Is Clarence Thomas the worst Supreme Court justice ever?
You've got Ginni's husband to thank for the gun madness gripping this country
I guess we should consider ourselves lucky that automobiles were not invented until the late 1800s and did not come into regular use in this country until the early 20th Century, otherwise the Supreme Court would be busy doing away with requirements for driver's licenses, auto registrations, and environmental regulations on exhaust emissions and gas mileage.
At least that would be true if the reasoning used by Justice Clarence Thomas in his decision in a landmark Second Amendment case was applied to cars, that any regulations of guns in this country must be "consistent with the Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation." In the case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, New York state held that a citizen must show a need to carry a firearm in order to obtain a firearms license. The Bruen decision, handed down last year, overturned the law, saying essentially that because at the time of the writing of the Second Amendment there were no laws requiring the licensing of firearms, no law could require such a license now.
Bam!
With one decision, Clarence Thomas threw out about 200 years of jurisprudence and laws that had been passed regulating guns in this country for reasons of, for example, public safety. Before the Thomas decision, if a state wanted to limit gun purchases to those over 21 years of age or forbid the ownership of firearms by people who had been convicted of domestic abuse or those who had a restraining order against them because they had threatened a domestic partner, then the state could pass those laws.
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Worst ever? Well, he's awfully bad. But he does have competition. There's Roger B (Dred Scot) Taney but I could cast a vote for James Clerk McReynolds. This is a guy who refused to sit next to Justice Brandeis because Brandeis was Jewish (he hated a whole bunch of other people, too .....) He also did the same with later Jewish justices. And there's Stephen Johnson (Plessy v. Ferguson) Field, who was also opposed to any form of government regulation whatsoever.
Clarence Thomas is abhorrent, but it's hard to argue he is the single worst justice of all time. In trying to find who wrote the Dred Scott decision (Roger Taney) and Plessy v. Ferguson (Henry Billings Brown), I came across this Think Progress article, which counts Clarence Thomas as one of the five worst justices in our history. Oddly, the list does not even include Brown. https://archive.thinkprogress.org/the-five-worst-supreme-court-justices-in-american-history-ranked-f725000b59e8/
I just watched a Frontline program this past week about Clarence and Ginni Thomas's paths to power. I hadn't known much about either of them personally before that. I was struck by how much both of them have craved acceptance and respect all their lives, and have adopted the goals, principles, and world outlook of whatever group was currently giving them that acceptance and respect. Thomas as a student at Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts was a member of the Black Panthers and was very into the Black Power movement, very understandable given how much racism he experienced growing up. But he became disenchanted with the Panthers and all left-wing activities after a subset of the ~100,000 people who attended the Moratorium against the Vietnam War on the Boston Common in April 1970 (I was there with my mother) including Clarence Thomas and other Panthers marched over the Harvard Square in Cambridge and threw a violent riot. This link shows the clip about his disillusionment and has another link where you can stream the whole Frontline episode about the Thomases:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/clarence-thomas-black-power-movement/
The documentary strongly suggests that both Clarence Thomas and Ginny are people who felt a big hole inside that they have always been trying to fill. Clarence thought that by going to Yale Law School he would graduate and be automatically assured of a highly paid future at a prestigious law firm. When racism prevented him from getting those jobs, he took a far less remunerative job working for Republican Senator John Danforth. Thomas began thinking about becoming a judge and set his eye on rising to the Supreme Court quite early. And he noticed that the line for a Black judge to be nominated by a Democratic president was quite long with many aspirants, while the line of Blacks who sought to be nominated by a Republican was a lot shorter. So he became a Republican. And because he has always become a fierce advocate for whatever belief system he adopted at the time, he has adopted and championed the most extreme views of the Republican Party's right wing.