an institution, as friends, as colleagues—it's a wonderful place. The mere fact that people disagree doesn't carry over into how they treat each other. That is what I thought Washington was going to be when I came to town. I didn't think for a moment that because I didn't agree with somebody meant I was going to be hated. It wasn't until I went into the Reagan administration that I started feeling that lash.

Why do you never speak in oral arguments?
It's not a necessary part of the job. The court used to be very quiet. This [speaking] is all new. Justice [Harry] Blackmun asked no questions, and nobody beat on him about it. I ask more than he did. Justice [William] Brennan rarely asked questions, Justice [Thurgood] Marshall told stories, but he rarely asked questions.

How do you think your hearings changed the confirmation process?
It's obvious, isn't it? Would you want to be nominated for something [now]? Justice White was, he told me, nominated on day one and sworn in 10 days later. Now look at the confirmation hearings, whether it's the chief justice or Justice Alito. You've got all of this controversy around them—how does that improve the court? I think it's really poisoned the well.

What gave you the drive to succeed?
I was driven by the fear of failure. I had obligations. If I failed, then what would I do next? What were my options in life?

When you were going through those hearings, did you think the whole thing was a mistake and you should never have accepted the nomination?
No, not really. I would have preferred not to have been nominated for any variety of reasons. But I think it's wrong for people to do bad things to other people.

Are you referring to the senators or Anita Hill?
No, I wasn't referring to her. I was thinking of the interest groups. There are always going to be people who are going to try to trip you up. But that doesn't mean that those who are in charge of the process should allow it to happen. People in authority should know better. That was my frustration.

Have you enjoyed your time on the court?
This job is a humbling experience. When you decide cases, you want to try to get it right. Some people know how they want it to come out before they start—they have a particular point of view—[so] the case is easy for them because they only see one side, their side. The rest of us have to look at both sides and think it through. I made a decision when I first got here: I will only do what is necessary to discharge the responsibilities under my oath. I will not do things for histrionics. I will not do things so people will think well of me. The job is important, it's not about me.

Have you moved intellectually to the right?
No, I never moved toward the right. I was a libertarian. What I wanted more than anything else was not to be in a box. People try to put me in one. They have become very comfortable with that when it comes to blacks. We're all supposed to be liberals, Democrats, and believe in affirmative action. I'm just like everybody else. I'm complicated; I think things through. I assume people will say that I am conservative. But the reason I wrote the book about my grandfather is that my views are consistent with his.

Which means?
To the extent that I am conservative—I am conserving what they gave me. I made a decision to align myself with the Republican Party years ago. [But] I am not a Republican now. I am a federal judge and have been for almost 20 years. And I take that enormously … seriously. It is really important to me to do this job right, regardless of what anybody else says. President George Herbert Walker Bush asked me: can you call them as you see them if you get on the court? That's all the man exacted from me.

Along the road from Pin Point, Ga., to the Supreme Court, why did you not give up during difficult times?
I wanted to give up a hundred times. The thing that was so hurtful to me was after the end of that long journey to be beaten like that.

You mean at the hearings?
Yes, throughout the hearings, the summer, everything … I asked my wife, "Why? I just disagree with them. I don't even know if I disagree with them on specific issues." [But] I cannot carry around bitterness and at the same time carry around a positive message for young kids and for people who still need help. When my buddies and I get together, we talk about how can we help kids who are in the position we were in at 16, 17, 18 … We don't want these kids to humiliate themselves. We have an obligation to help because we were there, and we remember what it was like. My goal is: I will never treat anybody the way I was treated in this city. I also will never do my job as poorly as people did their jobs when I was at their mercy.

Jamie Kirchick on Clarence Thomas

2007-10-15T06:25:00.001-07:00

Jamie Kirchick of The New Republic has an excellent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times defending Clarence Thomas against charges of hypocrisy:

Clarence Thomas is not the hypocrite

It's not fair to use affirmative action against the Supreme Court's lone black judge.
By James Kirchick
October 15, 2007

WITH THE RELEASE of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' memoir, "My Grandfather's Son," all of the old smears directed against him since his confirmation hearings 16 years ago are once again being trotted out.

That he's "incompetent." That he's "not qualified." That the only reason he was appointed is because he's black. In other words, that he's a product of affirmative action or, more precisely, an "affirmative action hire."

Last week, for instance, liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote: "I believe in affirmative action, but I have to acknowledge there are arguments against it. One of the more cogent is the presence of Justice Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court."

Robinson's comment echoes many previous attacks. * * * Even The American Prospect magazine, a liberal journal that sees its mission as "beating back the right wing," ran an article two years ago calling Thomas the "most visible affirmative action hire in all the land, a token black nominee whose lack of qualifications was so painfully outed during his confirmation hearings."

How can you support a policy of racial preferences and then attack one of its supposed beneficiaries as undeserving? This, ultimately, is the intrinsic hypocrisy of the Thomas bashers. They allege that he's not competent and that the only reason he became a Supreme Court justice was because he's black. And in so doing, they level the exact same arguments against Thomas that they castigate conservatives for making about affirmative action itself. * * *

This blatant intellectual inconsistency does not stop Thomas' liberal critics from accusing him of hypocrisy -- namely, for being the "most visible affirmative action hire in all the land" while simultaneously standing as its most prominent black opponent. By opposing racial preferences, liberals say, Thomas -- who was accepted into Yale Law School via an affirmative action program -- is denying others the very same benefits he received.

But as Thomas reveals in "My Grandfather's Son," his opposition to racial preferences is based on personal conscience and a genuine concern for its effects on black Americans, not selfish disregard for his racial brethren born out of self-loathing, as affirmative action advocates would have it. He writes that he keeps his Yale diploma tucked away in his basement with a 15-cent cigar sticker affixed to its frame. Why? In a "60 Minutes" interview, Thomas said "that degree meant one thing for whites and another thing for blacks. . . . It was discounted."

This is one of the tragic legacies of racial preferences -- that the achievements of black people in the professional world will always be suspect, and not just to blacks who benefit from such preferences. In the minds even of liberals, blacks will always be thought of as "affirmative action hires" no matter how bright or qualified they are.

It may be difficult for well-intentioned white liberals to understand the personal insecurity that affirmative action causes, and as a white person, I can only take someone like Thomas at his word when he writes about the shame he feels because of racial preferences. But as a gay man, I can certainly empathize, as I imagine I would feel exactly the same way if sexual orientation became a "plus factor" in a law school or employment application process. Factoring in a person's immutable traits demeans them and robs them of their individuality.

Whether or not Thomas is qualified to be a Supreme Court justice, who are affirmative action advocates to smear him as an affirmative action hire? (Can you imagine a left-wing magazine like The American Prospect saying that about a liberal black judge? It would never happen.) But if they honestly believe Thomas is one, then they only have themselves to blame for a rotten system that privileges some people over others because of skin pigmentation.

From the day his Supreme Court nomination was announced by President George H.W. Bush, Thomas' critics have personally and viciously attacked him as if he were an abstraction -- representing everything they hate about minorities (whether women, gays or blacks) who do not subscribe to their liberal nostrums -- and, in so doing, have sucked him of his humanity as an individual. If liberals want to live up to their self-purported principles of equality and free inquiry, they would do well to stop treating Clarence Thomas as the scapegoat for their political agendas and start treating him like a man.

Rod Dreher on Clarence Thomas's book

2007-10-14T11:31:00.000-07:00

Rod Dreher has a glowing review of Clarence Thomas's autobiography in the Dallas Morning News today. The review begins like this:

Clarence Thomas' story is the real American Dream; Every father should read this book to his son

09:07 AM CDT on Sunday, October 14, 2007

If Clarence Thomas were a liberal, he'd be widely regarded as an American hero.

The Supreme Court associate justice's new memoir, My Grandfather's Son , is mostly a story about fatherhood and the making of his character. It's a tale so profoundly moving, and so profoundly true to this nation's ideals, that every American father ought to read the first two chapters – and then read them aloud to his children. Here is an inheritance of wisdom, a pearl of great price passed from a semi-literate peasant through his grandson, who lifted himself with it out of the direst poverty and became one of the world's most powerful men.

News Items

2007-10-13T17:10:00.000-07:00

Justice Clarence Thomas's autobiography is now at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. A well-deserved honor.

Hugh Hewitt has a review of Justice Thomas's book. It includes this assessment:

Ask serious readers and writers who care about the issue of race in America since emancipation, and most will agree that certain books have to be read: Richard Wright's Native Son, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird among them.

Justice Thomas's memoir is now on that list.

And Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk -- a rare example of a fair-minded liberal -- has these remarks on the Anita Hill controversy when judged in light of Clinton's actions:

I came of age during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. As a feminist freshman at Yale, I scrutinized the photos depicting Anita Hill's sad and fatalistic resolve, and pondered how an accusation of sexual harassment could be "a high-tech lynching for uppity black folks," as Mr. Thomas called it.

Like many others I thought the main issue was whether or not you believed her story.
* * *

Comparing some liberals' harsh judgment of Justice Thomas with this light judgment of Mr. Clinton tells a story of cultural inconsistency. But liberals will surely say that the disparity is perfectly consistent: Justice Thomas subordinated a woman against her will, while Mr. Clinton merely engaged in sexual conduct with willing women.

So let's recall precisely what was alleged against each, bearing in mind that both denied most allegations. Justice Thomas was accused of repeatedly asking his employee on dates, which she declined, commenting on her attractiveness, and discussing sex in her presence. Mr. Clinton was accused of having state troopers escort Paula Jones, an employee of the state of which he was governor, to a hotel room where he touched her without consent and exposed his genitals. He also admitted to having sexual contact with a young intern working in his White House.

If the metric we are using is the abuse of power by male bosses against female employees, how is it that Justice Thomas has fared so badly while Mr. Clinton seems to have fared relatively well since he left office? According to that metric, is attempting to date and talking about sex to a fellow Yale-educated employee worse than touching, propositioning and exposing oneself to a nonconsenting, low-level state employee? As for the affair in the White House with Monica Lewinsky, the relationship may have been consensual. But one would expect that those subscribing to the prevailing workplace sexual-harassment orthodoxy would be troubled by the power disparity between the leader of the free world and an unpaid 22-year-old intern.

The point is that for too long we have allowed that dubious early 1990s judgment of Justice Thomas to remain a dominant feature of the discourse about him. Sure, he was confirmed, and President Clinton was impeached. In reality, partisan politics was likely more determinative than substantive views about sex and power.

Even today, it is extremely common to hear liberals talk about Justice Thomas as a sexual harasser who should not have been confirmed, and about President Clinton as a victim of our country's fanatical sexual morality.

One need not be soft on sexual harassment to realize, after 16 years, that our country put Clarence Thomas through hell on the basis of accusations that don't approach the sexual allegations that we have rightly allowed to recede into the background of Bill Clinton's distinguished career. The high-tech lynching didn't keep Justice Thomas off the Court, but it did plenty of damage that, on closer scrutiny today, doesn't look fair by our own standards.

Women Who Testified Against Anita Hill

2007-10-12T09:15:00.000-07:00

Most of the women who testified against Anita Hill could have been foreclosed from testifying at all, if Democrat Howard Metzenbaum had had his way. As you can see on page 582 of this file, Metzenbaum made a motion to prevent them from testifying:

But I wonder whether, in view of the fact that it is now 11:30 at night, and the next nine witnesses, of those nine I think seven of them are employed by the Administration either at the EEOC or at the Labor Department or the Department of Education, and two of them, one is a former secretary to Senatory Danforth and one is a former chief of staff to Clarence Thomas -- I wonder, Mr. Chairman, if we couldn't stipulate that all of that testimony will be very supportive of Clarence Thomas? I don't think there is any argument about that. I don't know why there is any reason to have to hear it . . . We know what the testimony will be.

Helgi Walker on Justice Thomas

2007-10-12T06:47:00.000-07:00

Thanks again to Howard Bashman, here's the article Why Are the Media So Angry at Justice Thomas, by Helgi Walker, one of his former clerks. It begins:

MEDIA REACTION to the release last week of "My Grandfather's Son" by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been noteworthy in two respects: First, while the general coverage across the country had been even-handed and fair, some journalists feel compelled to express their views of the book and the justice in terms that are so negative and personalized that they seem to belie a deep anger toward the man and what he stands for; second, others in the press are being chastised by their peers for not being critical enough of the book. The irony is that the man who some regrettably still feel the need to tear down 16 years after his confirmation is among the staunchest defenders on the Supreme Court of a fulsome understanding of the First Amendment - thus protecting their right to voice their opinions, however mean-spirited.

Time Magazine Interview

2007-10-12T06:45:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Howard Bashman, here's a Time Magazine interview with Justice Thomas.

On a rainy October afternoon, Justice Clarence Thomas is seated in temporary chambers at the Supreme Court. The office he has occupied for most of the past 16 years is being remodeled as part of a larger renovation of the Supreme Court building. Thomas' relationships on the court are also being reworked. For one thing, the case conferences presided over by the new Chief Justice are more elaborate than they used to be. Former Chief Justice William Rehnquist was more of a "keep-the-trains-running-on-time kind of guy," says Thomas. And the more extensive back-and-forths under John Roberts have been extremely civil, despite the perception on the outside that the court--mimicking the political climate elsewhere in the capital--is nastily divided at the moment. "This place is so different from what is beyond these walls," he says. "You disagree with someone here, and it is 'I respectfully disagree.' People have different approaches to the Constitution and statutory construction, and there are different conclusions. That is why you say, 'I respectfully dissent.'"

In fact, the growing respect the Justices have for one another has led to more contact among them under Roberts, not less. "This is a place where rather than hurling aspersions, people will actually sit at lunch and chat and laugh," Thomas says. "When we have formal meetings on the bench or at conference, we have lunch. When I first got here, it was two, three people, a maximum of four. Now--today, for example--it was the entire court, all nine. It is an interesting experience."
Thomas, who has just published his memoir, My Grandfather's Son, argues that the number of 5-to-4 decisions under Roberts does not reflect personal conflict so much as disagreements over principles. "Some cases are harder than others, and some stress you out more as you are working through them, but no, I don't see that as particularly saying the members of the court don't get along. They simply don't agree."

The atmosphere of politeness , says Thomas, comes from a basic respect for the institution. "People know they are working on something bigger than all of us, something that is going to be here when we are gone," he says. "So you don't get these kinds of personal reactions where people are saying they are upset, emotionally hurt about this or that. They might be exasperated. We are human beings. But in the end we realize this is not about us."

Thomas says there is no vote-trading among the Justices and he has never been pressured by Rehnquist or Roberts to change his opinion in order to create the image of a more unified court. He says there are attempts at persuasion in conference and when opinions circulate internally before being issued; they arrive as comments on the draft opinions of others. "There is very little face-to-face or buttonholing in the hallway," he says. "It is done by letter. So it will be 'Dear Clarence, I don't agree with this point or that point.'" Justice Byron White never failed to sign off with "Cheers, Byron," according to Thomas.

The job has deepened his humility, says Thomas. "If there is any lesson I've learned since I have been here, it is that this job is easy for people who don't do it, have no authority to do it or have their minds made up on a particular side of an issue. For the rest of us, who have to start at square one and decide cases, it is a hard job, and it is a humbling job. So I will not criticize other people who have had to decide cases in their time. And I reflect back on what Justice Thurgood Marshall said to me: 'I had to do in my time what I had to do, and you have to do in your time what you have to do.'"

Women Who Testified Against Anita Hill, Part X

2007-10-12T06:29:00.000-07:00

Here's another of the women who testified against Anita Hill:

[Statement of Ms. Fitch, former Special Assistant and Historian, EEOC]

MS. FITCH: Mr. Chairman, Senator Thurmond, members of the committee:

My name is Dr. Nancy Elizabeth Fitch. I have a BA in English literature and political science from Oakland University, which was part of Michigan State University at the time--

SENATOR THURMOND: Would you please call the microphone closer to you, so that the people in the back can hear you.

MS. FITCH: --and a masters and Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I have taught at Sangamon State University in Illinois, was a social science research analyst for the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress, been a special assistant and historian to the then Chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Clarence Thomas, an assistant professor of history at Lynchburg College in Virginia, and presently assistant professor of Africa-American Studies at Temple University, in Philadelphia.

From 1982 to 1989, I worked as a special assistant historian to then Chairman Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. I worked for and with him seven years and have known him for nine. I researched the history of African-Americans, people of color and women an their relationship to issues, including employment, education and training. These were used for background on speeches, special emphasis programming at the Commission and for policy position papers.

I reported only to Judge Thomas, and my responsibilities also included outreach efforts to local colleges and universities and to the D.C. public schools. Judge THomas was interested in his staff and himself being mentors and role models, especially, but not only to young people of color.

In these nine years, I have known Clarence Thomas to be a person of great integrity, morally upstanding, professional, a decent person, an exemplary boss. Those years spent in his employ as a Schedule C employee, a political appointee, were the most rewarding of my work life to that tim. My returning to higher education I attribute to his persuading me to return to what I loved, not continuing as a bureaucrat, but returning to teaching.

I would like to say Judge Thomas, besides being a person of great moral character, I found to be a most intelligent man. Senator Biden was correct yesterday, when he indicated that the Republican side of the panel might have overlooked its easiest defense, that of dealing with the judge's intelligence.

If these allegations, which I believe to be completely unfounded and vigorously believe unfounded, were true, we would be dealing not only with venality, but with abject stupidity with a person shooting himself in the foot, having given someone else the gun to use at any time.

There is no way Clarence Thomas--CT--would callously venally hurt someone. A smart man,, concerned about making a contribution to this country as a public official, recognizing the gravity and weightiness of his responsibilities and public trust, a role model and mentor who would, by his life and work, show the possibilities in America for all citizens given opportunity, well, would a person such as this, Judge Clarence Thomas would never ever make a parallel career in harassment, ask that it not be revealed and expect to have and keep his real career. And I know he did no such thing.

He is a dignified, reserve, deliberative, conscientious man of great conscience, and I am proud to be at his defense.

As I told the FBI agent who interviewed me on Tuesday, October 1st, I trust Judge Thomas completely, he has all of my support and caring earned by nine years of the most positive and affirmative interacting, not only with me, but with other staff and former staff, men and women, and I know he will get back his good name.

Thank you.

Justice Clarence Thomas Interview with Mark Levin

2007-10-11T12:22:00.000-07:00

On his radio show, Mark Levin interviewed Justice Clarence Thomas on October 10, 2007. The one-hour interview is available via four sound files here.

Women Who Testified Against Anita Hill, Part IX

2007-10-11T06:24:00.001-07:00

Here is the testimony of J.C. Alvarez. Her testimony is especially powerful. Notice that it is interrupted in the middle by several minutes of squabbling because Senate Democrats didn't want to let her finish (this shows that they weren't interested in hearing from women; just from Anita Hill and anything that would derail Thomas's nomination).

Sunday, October 13, 1991 Evening Session

[Statement of Ms. Alvarez]

MS. ALVAREZ: My name is J. C. Alvarez. I am a businesswoman from Chicago. I am a single mom, raising a 15-year-old son, running a business. In many ways, I am just a John Q. Public from Middle America, not unlike a lot of the people watching out there and not unlike a lot of your constituents.

But the political world is not a world that I am unfamiliar with. I spent nine years in Washington, D.C. A year with Senator Danforth, two years with the Secretary of Education, a short stint at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and four years as Special Assistant to Clarence Thomas at the EEOC.

Because of this past political experience, I was just before this Committee a couple of weeks ago speaking in support of Clarence Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court. I was then and I still am in favor of Clarence Thomas being on the Supreme Court.

When I was asked to testify the last time, I flew to Washington, D. C., very proud and happy to be part of the process of nominating a Supreme Court Justice. When I was sitting here before you last time, I remember why I had liked working in Washington, D.C., so much--the intellectual part of it, the high quality of the debate. Although I have to admit when I had to listen to some of your questioning and postulating and politicking, I remembered why I had left. And I thought at that point that certainly I had seen it all.

After the hearings, I flew back to Chicago, back to being John Q. Public, having a life very far removed from this political world, and it would have been easy to stay away from politics in Washington, D.C. Like most of your constituents out there, I have more than my share of day-to-day challenges that have nothing to do with Washington, D.C., and politics. As I said before, I am a single mom, raising a teenager in today's society, running a business, making ends meet--you know, soccer games, homework, doing laundry, paying bills, that is my day-to-day reality.

Since I left Washington, D.C., I vote once every four years for President and more frequently for other State and local officials. And I could have remained outside of the political world for a long, long time and not missed it. I don't need this. I needed to come here like I needed a hole in the head. It cost me almost $900 just for the plane ticket to come here, and then there is the hotel and other expenses. And I can assure you that especially in these recessionary times I have got lots of other uses for that money.

So, why did I come? Why didn't I just stay uninvolved and apolitical? Because, Senators, like most real Americans who witness a crime being committed, who witness an injustice being done, I could not look the other way and pretend that I did not see it. I had to get involved.

In my real life, I have walked down the street and seen a man beating up a woman and I have stepped in and tried to stop it. I have walked through a park and seen a group of teenage hoodlums taunting an old drunk man and I have jumped in the middle of it. I don't consider myself a hero. No, I am just a real American from Middle America who will not stand by and watch a crime being committed and walk away. To do so would be the beginning of the deterioration of society and of this great country.

No, Senators, I cannot stand by and watch a group of thugs beat up and rob a man of his money any more than I could have stayed in Chicago and stood by and watched you beat up an innocent man and rob him blind. Not of his money. That would have been too easy. You could pay that back. No, you have robbed a man of his name, his character and his reputation.

And what is amazing to me is that you didn't do it in a dark alley and you didn't do it in the dark of night. You did it in broad daylight, in front of all America, on television, for the whole world to see. Yes, Senators, I am witnessing a crime in progress and I cannot just look the other way. Because I am John Q. Public and I am getting involved.

I know Clarence Thomas and I know Anita Hill. I was there from the first few weeks of Clarence coming to the Commission. I had the office next to Anita's. We all worked together in setting and executing the goals and the direction that the Chairman had for the EEOC. I remember Chris Roggerson, Carlton Stewart, Nancy Fitch, Barbara Parris, Phyllis Berry, Bill Ng, Allyson Duncan, Diane Holt--each of us with our own area of expertise and responsibility, but together all of us a part of Clarence Thomas's hand-picked staff.

I don't know how else to say it, but I have to tell you that it just blew my mind to see Anita Hill testifying on Friday. Honest to goodness, it was like schizophrenia. That was not the Anita Hill that I knew and worked with at EEOC. On Friday, she played the role of a meek, innocent, shy Baptist girl from the South who was a victim of this big, bad man.

I don't know who she was trying to kid. Because the Anita Hill that I knew and worked with was nothing like that. She was a very hard, tough woman. She was opinionated. She was arrogant. She was a relentless debater. And she was the kind of woman who always made you feel like she was not going to be messed with, like she was not going to take anything from anyone.

She was aloof. She always acted as if she was a little bit superior to everyone, a little "holier than thou." I can recall at the time that she had a view of herself and her abilities that did not seem to be based in reality. For example, it was sort of common knowledge around the office that she thought she should have been Clarence's chief legal advisor and that she should have received better assignments.

And I distinctly remember when I would hear about her feeling that way or when I would see her pout in office meetings about assignments that she had gotten, I used to think to myself, "Come on, Anita, let's come down to earth and live in reality." She had only been out of law school a couple of years and her experience and her ability couldn't begin to compare with some of the others on the staff.

But I also have to say that I was not totally surprised at her wanting these assignments because she definitely came across as someone who was ambitious and watched out for her own advancement. She wasn't really a team player, but more someone who looked out for herself first. You could see the same thing in her relationships with others at the office.

SENATOR KENNEDY: [Presiding.] Excuse me. Ms. Alvarez, we had the five minutes, you know, for the other panel. But we have very extensive questionings. I don't want to cut you off when you have been waiting a long time.

MS. ALVAREZ: Well, Senator, if you would just give me a few more minutes.

SENATOR THURMOND: Mr. Chairman, I would like to make a statement. The other panel has been on all day long. This is a panel in reverse now. And the only limitation was the nine, number nine, for one hour, and that is the last panel to come on.

I object to cutting these people off. They are entitled to speak.

SENATOR LEAHY: Mr. Chairman, we made an agreement just about 10 minutes ago and it is already being broken. Let's stick to the agreement.

SENATOR THURMOND: There is no agreement on this panel at all. It was the last panel of nine people that we agreed to take one hour on and no more. This panel is answering the first panel that has been on here for hours and hours, and they are entitled to speak, and we are going to contend for it.

SENATOR KENNEDY: Well, I think the record will show that there were as many questions focused on the other panel from that side as it was from this side. I distinctly heard the Chairman say that they were going to be five minutes and then it is unlimited.

SENATOR THURMOND: Well, he suggested five minutes.

SENATOR KENNEDY: All right. Let's make it seven.

SENATOR THURMOND: No, we don't want to limit them.

SENATOR KENNEDY: Let's make it seven.

SENATOR THURMOND: You didn't limit this morning. You didn't limit all day long. They were in your favor. Here are some in our favor. They are entitled to speak.

SENATOR HATCH: And they read their full statements, the last panel.

SENATOR KENNEDY: I will ask the clerk to read back what Chairman Biden said about this panel.

SENATOR THURMOND: Well, send it to Chairman Biden.

SENATOR KENNEDY: I will ask the clerk to read back what was agreed to.

SENATOR THURMOND: No agreement.

SENATOR LEAHY: It was agreed to.

SENATOR THURMOND: He just said he suggested five minutes.

SENATOR SIMPSON: Mr. Chairman? Mr. Chairman?

SENATOR KENNEDY: Go ahead, Ms. Alvarez. Continue.

SENATOR SIMPSON: Mr. Chairman, if I--

SENATOR KENNEDY: Ms. Alvarez is going to continue.

SENATOR SIMPSON: Mr. Chairman, if I could, I think we all concurred on the one panel with three minutes and that is separate and apart from this.

SENATOR THURMOND: The last panel.

SENATOR SIMPSON: And this is the regular panel and the regular time that we did this morning with the other group. And we just ask for the same courtesies here.

SENATOR KENNEDY: That is exactly, the Senator has stated. Whatever time was given to the earlier panel ought to be given to this panel.

I am glad the Chair is back.

[Laughter.]

SENATOR KENNEDY: Good to see you, Joe.

SENATOR BIDEN: [Presiding.] Please go on.

MS. ALVAREZ: If I could finish.

SENATOR BIDEN: I am not sure I know--I know I don't know, and I don't want it repeated. Did you all settle it? Are we all square?

MS. ALVAREZ: It is settled. I am going to finish.

SENATOR BIDEN: There is no limit on this panel. What is the motion?

SENATOR THURMOND: There is no motion at all. Just let them speak till they get through.

SENATOR BIDEN: Speak.

MS. ALVAREZ: Please. I made an awful lot of effort to come here. I would like to just finish saying what I have to say.

SENATOR BIDEN: Yes. You go right ahead.

MS. ALVAREZ: You could see that Anita Hill was not a real team player, but more someone who looked out for herself. You could see this even in her relationships with others at the office. She mostly kept to herself, although she would occasionally participate in some of the girl-talk among the women at the office, and I have to add that I don't recall her being particularly shy or innocent about that either.

You see, Senators, that was the Anita Hill that we all knew and we worked with. And that is why hearing her on Friday was so shocking. No, not shocking. It was so sickening. Trust me, the Anita Hill I knew and worked with was a totally different personality from the Anita Hill I heard on Friday. The Anita Hill I knew before was nobody's victim.

The Clarence Thomas I knew and worked with was also not who Anita Hill alleges. Everyone who knows Clarence, knows that he is a very proud and dignified man. With his immediate staff, he was very warm and friendly, sort of like a friend or a father. You could talk with him about your problems, go to him for advice, but, like a father, he commanded and he demanded respect. He demanded professionalism and performance, and he was very strict about that.

Because we were friends outside of the office or perhaps in private, I might have called him Clarence, but in the office he was Mr. Chairman. You didn't joke around with him, you didn't lose your respect for him, you didn't become too familiar with him, because he would definitely let you know that you had crossed the line.

Clarence was meticulous about being sure that he retained a very serious and professional atmosphere within his office, without the slightest hint of impropriety, and everyone knew it.

We weren't a coffee-klatching group. We didn't have office parties or Christmas parties, because Clarence didn't think it was appropriate for us to give others the impression that we were not serious or professional or perhaps working as hard as everyone else. He wanted to maintain a dignity about his office and his every behavior and action confirmed that.

As his professional colleague, I traveled with him, had lunch and dinner with him, worked with him, one-on-one and with others. Never did he ever lose his respect for me, and never did we ever have a discussion of the type that Ms. Hill alleges. Never was he the slightest bit improper in his behavior with me. In every situation I have shared with Clarence Thomas, he has been the ultimate professional and he has required it of those around him, in particular, his personal staff.

From the moment they surfaced, I thought long and hard about these allegations. You see, I, too, have experienced sexual harassment in the past. I have been physically accosted by a man in an elevator who I rebuffed. I was trapped in a xerox room by a man who I refused to date. Obviously, it is an issue I have experienced, I understand, and I take very seriously.

But having lived through it myself, I find Anita Hill's behavior inconsistent with these charges. I can assure you that when I come into town, the last thing I want to do is call either of these two men up and say hello or see if they want to get together.

To be honest with you, I can hardly remember their names, but I can assure you that I would never try and even maintain a cordial relationship with either one of them. Women who have really been harassed would agree, if he allegations were true, you put as much distance as you can between yourself and that other person.

What's more, you don't follow them to the next job--especially, if you are a black female, Yale law school graduate. Let's face it, out in the corporate sector, companies are fighting for women with those kinds of credentials. Her behavior just isn't consistent with the behavior of a woman who has been harassed, and it just doesn't make sense.

Senators, I don't know what else to say to have you understand the crime that has been committed here. It has to make all of us suspicious of her motives, when someone of her legal background comes in here at the 11th hour, after 10 years, and having had four other opportunities through congressional hearings to oppose this man, and alleges such preposterous things.

I have been contacted by I think every reporter in the country, looking for dirt. And when I present the facts as I experienced them, it is interesting, they don't print it. It's just not as juicy as her amazing allegations.

What is this country coming to, when an innocent man can be ambushed like this, jumped by a gang whose ring leader is one of his own proteges, Anita Hill? Like Julius Caesar, he must want to turn to her and say, "Et tu, Brutus? You too, Anita?"

As a mother with a child, I can only begin to imagine how Clarence must feel, being betrayed by one of his own. Nothing would hurt me more. And I guess he described it best in his opening statement on Friday. His words and his emotions are still ringing in all of our ears and all of our hearts.

I have done the best I could, Senators, to be honest in my statement to you. I have presented the situation as it was then, as I lived it, side by side, with Clarence and with Anita.

You know, I talked with my mom before I came here, and she reminded me that I was always raised to stand up for what I believed. I have seen an innocent man being mugged in broad daylight, and I have not looked the other way. This John Q. Public came here and got involved.

Justice Clarence Thomas on C-Span

2007-10-10T13:44:00.000-07:00

Justice Clarence Thomas was interviewed by Brian Lamb on C-Span's Q&A earlier this week. The video and transcript are now available here. It's a very long interview and worth watching. Here are some interesting moments from the transcript:

* * *

LAMB: When the "60 Minutes" program came up, it said, "the justice nobody knows." That was the headline on it.

And I went back and checked our records, and [C-Span has] had you on, since you have been a justice, about 100 times.

THOMAS: That's right.

LAMB: There's only one other justice that appeared more, and that's Justice Breyer.

But I just wondered. "The justice nobody knows." How many of these justices here do we know?

THOMAS: Well, Brian, you hit the point. You - now you have - C-SPAN has been wonderful, by the way.

Do you remember after Bush v. Gore, that you had me on the day after Bush v. Gore was decided?

LAMB: With the kids.

THOMAS: With the kids. You've had me in your program to go to a local school as one of your leadership programs. You have had crews follow me all over the country.

But even during that time, what was the general media saying? That I was hunkered down and hiding out, I was angry. And then you go back and take a look at all your tape, and you see if you see any indication that I was either hunkered down or angry at anybody.

And so, that story persisted, despite the fact that I was constantly on C-SPAN.

* * *

LAMB: How much do you read the newspapers?

THOMAS: Oh, I don't. I don't. I don't think it's a good use of my time.

* * *

LAMB: Some of the toughest criticism I've seen since this book came out is Eugene Robinson.

THOMAS: Who's that?

LAMB: He is an African-American columnist for the "Washington Post."

THOMAS: Oh, I couldn't care less.

LAMB: Well, let me tell you what he said. I mean, and I just wonder if this …

THOMAS: Do you know who this is?

LAMB: Yes.

THOMAS: Well, I don't.

LAMB: I've interviewed him. And you have no idea.

THOMAS: I have no idea.

LAMB: He says, "I believe in" - I mean, this is how tough it has been this week. If you haven't read this, this will be new to you.

"I believe in affirmative action. But I have to acknowledge, there are arguments against it. One of the more cogent is the presence of Justice Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court."

THOMAS: I really don't - that's useless to me. Why is that important?

LAMB: I don't know. But, I mean, people read his column.

THOMAS: I mean, you can find - but you could go and find somebody at a local tavern who has had too much to drink saying that.

That's useless. That's supposed to be insulting and cute.

When you get to the point of ridicule and making little sort of low-brow comments like that, then you've run out of real arguments.

* * *

Thomas and Oral Argument

2007-10-10T09:49:00.000-07:00

Here's Jan Crawford Greenburg's interview with Justice Clarence Thomas on why he doesn't speak up often at oral argument:

THOMAS: I think when people are invited in to make their case, we should listen. It's not a debate society. This is not a seminar.

And when I first came on the Court, there were far fewer questions, and there were so many more opportunities to have a conversation with a lawyer, not the sort of family feud type environment that we have now.

I think that that's not as productive as actually having a conversation, and I do think it's important that we listen to people. You know, I think it's wonderful, what a great country. You can have a case, you can come all the way to the Supreme Court, and you can say your piece.

There are times I've gone across the country, and I'll meet a small town lawyer who says, "You know, I was up at your Court and they never let me say what I wanted to say."

That isn't what I want to hear. I prefer to hear, "I made it all the way to Court and I got to tell you what I really thought."

Now, it may not change my mind, it may not change my colleagues' minds, but you have the satisfaction of having come and said your piece, and I think we should listen.

(Is that why you generally save your questions, when you ask them, until the end?)

THOMAS: Well, usually, there's such a seamless series of questions that you can't get in unless you elbow your way in, and I don't think that's necessary. I don't think we need all those questions, and I think it's unseemly to have to elbow my way in, interrupt counsel or interrupt my colleagues to get a question in.

There's more; check it out.

Henry Mark Holzer on Justice Thomas

2007-10-10T06:24:00.000-07:00

Henry Mark Holzer, author of The Supreme Court Opinions of Clarence Thomas, 1991–2006, has a lengthy article profiling Justice Thomas here. It's titled "His Grandfather's Miracle."

Women Who Testified Against Anita Hill, Part VIII

2007-10-10T06:14:00.000-07:00

Here's another of the many women who testified against Anita Hill:

[Statement of Ms. Newman, Director, OPM]

MS. NEWMAN: Constance Newman. I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you.

I am both saddened and optimistic as a result of these proceedings. I am saddened because of the way in which the raw nerves of America have been touched, the raw nerves of racism and sexism, leading to too much mistrust between too many of us. Many of these feelings are just below the surface of this great Nation, and we are all victims of it. We are all hurt in some way by the side of America that allows bigotry and unfairness to exist. We must come to terms with what is unfair in this basically fair Nation.

I am saddened for my friend, Judge Clarence Thomas, and his family. All who are in public life must sympathize with their plight.

I am saddened for Professor Anita Hill. Her life will never be the same. I don't know her, but I must believe that she must be a talented and conscientious woman, or she would not have completed the tough educational requirements of Yale Law School or be a tenured professor at a major law school. She must be a concerned black woman, or she would not have chosen to work in civil rights.

What was her motivation? Frankly, I do not know. I do not even want to try to speculate.

The waters are muddy around sexual harassment now, but I am optimistic. I am optimistic because I believe that as a result of these proceedings, you will know what I know about Judge Thomas. He is competent, he has integrity, he has "true grit," and I do believe that these proceedings will make him even stronger and even more sensitive.

I have known him for 10 years. That does not mean that we have not disagreed. We have. We have argued. Through the years he has changed his mind some; I have changed mine a little. But I have not changed my view about the basic decency and integrity of this man. I know him and have worked with him. I have worked in the halls of EEOC. Not once did I hear a hint of improper conduct. I would have heard. I heard of disagreements, but not improper conduct.

More Thomas Sowell on Clarence Thomas

2007-10-09T21:22:00.000-07:00

Here's another article by Thomas Sowell. Here, he examines the unreliable story peddled by Anita Hill.

There were ways in which different versions of events by Hill and Thomas were quite capable of being checked -- but were not checked.

That failure to check the facts was very strange in a situation where so much depended on the credibility of the two people. Here are the two versions.

According to Clarence Thomas, he hired Anita Hill at the urging of a friend because an official of the law firm at which she worked had advised her to leave.

According to Ms. Hill -- both then and now -- she was not "asked to leave" the law firm but was "in good standing" at the time.

This too was not just a question of "he said" and "she said." An affidavit sworn by a former partner in that law firm supported Clarence Thomas' version. That was ignored by most of the media.

Since the Senate has the power of subpoena, it was suggested that they issue a subpoena to get the law firm's records, since that could provide a clue as to the credibility of the two people.

Senators opposed to the nomination of Judge Thomas voted down that request for the issuance of a subpoena.

* * *

In another instance, there was already hard evidence but it too was ignored. Clarence Thomas said that Anita Hill had initiated a number of phone calls to him, over the years, after she had left the agency where they both worked. She said otherwise. But a phone log from the agency showed that he was right.

The really fatal fact about Anita Hill's accusations was that they were first made to the Senate Judiciary Committee in confidence, and she asked that her name not be mentioned when the accusations were presented to Judge Thomas by those trying to pressure him to withdraw his nomination to the Supreme Court.

Think about it: The accusations referred to things that were supposed to have happened when only two people were present.

If the accusations were true, Clarence Thomas would automatically know who originated them. Anita Hill's request for anonymity made sense only if the charges were false.

Good point.

Clarence Thomas Has a Right to Be Angry

2007-10-09T14:03:00.001-07:00

That's the title of a CNN column by Ruben Navarrette, Jr. Check it out.

Greenburg v. Lithwick

2007-10-09T08:57:00.001-07:00

On Bloggingheads.tv, Supreme Court star reporter Jan Crawford Greenburg and Dahlia Lithwick debate at length about Justice Clarence Thomas. Greenburg is a star Supreme Court reporter, while Lithwick is a lightweight partisan hack* whose smug demeanor and tone of voice grow quite tedious. Still, an interesting debate.

*See especially here, as well as here, here, here, here, and here.

Clarence Thomas Interview with Bill Bennett

2007-10-09T08:26:00.000-07:00

Justice Clarence Thomas was interviewed by Bill Bennett on his radio show. The interview is available here, although not for free.

UPDATE: The Claremont Institute has now posted the entire MP3 of the Bill Bennett radio interview, which includes a favorable plug for Claremont.

Thomas Sowell on Clarence Thomas

2007-10-09T06:53:00.000-07:00

Meet My Friend Clarence, by Thomas Sowell:

It would be hard to think of anyone whose portrayal in the media differs more radically from the reality than that of Justice Clarence Thomas. His recent appearances on 60 Minutes, the Rush Limbaugh program, and other media outlets provide the general public with their first in-depth look at the real Clarence Thomas.

* * *

In an era when so many people have neither the time nor the patience to examine arguments and evidence, critics have tried to dismiss Clarence Thomas as someone who “sold out” in order to advance himself.

In reality, he was in far worse financial condition than if he had taken the opposite positions on political issues.

As late as the time of his nomination to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas’s net worth — everything he had accumulated over a lifetime — was less than various civil-rights “leaders” make in one year.

Nobody sells out to the lowest bidder.

The other great myth about Justice Thomas is that he is a lonely and embittered man, withdrawn from the world, as a result of the brutal confirmation hearings he went through back in 1991.

Clarence Thomas was never a social butterfly. You didn’t see his name in the society pages or at media events, either before he got on the High Court or afterward.

In reality, Justice Thomas has been all over the place, giving talks, especially to young people, and inviting some of them to his offices at the Supreme Court.

Summers find him driving his own bus all around the country, mixing with people at truck stops, trailer parks, and mall parking lots. The fact that he is not out grandstanding for the media does not mean that he is hunkering down in his cellar.

Clarence Thomas’s sense of humor is terrific. Whenever I am on the phone with someone and laughing repeatedly, my wife usually asks me afterward, “Was that Clarence?” It usually is.
* * *

The Real Clarence Thomas

2007-10-09T06:51:00.000-07:00

The Real Clarence Thomas, by John Yoo:

Critics ignore the unique, powerful intellect that Justice Thomas brings to the court. He is the justice most committed to the principle that the Constitution today means what the Framers thought it meant.

At times, this can cause him to lean liberal. He agrees, for example, that the use of thermal imaging technology by police in the street to scan for marijuana in homes violates the Constitution's ban on unreasonable searches. He opposes the court's effort to place caps on punitive damages. He has voted to strike down literally thousands of harsher criminal sentences because they were based on facts found by judges rather than juries, as required by the Bill of Rights. He supports the right of anonymous political speech, and wants advertising and other commercial speech to receive the same rights as political speech.

So was it Justice Thomas's anger, or lack of intellect, that made him rule in favor of the rights of criminals, the press and the plaintiffs bar--one of the Democratic Party's largest financial supporters?

Women Who Testified Against Anita Hill, Part VII

2007-10-09T06:47:00.000-07:00

Here's another woman who testified against Anita Hill:

[Statement of Ms. A. Jenkins, former Secretary, EEOC]

MS. JENKINS: Chairman Biden, Senator Thurmond and other members of the committee, my name is Anna Jenkins, and I reside in Silver Spring, Maryland. I am a staff assistant in the Office of Policy Development at the White House. I was not asked by the White House to give a statement. I went to them and asked if it was okay for me to give a statement.

I have been a Federal employee since December 1965 and worked for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from May 1970 to September 1989, with intermittent details to the White House under the Carter and Reagan administrations.

I was employed as a secretary in the EEOC's Office of the Chairman in the Executive Secretariat as a staff specialist. During my tenure with the Office of the Chairman, I served under five chairpersons, William Brown, John Powell, Lowell Perry, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Clarence Thomas. In September 1989, I left the EEOC to join the Bush administration, Office of Policy Development.

When President Reagan appointed Clarence Thomas as Chairman of the EEOC, I was the only employee left in the Chairman's Office from the previous administration. Upon Judge Thomas' arrival at the agency, I worked directly for him as his secretary until his confidential assistant Diane Holt and legal assistant Anita Hill came on-board. He brought them from the Department of Education.

Prior to Anita Hill joining the staff, she appeared quite anxious to work for the EEOC. In fact, she called Judge Thomas several times to inquire about the status of her appointment.

I recall the first day Ms. Hill reported to work at EEOC. She was very pleased and excited about being able to select an office with a big picture window overlooking the Watergate Hotel and the Potomac River.

I had daily contact with Anita Hill and Judge Thomas. We shared a suite of offices consisting of a reception area, conference room, kitchen, and five offices. Judge Thomas' conduct around me, Anita Hill, and other staffers was always proper and professional. I have never witnessed Judge Thomas say anything or do anything that could be construed as sexual harassment. I never witnessed him making sexual advances toward any female, nor have I witnessed him engaging in sexually oriented conversations with women.

I have witnessed Judge Thomas and Anita Hill interact in the office. At no time did the relationship appear strained nor Anita appear uncomfortable with the relationship.

I understand that at Anita's press conference she denied knowing Phyliss Berry. I was confused by her denial, since Phyliss Berry often visited the office while Anita worked there. I have seen them exchange greetings.

In closing, I wish to emphasize that I have the highest regard and respect for Judge Thomas. In light of my experience with him and the way I have seen him conduct himself around other females, I find this harassment allegation unbelievable.

Justice Thomas on the First Amendment

2007-10-08T18:56:00.002-07:00

An online symposium of articles about Justice Thomas and the First Amendment. Several of these articles are by prominent scholars:

Foreword: Justice Thomas and the First Amendment, by Erwin Chemerinsky. Essays in this online symposium lead to stark view of Justice Clarence Thomas as the most radical member of the Supreme Court.

Justice Thomas: constitutional ‘stare indecisis.' by Thomas C. Goldstein. Recent First Amendment decisions are a window into Thomas’ view that constitutional-law precedent has no value.

Flexibility and the First Amendment, by Eric F. Citron. In his concurrences, Justice Thomas shows a controversial tendency to replace balancing tests with more hard-and-fast rules.

Justice Thomas and sexual expression, by Geoffrey Stone. Thomas accords government considerable deference when it regulates obscenity, restricts conduct; but applies rigorous scrutiny to content-based limits on non-obscene sexual expression.

Justice Thomas and the electronic media, by Mary-Rose Papandrea. Tracing Thomas' application of traditional First Amendment doctrine to all forms of communication.

Justice Thomas: leading the way to campaign-finance deregulation, by Richard L. Hasen. Thomas' clear, if radical, vision is proving influential, drawing other justices toward his view that government cannot limit money spent on election ads, other forms of political speech.

Morse v. Frederick: history, policy and temptation, by William D. Araiza. In student-speech and other cases, Justice Thomas' approach reflects discomfort with the balancing and line-drawing that marks much of the Court’s recent free-speech jurisprudence.

Justice Thomas: a lone caution over speech codes, by Robert M. O'Neil. Suspicion of official reasons offered to bar certain words from being uttered marks justice's jurisprudence.

Justice Thomas and prisoners’ freedom of expression, by David L. Hudson Jr. Reasoning in several opinions renders First Amendment essentially a nullity for inmates challenging restrictions on expression.

Noting the emperor has no clothes: establishment-clause jurisprudence of Justice Thomas, by John C. Eastman. Believing legal opinion on establishment clause in 'hopeless disarray,' Thomas challenges view that clause applies to states.

Justice Thomas and the burning cross, by Scott D. Gerber. Thomas' jurisprudence has changed to the point where racial significance of cross-burning dictates his constitutional analysis.

Justice Thomas on compelled speech, by Stephen Bates. In this area, the justice believes that the First Amendment should be construed broadly; he would strike down programs that the Court would uphold.

Justice Thomas and commercial speech, by Bruce E.H. Johnson. A jurist's long intellectual journey to a staunch defense of advertising as protected expression.

Justice Thomas, speaking (or not) about the First Amendment, by Alyssa Work. Preferring to write out his views, Thomas has let his voice be heard from the bench in only seven First Amendment cases out of 94 in which he has taken part.

Justice Thomas’ First Amendment record, by Ronald K.L. Collins and Alyssa Work. Lists, tables showing Justice Clarence Thomas's record on First Amendment cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Justice Clarence Thomas: oral arguments in First Amendment cases, compiled by Alyssa Work. Transcripts of remarks by Justice Clarence Thomas in oral arguments involving First Amendment cases.

Justice Thomas & the First Amendment: voting record, by Alyssa Work. Justice Clarence Thomas' voting record on selected topics: sexual expression, commercial speech, compelled speech and campaign speech.

Justice Thomas on the First Amendment in confirmation hearings, compiled by Alyssa Work. Questions, responses concerning First Amendment issues during Justice Thomas’ confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sept. 10 – 16, 1991.

Justice Thomas bibliography.
Bibliography for online symposium on the First Amendment jurisprudence of Justice Clarence Thomas.

Thomas on Precedent

2007-10-08T14:02:00.000-07:00

Jan Crawford Greenburg had seven hours of interviews with Justice Thomas, and not all of that got aired on ABC. So she's writing a series of blog posts that delve into the unaired portions of the interviews.

Yesterday, she had a post called Being a Justice. Worth checking out. And today, she has a post called "Thomas on Precedent. Here's an excerpt; read the whole thing:

Let’s start first with Scalia. I think we can all agree (as Harry Blackmun’s papers make clear) Thomas doesn’t “follow” anyone—as some of my colleagues in the press have been pointing out for years, Tony Mauro being among the first.

Thomas, to be sure, admires Scalia. In his book, Thomas says he told the Bush White House “Scalia,” when lawyers asked him, as a prospective nominee, the standard question: “Which Justice do you most admire?” (Sam Alito, when asked that question, said “Rehnquist.”) Thomas told me he’d been impressed by Scalia’s opinion in Morrison v. Olson, which the Court had decided when he at EEOC. It had divided the Court 7-1, and Scalia’s dissent is a classic exposition on separation of powers.

“In the Olson case, he had been the lone voice that the independent counsel law actually violated the whole notion of separation of powers, and it turns out now—when the interest changed—that people agree with him. But I just thought it was fascinating,” Thomas said. “He was not going along with something simply because, at that time, it was fairly popular. He was going back to that document, going back to the history and the tradition of that document, and then explaining it in a very rational and well-written way.”

But Thomas parts ways with Scalia on significant issues—especially, as most of you know, on the issue of stare decisis, which is Latin for “let the decision stand.” That principle maintains stability in the law and acts as a restraint on judges. All justices say they believe in stare decisis—and they testify to that effect in their confirmation hearings--but all of them also are willing to set it aside when they think the Court got it wrong in the past.

Thomas and Scalia, for example, have voted to overturn Roe v. Wade because they don’t think a right to an abortion is in the Constitution. This past term, they also would have overturned other decisions, including a recent one that had upheld the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law. But other conservatives—John Roberts and Sam Alito--instead took a more cautious approach and held the Court back.

Liberal justices walk away from the principle, too. In recent years they overturned cases, for example, that had allowed the death penalty for the mentally retarded and for juveniles. They also overturned a 1986 decision that allowed states to prosecute homosexuals for private, consensual sex. And they have indicated that some of the Court’s recent decisions will not have staying power—that they will overturn those cases the moment the Court’s membership changes.

But of all the justices, Thomas is the one most willing to rethink old cases. In Ken Foskett’s insightful book, Judging Thomas, Scalia said Thomas “doesn't believe in stare decisis, period. If a constitutional line of authority is wrong, he would say, ‘let’s get it right.’"

Thomas says Scalia’s claim is an overstatement. He suggests he sees real limits on the kind of cases he would seek to overturn--even if he believed they were wrongly decided under the Constitution.

But there’s no question, he says, he’s much more willing to go back to the precedent and reexamine it.

“When you get a case, you have the last decision in the line. That’s what’s on your desk,” Thomas says. “The last decision in the line is like a caboose on a train. Let’s go from the caboose all the way up to the engine, and see what really went on, and let’s think it all through.

“You might get up to the caboose and find out: Oh, there’s nobody in the engine,” Thomas continues. “You say, ‘There’s nobody driving the train. What happened? Where did we go wrong? Maybe we’re headed in the wrong direction. Let’s think it through.’”

That willingness to “think it through” separates Thomas from Scalia in a number of cases.

“Maybe you can’t change it, but at least let’s make it coherent as to what happened. You can accept the precedent, but you should at least try to see what went on,” he says. “You go back to the document. You go back to the language of the Constitution, to the history, to the tradition. You go through it all, and then you compare that with the precedent.”

C-Span on Justice Thomas's Book Party

2007-10-08T10:45:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, Armstrong Williams had a book party to celebrate the issuance of Justice Clarence Thomas's autobiography. Along with many VIPs, C-Span was there to film the event.

You see glimpses of Chief Justice John Roberts, Justices Scalia, Breyer, and Souter, and other influential people. Two things that I noticed: Thomas chatting cheerfully with Julian Bond of the NAACP, who is normally very unfriendly to conservatives. Then at about 17:00, the camera captures Bob Jones III, of Bob Jones University, shaking Thomas's hand. After exchanging pleasantries, Thomas says, "You know I had a difference of opinion with you guys during the early Reagan administration about [unintelligible]. So I don't want to surprise you with that. And it's just, it isn't a negative thing, but let me say hello to the Chief here." Thomas seemed quite eager to get out of the conversation.

UPDATE: David Lat live-blogged the event here.

Women Who Testified Against Anita Hill, Part VI

2007-10-08T07:28:00.000-07:00

Here's another one of the women who testified against Anita Hill:

[Statement of Ms. Altman, former employee, Department of Education]

MS. ALTMAN: My name is Nancy Altman. I consider myself a feminist. I am pro-choice. I care deeply about women's issues. In addition to working with Clarence Thomas at the Department of Education, I shared an office with him for two years in this building. Our desks were a few feet apart. Because we worked in such close quarters, I could hear virtually every conversation for two years that Clarence Thomas had. Not once in those two years did I ever hear Clarence Thomas make a sexist or offensive comment, not once.

I have myself been the victim of an improper, unwanted sexual advance by a supervisor. Gentlemen, when sexual harassment occurs, other women in the workplace know about it. The members of the committee seem to believe that when offensive behavior occurs in a private room, there can be no witnesses. This is wrong.

Sexual harassment occurs in an office in the middle of the workday. The victim is in a public place. The first person she sees immediately after the incident is usually the harasser's secretary. Co-workers, especially women, will notice an upset expression, a jittery manner, a teary or a distracted air, especially if the abusive behavior is occurring over and over and over again.

Further, the women I know who have been victimized always shared the experience with a female co-worker they could trust. They do this to validate their own experience, to obtain advice about options that they may pursue, to find out if others have been similarly abused, and to receive comfort. Friends outside the workplace make good comforters, but cannot meet the other needs.

It is not credible that Clarence Thomas could have engage in the kinds of behavior that Anita Hill alleges, without any of the women who he worked closest with--dozens of us, we could spend days having women come up, his secretaries, his chief of staff, his other assistants, his colleagues--without any of us having sensed, seen or heard something.

Chicago Tribune Article

2007-10-07T19:24:00.000-07:00

A good profile of Justice Thomas's birthplace: Justice moved through 2 worlds; Thomas' story starts in tiny Pinpoint, Ga.:

It is easy to miss the tiny community where Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas once lived. There is a sign at the turnoff noting that he was born here. But Pinpoint, on the outskirts of Savannah, has never been much more than a two-lane road lined with moss-covered oak trees and a handful of houses.

* * *

Many of the 200 or so people who live in Pinpoint are related to Thomas in some way, whether through blood or heritage. They are forever linked through their ancestors -- descendants of West African slaves who were brought to the Georgia, Florida and South Carolina coasts during the 1700s to work the rice fields.

"If you are a gentleman raised in Pinpoint, you are called a homeboy. Clarence Thomas is just another homeboy. You don't ever get the fanfare you would get in other places," said Bishop Thomas Sills, pastor of Sweet Field of Eden Baptist Church in Pinpoint, where Thomas' mother and sister are members.

Others, particularly young men, say they feel no bond with the powerful man in Washington who wears a black robe and makes critical decisions that affect their lives, whether they realize it or not.

"How can you have something in common with somebody you don't know?" said Mike Williams, a 25-year-old landscaper who grew up in Pinpoint.

When Thomas occasionally returns to Pinpoint, where his sister and her family still live, people cordially say hello and keep moving. When people gather on each other's front porches as they often do on hot afternoons, the discussion rarely, if ever, turns to Thomas or his court decisions.

Little sign of Thomas

John Taylor, 53, said people who live in Pinpoint, for the most part, have been unaffected by Thomas' celebrity. Thomas does sponsor a youth basketball team here. Other than the street sign, there is little else that indicates his roots are deeply implanted here.

"It's the same here as it has always been," said Taylor, who is unemployed and has lived in Pinpoint his entire life. "People must like him, though, because nobody has anything bad to say about him."

When Thomas was in Pinpoint recently filming a segment for CBS' "60 Minutes," Taylor said he happened upon him.

"I just said 'Hi' and he said 'Hello,'" Taylor said. "I didn't try to shake his hand or anything."

It is a contrast to the adoration he receives in the predominantly white Catholic community in Savannah, where Bishop Kevin Boland, who heads the Catholic Diocese of Savannah, credits the early exposure to Franciscan nuns and Catholic teachings with laying the foundation for Thomas' success.

"We are conscious of the fact that he went to Catholic grade school, Catholic high school and a Catholic college," said Boland, one of Thomas' former high school math teachers. "He has been before our eyes all the time, and in a sense we look at him as a product of Catholic education, which would be a foundation of all that followed."

In this neighborhood of mostly white Catholics who knew Thomas from his days at the now-closed St. John Vianney Minor Seminary, the high school where he once studied to become a priest, the Supreme Court justice is treated like a superstar.

Betty Purdy, the 82-year-old receptionist at the diocese office, gets excited when she speaks of Thomas, though she rarely came in contact with him when he was a student in St. John and she was a secretary.

When Thomas' brother died in 2000, Purdy went to the wake. When the justice returned to Savannah for a class reunion in 2004, Purdy was one of the first to greet him.

"We were in the lobby of a hotel for the reunion, and I walked up to him and gave him a hug," she said. "We didn't talk long because they were starting their reunion. They wanted to get together."

Thomas excelled in academics and athletics at St. John, where for a while he was the only black student. But issues of race always simmered under the surface and occasionally bubbled over the top.

Thomas wrote of once asking classmates to sign his yearbook, and one senior wrote, "Keep on trying, Clarence, one day you will be as good as us."

Despite his success, Thomas wrote, the hurt and insecurities he experienced growing up remain with him today. Revisiting Pinpoint, an isolated 25-acre peninsula about 10 miles southeast of Savannah, reminded him of that.

* * *

Clarence Thomas on C-Span

2007-10-07T11:57:00.000-07:00

Justice Clarence Thomas will be speaking about his new autobiography on C-Span tonight at 8 and 11 Eastern. This website will probably have the video and transcript up fairly soon thereafter.

Women Who Testified Against Anita Hill, Part V

2007-10-06T09:34:00.000-07:00

Here's another one of the women who testified against Anita Hill:

[Statement of Ms. Saxon, former Assistant, Congressional Relations, Office for Civil Rights, Department of Education]

MS. SAXON: I worked at the Department of Education in the Office for Civil Rights from September 1981 until September 1982. I was 24 years old at the time. I was the confidential assistant to Clarence Thomas. In that capacity, I handled congressional relations and public affairs. My office was just down the hall from Anita Hill's during her tenure at the Department of Education.

I never saw any harassment go on in the office. The office was run very professionally. Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill were always very cordial and friendly in their relations. There was never any evidence of any harassment towards any of the female employees. I dealt with Anita Hill on a daily basis in performing my duties. She was happy in her position and she liked working for Clarence Thomas.

Anita Hill never indicated to me that he was harassing her. Clarence Thomas generally left the door of his office open, so if he had any meeting with Hill or any other employees, they were in view. He operated with an open-door policy with every member of the staff, regardless of gender. I never saw him meet in private with a female employee, without someone else present. Unless it was a group meeting and there were many staffers present, the door would be open and his secretary would be right outside the door.

Anita Hill was the only special assistant who accompanied Clarence Thomas to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, upon his appointment in August of 1982. Anita told me that she was very excited about the opportunity to work for the Chairman of the EEOC. She related to me that she was pleased that Clarence was taking her with him.

I believe Anita Hill's statements that she felt pressures to accompany Clarence Thomas to EEOC, because of fears of losing her job, are simply untrue. I and the rest of the senior staff of the Office for Civil Rights found other positions within a few months. That is how the process of being a political appointee worked.

I was Clarence Thomas' confidential assistant for a year. My job required that I meet with him at least once a day. He never made an inappropriate advance, uttered an off-color remarks, or used coarse language in my presence. I was younger and more politically active than Anita Hill. I introduced him to my friends in Washington, the political community and very social settings. I was the first person to bring and introduce him to a luncheon with Thomas Sowell and others at the Capitol Hill Club. During this entire period, he never made any inappropriate actions toward me or any other female with whom I saw him.

I understand what women in this country go through in the area of sexual harassment. There is no place for sexual harassment in the workplace. I experienced perhaps a different kind of harassment, by being a victim of a violent crime. I know what it is to have one's face violated. I know what it feels like to feel helpless and humiliated.

Let me assure you in no uncertain terms that no harassment took place in the workplace at the Office for Civil Rights.

Mona Charen on Clarence Thomas

2007-10-05T13:51:00.002-07:00

Mona Charen has this article on Thomas's new book:

National Public Radio was one of the first out of the box greeting Clarence Thomas’s memoir, My Grandfather’s Son. Nina Totenberg acknowledged that it was, “in some ways a beautifully written book” but went on to declare it “a book of complete bitterness and rage.” The Washington Post’s front page announced that Thomas had “settled scores” in his “angry” book. And Washington Post columnist (as well as Charen pal) Ruth Marcus writes of Thomas’s “blast furnace” anger.

Imagine that. He hasn’t gotten over it. Totenberg, for those who may have forgotten, was the journalist who first reported that Anita Hill had made allegations against Thomas (though at the time, Hill had not agreed to go public). And she was a prominent Hill enthusiast during the contretemps.

Totenberg affects surprise that Thomas is angry? It would require a masochist not to be angry. Imagine that your spotless reputation had been thoroughly trashed before a worldwide audience. Imagine further that everything you had attempted to accomplish in your career was undermined in two weeks by ideological opponents ready to do anything to keep someone with your heterodox views down. It is my experience that people often become enraged when they read even small inaccuracies about themselves in the newspapers. Contemplate enduring a campaign of vilification. How many years is it supposed to take to get over something like that? Is Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky thing?

Behind the Caricature of Justice Thomas

2007-10-05T13:49:00.001-07:00

A column by Brian DeBose of the Washington Times:

We caught up with him at a soiree in honor of his new book "My Grandfather's Son."

* * *

And you can forget the idea that this man has no personality.

We found him to be quite funny and jovial, with a big hearty laugh that could be heard in a noisy 20' by 16' room filled with about 40 people. Most were the justice's friends, but he was open with everyone.

"I do this all the time," Mr. Thomas said. "All over the country, just not in a setting where I am promoting a book ... I just don't go around promoting myself."

* * *

Asked who he was trying to reach by telling his story, Mr. Thomas said: "If you have to pay a mortgage, worry about your bills, have children and have hope for the future, that's the audience: regular every-day people."

"And you are going to have struggles," he promised.

How do you stay positive, he asked. How do you put one foot in front of the other?

"See the people who are the critics? They have all the answers. But you don't and that's my point. And the reason you want to talk about these things is you want other people to see that it's hard, you struggle and people have real lives. Some days you're down, but you got to get up and go to work. The book is for those people, it's for you man. Stay strong, be positive and keep at it," Mr. Thomas said.

Those were his final words to me and his message he wants people to walk away with after reading his book.

Op-Ed on Clarence Thomas's Book

2007-10-05T13:47:00.001-07:00

Here's an op-ed from Alabama. While the author disagrees with Thomas on many issues, he comes to this conclusion:

Despite our radically different points of view, I think it's right to view Clarence Thomas as a role model. Why? Because we all aren't going to agree on every issue - not even when our common ancestry or experiences suggests that we might.

W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington didn't. Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. didn't.

Yet despite their differences, the black community reveres them all. We need to figure out a way to do the same for Thomas.

One day, some black child will see Thomas' lone black face among the nine Supreme Court justices, knowing nothing of his politics or filthy jokes. And that lone black face will give this child hope. Because Thomas could do it, the child will believe he can, too.

We can talk to the child about Thomas' politics later. But in that moment, the child will be better off to have seen Clarence Thomas standing among the nine in that long, black robe.

Mark Tushnet on Thomas (and This Site)

2007-10-05T06:49:00.000-07:00

Mark Tushnet is a prominent legal scholar at Harvard Law School (formerly at Georgetown), and very much a left-winger. Among other things, he notoriously once wrote that judges should adopt "an explicitly political approach to constitutional law” and make “a political judgment: which result is . . . likely to advance the cause of socialism?” Mark Tushnet, The Dilemmas of Liberal Constitutionalism, 42 Ohio State Law Journal 411, 424 (1981).

Nor is Mark Tushnet a man who is predisposed to favor Clarence Thomas, in particular. In his 2005 book A Court Divided, Tushnet recounts one of his earlier essays about Thomas:

After presenting what I still think was a relatively sympathetic account of what I thought had happened between Thomas and Anita Hill, I concluded that he had almost certainly lied in denying that anything at all had happened. Under normal circumstances, the discovery that a Supreme Court justice had lied about something important in the course of his nomination hearings would lead to an impeachment, but because that outcome was politically impossible, I wrote that legal scholars and ordinary citizens ought to take the position that Supreme Court decisions rendered by five to four majorities when Thomas was in the majority should not be regarded as law at all.

Tushnet then clarifies that he wasn't "entirely serious" about that proposal, but it still marks him as perhaps the most vigorous academic opponent of Thomas as of the mid-1990s.

But lo and behold, Tushnet changed his mind since the mid-1990s. His 2005 book A Court Divided goes on to present a much different view of Thomas. On page 72, he says this:

What [Thomas] has done on the Court is certainly more interesting and distinctive than what Scalia has done and, I think, has a greater chance of making an enduring contribution to constitutional law. Basically, anyone whom Ronald Reagan selected for the Supreme Court who had strong ties to the Federalist Society would have done just about what Scalia did. . . .

Thomas is different. There was no close competition for the seat he got, but the others who were at least considered -- Judges Laurence Silberman and Edith Jones -- were more or less standard Federalist Society conservatives. They might have been Scalia's clones. Not Thomas.

Tushnet even gives a fairly sympathetic account of what he thinks could have happened with Anita Hill:

Pp. 81-83:

I don't think Hill was fantasizing or inventing events that never happened. I also think that Thomas either was describing the events as he remembered them in 1991 . . . or was trapped by the circumstances into misdescribing the events, a completely understandable -- and not disqualifying -- response.

* * *

Thomas was a bit clumsy in approaching women for dates. Almost all the women in the dating pool were young professionals, many from the African American middle class about which Thomas was so ambivalent. He remained resentful under the surface about the fact, as he believed it to be, that many African American women wouldn't consider romance with a man as dark as he. He tried a number of ways of approaching women to see if they would be interested. Some of his methods of exploring the possibility of dating were ordinary, like asking if he could help a woman move into her new apartment . . . Another involved raising issues about sex in a joking way, a technique that wasn't rare when Thomas was a college undergraduate, to see if the woman's response suggested that she might be interested in exploring the possibility of developing a closer relationship.
* * *

Some women he approached in this way were mildly amused at what they regarded as Thomas's ineptness but not offended. Anita Hill was different. She was really offended. Like many men testing the dating waters, Thomas didn't take a single turndown as definitive. But after trying a couple of times to see if Hill would be interested in dating him, Thomas moved on.

* * *

Then, a decade after Thomas had reentered the dating market as his first marriage was deteriorating, the events with Hill resurfaced. He may or may not have recalled his efforts to date her in detail. The on thing he knew, though, was that whatever had happened wasn't anything like the way it was being presented in the media. No fair-minded person could interpret what had happened as a gross episode of serious sexual harassment (indeed, even Hill herself didn't describe it that way, although some senators -- some Thomas's supporters, some his opponents -- did). The right stance to take was the one taken by some of the women Thomas had approached -- no more than moderate amusement, perhaps a bit disdainful, at his ineptness, but certainly not shock and horror over sexual harassment.

What was Thomas to do? Knowing that he hadn't done what people seemed to think he had done, he denied that anything at all had happened. Several years had passed between the events and the nomination hearings. He had remarried, and his efforts to date women before he met Virginia weren't that important to him. Perhaps his memory blurred all his dating efforts into one large group. He may not have specifically remembered approaching Hill, and he certainly didn't remember approaching her -- or anyone -- in the way people were saying he did. Indeed, perhaps he had constructed his recollections of how he had gone about dating in light of his later success and didn't remember being clumsy about dating at all. In any case, his flat denial that anything had occurred was accurate as a representation of what he remembered in 1991.

An interesting perspective coming from a man who had been such a fierce opponent of Thomas's.

Tushnet's book includes this gem in describing Thomas's intellect:

Pp. 86-87:

To equalize the number of majority opinions each justice wrote, Rehnquist had to give Thomas important and difficult regulatory cases. On these he shone. Breyer, who sat next to him at the Court for over a decade, said that Thomas was a smart lawyer. He based this judgment on Thomas's work on these regulatory cases, in which Breyer had specialized as an academic. Kennedy noted that Thomas had a "photographic memory of the record," a real asset in complex regulatory cases.

Tushnet goes on to admit that legal academics have treated Thomas unfairly:

Pp. 88-89, 103:

One can't dismiss the possibility, raised by Thomas himself, that racism has affected the way some white academics treat him. The National Review once published a cover depicting Thurgood Marshall sleeping on the Supreme Court bench, and I believe that some white liberals have a similar view of Thomas, of a dim bulb who doesn't deserve the position he's attained. . . . Elites in the legal academy disparaged Thomas, and he disparaged them in return.

* * *

Probably because of the legacy of Thomas's bitter confirmation process, it is hard to locate serious academic commentary on his Supreme Court opinions that is even passingly dispassionate or written by someone without an obvious ax to grind. Thomas's disparagement of liberal elites, then, is only what they deserve for their disparagement of him.

Wow.

Finally, Tushnet has a note of praise for this site (or, rather, this site's predecessor) in the chapter on Scalia!

p. 147:

I haven't been able to locate a blog for other justices equivalent to "Ninomania," maintained by a law professor at Regent University (which does have a link to the extremely useful "Justice Clarence Thomas Appreciation Page").

Nice to see this site acknowledged in such a way.

Women Who Testified Against Anita Hill, Part IV

2007-10-05T06:20:00.000-07:00

Here is another of the many women who testified against Anita Hill:

[Statement of Ms. J. Brown, former Press Secretary to Senator. John Danforth]

MS. J. BROWN: My name is Janet Brown, Mr. Chairman.

SENATOR HATCH: Would you pull your microphone over, Ms. Brown?

MS. BROWN: Yes, I will.

SENATOR HATCH: I would love to hear you.

MS. J. BROWN: This will be very brief.

I have known Clarence Thomas very well for 12 years. We worked for two years very closely here in the Senate on Senator Danforth's staff. He is a man of the highest principle, honesty, integrity and honor in all of his personal and professional actions.

A number of years ago, I was sexually harassed in the workplace. It was a demeaning, humiliating, sad and revolting experience. There was an intensive and lengthy internal investigation of his case, which is the route that I chose to pursue. Let me assure you that the last thing I would ever have done is follow the man who did this to a new job, call him on the phone or voluntarily share the same air space ever again.

Other than my immediate family, the one person who is the most outraged, compassionate, caring and sensitive to me was Clarence Thomas. He helped me work through the pain and talk through the options. No one who has been through it can talk about sexual harassment dispassionately. No one who takes it seriously would do it.

I don't subscribe to the belief that men, because they are men, don't understand sexual harassment. My husband, my father and my brother understand it. Clarence Thomas understands it. And because he understands it, he wouldn't do it.

Justice Thomas Interview with Laura Ingraham

2007-10-04T18:12:00.000-07:00

Justice Clarence Thomas was interviewed by Laura Ingraham (one of his early clerks) on her radio show; she mentions that it is his "first live interview" that he's ever done. The audio is available here.

John McWhorter Review

2007-10-04T18:10:00.000-07:00

John McWhorter has a short audio review of Justice Clarence Thomas's autobiography on NPR here.