Clarence Thomas Is Unhappy. Good.
He deserves it.
Clarence Thomas thinks you hate him. It appears our protests, cards, and letters have conveyed the appropriate message. The Supreme Court justice whined to a packed crowd of lawyers and judges at a judicial conference in Alabama: “We’re in a world and we — certainly my wife and I the last two or three years it’s been — just the nastiness and the lies, it’s just incredible … There’s certainly been a lot of negativity in our lives, my wife and I, over the last few years, but we choose not to focus on it.”
Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas, are clearly obsessed with what decent people think of them. Unfortunately for their egos, it’s not a lie that Thomas is billionaire Harlan Crow’s kept boy. Crow, who also collects non-living fascist memorabilia, purchased Thomas’s mother’s home, fixed it up, and let her continue living there. Crow paid the tuition of the young man Thomas had raised as a son. Then there were the 20 years of free luxury trips. Thomas insists that he and Crow are just good friends and these favors don’t have a price attached. I assume he never watched The Godfather.
It’s also not a lie that Ginni Thomas was actively involved in Donald Trump’s 2020 coup attempt. She texted Trump’s chief of staff and accomplice on November 10: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!! ... You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.” (Ginni Thomas’s text messages share the same grammatical construction and overall coherence as Trump’s social media text.) Clarence Thomas has refused to recuse himself from cases before the court that directly involved the 2020 election.
This is all true. Facts that make you look bad might seem “nasty” but they aren’t lies.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit Judicial Conference, where Thomas bemoaned his outcast state, was held at a luxury resort but he still couldn’t enjoy himself. He does better on Harlan Crow’s private island.
Thomas, who’s expressed nothing but contempt for liberals since he was confirmed 1,000 years ago, repeated Stephen Breyer’s recent nonsense about how the nine unelected elites were once a loving family who ruled collegially over the common people.
“We may have been a dysfunctional family, but we were a family,” he said. “And it would be inconceivable that anyone would leak an opinion of the court or do anything to intentionally harm one another.”
Thomas still pretends that it was some random liberal clerk who leaked the Dobbs draft opinion and the mighty Supreme Court was unable to identify them? As Batman once said, “You can think I’m dumb. Just don’t my talk to me like I’m dumb.”
The Court added three far-right justices after 2016 and the most recent liberal justice was confirmed after the horrible Dobbs decision. I find it unlikely that the three liberal justices at the time — Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor — had clerks who suddenly went rogue.
Times reporter Abbie VanSickle wrote with what I assume was a straight face that Thomas “expressed frustration with some of the current trends in the federal courts, including the practice of seeking sympathetic judges and the increasing use of emergency petitions that ask the Supreme Court to consider issues quickly.”
Thomas should complain to his right-wing buddies who openly judge and forum shop. This is how Roe was overturned in the first place, and he’s actively encouraged it in his opinions. His woe-is-me spiritual is insulting. Thomas is correct that the Supreme Court and public sentiment toward it has changed dramatically, but he’s either delusional or lying when he suggests that anyone other than the radical Right is to blame. The Federalist Society and rubber-stamping Republican senators stacked the courts with ideologues who don’t care about precedent or even basic democracy. Republicans openly politicized the Supreme Court when it blocked Barack Obama’s replacement for Antonin Scalia and then confirmed Any Coney Barrett via drive-through window. (She received her robe and a latte at the same time.)
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has become even more dismissive of public perception and resisted any attempts at true accountability. Thomas and Samuel Alito only begrudgingly reported their paid vacations to billionaire unicorn hunting islands after the press exposed their underhanded shadiness.
A year earlier, the Times had promoted the Thomases’ calculated and farcical “just us folks” narrative in a lengthy profile, likely intended to bolster their MAGA image.
There are still people who have faith in the country and what it stands for, but it was on the road and beyond the East Coast elites that the couple found those Americans, at least in Justice Thomas’s telling. “My bride and I, Virginia, we were R.V.ing in the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. And we noticed something there,” he said. “The large number of flags of people who still believe in the ideal of this country, in an environment when there’s so much criticism, antagonism, and actually people with disdain for the very same. It was very interesting to be with regular people for three weeks.” Here, far from Washington, far from the news media, far from “the interest groups,” far from anyone who recognized him at all, was where he — where they — were at home.
Now, that’s an example of nasty lies. The Thomases actually don’t prefer camping out in their R.V. at a Walmart parking lot. Their ideal vacations don’t involve hunting squirrel in the Ozarks. Crow showered Thomas with gifts and helped him maintain a lifestyle to which he would never otherwise have become accustomed. Thomas grew up dirt poor and has no white billionaire relatives. Republicans like to make a fuss over Barack and Michelle Obama socializing with Oprah Winfrey and other wealthy celebrities, but people legitimately want to hang out with the Obamas because they’re cool. No one would willingly spend time with the Thomases unless they could write it off as a business expense or consider it part of their civic responsibility like less-pleasant jury duty.
Thomas says Washington, D.C. is a “hideous place,” but he’s not about to put us out of his misery.
“I wound up in this job,” Thomas said from his sweet chariot. “And this is, we pray, to do whatever it was that God wanted me to do, what I was being called to do. But being in public life is not something I would have chosen to do.”
No one seriously believes Thomas is still on the Supreme Court because of some higher calling. He was Ronald Reagan’s tool in the 1980s to sabotage the Equal Opportunity Commission, and he was George H.W. Bush’s tool to roll back the hard-fought rights of marginalized people. Crow has helped ensure that Thomas is a well-compensated tool, as it’s highly unlikely they would’ve had their “meet cute” if he wasn’t Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court justice but instead Clarence Thomas, the low-level legal associate.
When I spoke with author Madiba Dennie, she said, “Something I think should happen more is that the justices’ lives should be made really difficult … socially, interpersonally, just give them hell, make their lives hard. Like it should be, it should be challenging for them to be able to comfortably act the way they do.”
Republicans will freak out in bad-faith and claim that Dennie’s proposing putting bombs in justices’ car or even more galling, interrupting their expensive steak dinners. I don’t promote violence or harassment, but I do believe the justices should feel the weight of their decisions and the impact they have on people’s lives. Notice that Thomas’s major complaint is that people say mean things about him and his wife. People say mean things about Taylor Swift and she’s not one of the most powerful people in America (although an argument could be made).
Thomas is 76 next month. He’s already inflicted enough damage to last multiple lifetimes. He could enjoy a comfortable retirement, except he probably understands that his life would suddenly become less comfortable once he was longer useful to men like Harlan Crow. His Supreme Court pension can only cover R.V. living.
Those of us without lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court are free to spend the rest of Thomas’s life reminding him how awful he is. This “nastiness” is inescapable, and no amount of money will make us treat him differently. Our self-respect is not so cheap a commodity as Clarence Thomas’s.
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Thomas is a bitter old reactionary who accepts bribes from a Hitler admiring sugar daddy. He & his insurrectionist wife would eagerly destroy democracy to own the libs. Yet Thomas resents the fact that he’s perceived as a corrupt, venal right wing operative. Fk him, his insurrectionist wife & the RV bribe they drove in on.
It's rich for Thomas to bemoan the lack of respect people give the Court when he has done so much to undermine the respect people used to have for it. You don't make sneering, partisan speeches, drip invective towards your opponents in your opinions, and violate basic ethics and then get upset when people no longer think you're part of some apolitical body of legal experts who are free from base politics. Thomas and his partisans on the judiciary are the reason the courts are heading towards becoming a merely advisory body with no ability to nullify federal laws.
Remember, judicial review is just a norm, created by SCOTUS itself, and has only been adhere to by Congress and presidents because they considered the courts legitimate. Peel off that legitimacy for the sake of cheap partisan gain, and you peel off all your power. Hope it's worth it!