Thomas is carrying out a personal and vindictive agenda without regard to the harm caused to hundreds of millions of people. He’s neither principled nor objective. Kavanaughs an angry drunk coasting off connections, wealth, and privilege. Barrett’s a perjured radical theologist trying to legislate handmaids tale into reality from the bench.
He simultaneously says that corporations have First Amendment rights to donate unlimited money to politicians, but have no First Amendment rights to moderate content on their social networks.
He's a hack that just does whatever is best for conservatives.
This seems so far from the present-day reality that I don’t know where to begin. Thomas is demonstrably taking bribes. Kavanaugh had a large amount of debt he claimed was from “baseball tickets” that just magically disappeared. Cony-Barrett is part of a cult. Meanwhile, the court is making wildly unpopular decisions left and right and openly states no one can hold them to account for anything they do or say, on or off the bench. They have zero legitimacy.
> Clarence Thomas famously speaks the least; he actually would prefer to hear out the attorneys making their case to the court.
Eh, my impression is that he's extremely arrogant and doesn't care what anyone else thinks. He's deeply uncurious and consequently relatively ignorant. He rarely engages in good faith with the facts and merits, and frequently misconstrues them to suit his own ideology. These are not the acts of an active listener who wants to learn and be shaped by what they learn. They're the acts of someone who believes they've got it all figured out.
Samuel Alito, Amy Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett "I won't overturn Roe v. Wade" Kavanaugh, Clarence "my wife is an insurrectionist but I don't care" Thomas.
If I were attributing bad faith to Thomas - and given that he ignores court norms on recusing himself, that doesn't seem like too much of a stretch - I would be more likely to ascribe to him a desire to see "liberal Silicon Valley" punished than anything else.
Thomas is an incredibly political beast, to the point that Scalia wrote him off as an unprincipled nutjob.
He also allegedly sexually harassed a subordinate of his, Anita Hill, though the allegations were never substantiated. This was prior to being appointed to the Supreme Court.
The Garland/Barrett shenanigans were at least strategic. Kavanaugh was even worse in my opinion. There was nothing special about that man. They could have easily dumped him as soon as the credible accusation against him came out. There are plenty of other judges with similar ideology and opinions that could have replaced him and provided the exact same impact on the court. There was no strategic reason to stick by him. The only reason was to prove a point about not caring about these accusations.
The only way that any more than a couple Republicans vote to remove Thomas or Gorsuch is if they see an opportunity to replace an older conservative justice with a younger conservative justice.
I don't even know who Clarence Thomas is. It sounds like he is religious to me which as far as I know allows sex for procreation only, not for pleasure. Maybe I am wrong tho. Whoever he is, I can agree with some of his views while disagreeing with others.
When you're a billionaire who has material interests in court cases and you just so happen to befriend a justice on said court who has nothing in common with you from either a wealth or personal background standpoint, then you're attempting to buy influence.
There's a zero percent chance that Harlan Crow, a generationally wealthy white guy from Dallas, would ever have anything to do with Clarence Thomas, a middle class black guy from rural Georgia, except that Thomas sits on the US Supreme Court.
None.
Crow sought Thomas out to peddle his influence. Thomas accepted because (a) he believes he deserves this sort of treatment, and (b) there's nothing particularly illegal about it because of how fucked the US Constitution is with regards to high court appointments.
Thomas isn't the only one, either. He's just the one currently in the news.
Clarence Thomas is a good legal thinker and is worth having on the court. He has a very specific world view that I don't think he would be likely to defect against. The only real argument that might work is deterrence, but that's probably not worth it.
My apologies, but I decline to argue this point. Whether Thomas (or any other Justice) is a good person or correct in their rulings isn't germane to the point I'm making.
Of all the currently-service Justices, the only one who has deviated from the perspective of the President who appointed them would probably be Roberts - and that statement is mostly based on a single ruling. It's not like he's well-loved by the left.
https://www.businessinsider.com/clarence-thomas-told-clerks-...
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