Clarence Thomas ... the Next Chief Justice?

POPE

CHIEF JUSTICE

THY LORD DAN HAS SPOKEN

Cause Ally said so, and why not?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26471-2004Nov4.html

That's just how families go really, isn't it though? Whoops, pregnant, ok well there you have it. I mean maybe that's just my family.

Ha ha, Ally, I think that's how A LOT of families go.

Next one, I think: Sandra Day O'Connor.

And I have heard more than one report that O'Connor wants to retire soon.

I hope Ginsberg realizes there's no way she can retire during the next four years. Methinks she must.

Stevens tends to vote relatively liberally, but he's the oldest on the court. Although I just read somewhere he hired clerks through 2006, which means he might stick around for a while.

The conservatives need to pick up two more "pro-life" votes to overturn Roe v Wade, since the last decision was 5-4 before Clinton appointed Breyer and Ginsberg.

But really, all the math just makes me ill. That and the fact that the conservatives have the audacity to say that there shouldn't a litmus test, which means you should not use a litmus test to not allow their conservative appointments.

If they actually deny Hatch the head of the Judiciary Committee over his comments, you'll know that this is all for real. My guess is that Schumer - with his mandate from a blue state - will become one of the most important senators since he sits on the Judiciary.

But ugh ugh ugh fuck fuck fuck.

http://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/posner-r-cnbc.html

this is barely related to clarence thomas. does anyone remember the name of the african american woman prior to anita hill who had to deal with a congressional shitstorm? i think bush i wanted to appoint her as secretary of education or something like that?

or to be clearer: "Bush I wanted to appoint her. . . ." (could've been reagan maybe). also, i think, like anita hill, she ended up becoming a professor? anybody remember her?

Lani Guinier, you dope.

thanks, dude! too much dope smoking, i'm afraid

Among other things:

The evening was devoted to the Bill of Rights, but Justice Thomas did not embrace the document, and he proposed a couple of alternatives.

‘Today there is much focus on our rights,” Justice Thomas said. “Indeed, I think there is a proliferation of rights.”

“I am often surprised by the virtual nobility that seems to be accorded those with grievances,” he said. “Shouldn’t there at least be equal time for our Bill of Obligations and our Bill of Responsibilities?”

He gave examples: “It seems that many have come to think that each of us is owed prosperity and a certain standard of living. They’re owed air conditioning, cars, telephones, televisions.”

Those are luxuries, Justice Thomas said.

“I have to admit,” he said, “that I’m one of those people that still thinks the dishwasher is a miracle. What a device! And I have to admit that because I think that way, I like to load it. I like to look in and see how that dishes were magically cleaned.”

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cywg7wzfIBs/SGvN--GDrZI/AAAAAAAAGb4/1RzopuiVxOc/s320/Richard_Pryor_-_That_Nigger%27s_Crazy_front_cover-1.jpg

If Thomas can get a Bill of Responsibilities and a Bill of Obligations added to the constitution, then I'm going to have to insist on a Bill of LOLs and a Bill of WTFs as well.

I like to load it. I like to look in and see how that dishes were magically cleaned

Now, see, he's the last person who should say shit like this.

Um...

The questions from students were read to Justice Thomas, and the first one seemed to throw him off. “Since the Civil War, what has changed the way Americans view the Constitution the most and why?” an unidentified student asked.

Justice Thomas gave a rambling response, touching on the Fourteenth Amendment, the rights of freed slaves, the application of parts of the Bill of Rights to the states and Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that endorsed the doctrine of “separate but equal.”

“I’m sure there are other things that have happened,” he said, wrapping up his answer. “So I would have to say just off the top of my head the Fourteenth Amendment. And I bet you someone’s going to hear that and say, well, no, it’s the dormant commerce clause or something.”

keep in mind this is a dude who travels around the country in an RV in the summer--being fascinated by a dishwasher seems right up his alley

I have to admit . . . that I’m one of those people that still thinks the dishwasher is a miracle. What a device! And I have to admit that because I think that way, I like to load it. I like to look in and see how that dishes were magically cleaned.

— Justice Clarence Thomas, March 31, 2009

Justice Clarence Tuomas

Thomas outraged at the tasering of his nephew.

But as a conservative who always gives the police the benefit of the doubt, and as someone who in his writing always stresses pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, I think Clarence should be giving the security here the benefit of the doubt and telling his nephew to stay on his meds! Surprise surprise that Clarence is not consistent between his judicial rulings and his private life.

ok as a person who used to be certified as an instructor in management of assaultive behavior I just want to ask what kind of ridiculous fucking hospital is it that need tasers to restrain patients who're attempting to check out ama

("management of assaultive behavior" btw isn't some badass thing it's just a series of procedures & protocols for containing violent patients, usu. in a psych setting but it works in any hospital setting)

Lots of schadenfreude on liberal blogs as you might imagine. From Digby's:

One of these years, before he dies, Thomas might explain to us why prisoners disgust him to the point of approving the very human rights violations we lecture China, Iraq, and other nations about. We have no explanation because Thomas has never conducted a major interview since being appointed to the court by the first President Bush.

Back in 1992, just after joining the court, Thomas dissented in the 7-2 decision that upheld a $800 award for damages for a Louisiana inmate who, from behind his locked cell, argued with a prison guard. Three guards took the inmate out of his cell, put him in handcuffs and shackles, and dragged him to a hallway where they beat him so badly that he suffered a cracked dental plate.

The lower court ruled that the beating had nothing to do with acceptable prison discipline. But Thomas all but laughed off the beating, saying the injuries were ''minor.'' Thomas said the ''use of force that causes only insignificant harm to a prisoner may be immoral, it may be tortious, it may be criminal, and it may even be remediable under other provisions of the Federal Constitution, but it is not `cruel and unusual punishment.'''

Last year Thomas was one of three dissenters, with Rehnquist and Scalia, in the 6-3 decision that found that executing the mentally retarded was ''cruel and unusual punishment.'' Also last year, Thomas dissented from a 6-3 decision to ban the practice in Alabama of chaining prisoners to outdoor ''hitching posts'' and abandoning them for hours without food, water, or a chance to use the bathroom. While the majority also called that ''cruel and unusual,'' Thomas said the hitching post served ''a legitimate penological purpose,'' encouraging a prisoner's ''compliance with prison rules while out on work duty.''

a little uncomfortable with the conflation of "patient" and "prisoner" in the reactions to this story.

I can see that, but would Clarence Thomas the judge say that hospital security guards have less authority to tase. Maybe, but I doubt it.

There are rationalizations to fit every situation. If Clarence Thomas cannot cut this handy cloth to tailor an opinion to suit his immediate purposes, then he would be a poor lawyer indeed. Of course, given time to polish it, he could justify his anger over this in a way that did not contradict his written judicial opinions.

Hate putting this here, but I guess no Anita Hill (or Hill/Thomas) thread.

I saw Freida Mock's documentary on Hill this afternoon. I've always said that the three most riveting events I've ever watched unfold were the O.J. saga, the Thomas confirmation hearings, and the Obama/Clinton nomination fight. (I was 12 during the Watergate hearings, so my memories are almost non-existent.) The timelines were very different--days vs. months vs. a couple of years--but it felt so precarious through all three, like no matter how much was said publicly, you were always on the precipice of something much worse and much more calamitous.

The last 20 minutes of the film is all uplift and the next generation and such, and I generally squirm through that kind of thing. But most of the rest is footage from the hearings, and I found all that just as compelling 20+ years later. The film's about Hill, but the cast of characters making up the Judiciary Committee is amazing. You'll never see a group of old white men spend so much time furrowing their brows and sighing. I'll never forget Alan Simpson hissing, "and they all told me, watch out for this woman," while he pretends to search his pockets for all the telegrams he's received--that's in there. Lots of Biden and Heflin and Specter, a little Kennedy, no praise for anyone. No Thurmond, surprisingly (he's there, but you don't hear from him). Even a bit of SNL, though I wished they'd gotten Farley-as-Heflin in there: "Judge Thomas, do you think that po-no is the way to go."

The most electric moment was the semi-surprise introduction of Hill after the film. (We'd been told that the filmmaker and a "surprise guest" would take questions afterwards--c'mon, there was a chance Thomas would be there...) She told a really funny story about running into Specter at an airport, where he cheerfully suggested they should "work together" some day.

@CoreyRobin
Clarence Thomas has more complex views on race/state than people realize. A preview of a book I'm writing about him.

In my paper, I document both Thomas’s involvement as a younger man in the broad milieu of Black Nationalism and how that involvement carries over into his jurisprudence. I use the phrase “broad milieu” deliberately. I don’t want to overstate the depth or intensity of his involvement, and I don’t want to posit a specificity, a precise location, to that involvement.

Reading Cedric Johnson’s paper on Huey Newton, which Cedric presented yesterday, one sees this deep texture and particularity to the different arguments within the Black Power movement. You don’t see that in Thomas. Instead you see someone who breathed in the broader atmosphere of Black Power and Black Nationalism, and never, I argue, stopped entirely breathing it. Or at least never stopped breathing part of it.

Specifically, what I think Thomas took away from that early engagement are two ideas. First, not only is racism a perdurable element of the American experience — and I want to stress that Thomas’s concern, unlike that of more internationally minded figures like Newton, Malcolm X, or Angela Davis, is with racism as an American experience — but it is also a protean and often hidden element of that experience.

Thomas believes that racism is so profoundly inscribed in the white soul that you’ll never be able to remove it. You see this belief in these quiet, throwaway lines in his opinions, which if you’re reading too fast you’ll miss....

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/clarence-thomass-counterrevolution/

I watched Confirmation, HBO's Hill-Thomas movie, last night. (Nothing to do with Bush's death--just happened to come across it in the library.) Not bad--some behind-the-scenes chronology I didn't know. The hardest thing for me was interference from other shows. Thomas was played by Bunk from The Wire, his wife by Martha from The Americans. (Checking the credits right now, I had no idea that was Treat Williams as Kennedy.)

#SCOTUS Justice Thomas asks his 1st question since 2016. In a case where the prosecutor struck 41 of 42 African American jurors, Thomas asked whether the defense struck any black jurors. The response: no, because the prosecutor had already struck all of them.

— Nina Totenberg (@NinaTotenberg) March 20, 2019

i feel like, somehow, thomas will not come to the obvious conclusion there.

lengthy interview with Corey Robin about his Thomas book on this week's On the Media

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/supreme-court-justice-most-say