Who is Clarence Thomas?

WHEN AMERICA’S Supreme Court overruled Roe v Wade in June, one jurist voting to scrap fifty years of abortion rights saw an opportunity to go further. For Justice Clarence Thomas, shredding the 1973 ruling was just the beginning. He wrote that Supreme Court decisions protecting the rights to contraception and to sexual intimacy and marriage equality for gays and lesbians rested on the same faulty logic. Since they, like Roe, are “demonstrably erroneous”, the court had a “duty” to strike them down, he argued. None of the other five conservatives signed his opinion. But America’s most conservative and longest-serving justice is influential. He has transformed lonely views into majority opinions. Who is he and where do his idiosyncratic views come from?

Mr Thomas was born poor in a small town in Georgia in 1948. After his father abandoned his family, he was raised by his grandfather. He spent his last two years of high school and the beginning of college at a seminary. Mr Thomas then jettisoned his plan to join the priesthood and pivoted to leftist black nationalism. He attended the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts (where he helped found a black student union to “expose and eradicate social inequities and injustices”) and then Yale Law School, where his views lurched to the right as he reflected on his admission under a racial-preference programme. Mr Thomas later found his muse in Thomas Sowell, a Marxist-cum-conservative economist who taught that blacks should be self-sufficient rather than depend on the false promise of white benevolence.

After law school Mr Thomas joined the Missouri attorney-general’s office under John Danforth, a Republican. He later moved to Washington to serve as an aide to Mr Danforth, who had been elected to the Senate. Mr Thomas became a judge in 1990 when George H.W. Bush appointed him to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and, 16 months later, to the seat that Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American on the Supreme Court and a civil-rights icon, would soon vacate. Bush introduced his nominee as the “best-qualified” person for the job, a claim that even Mr Thomas saw as “extravagant”.

Famously reticent during oral arguments for most of his 31 years on the court, Justice Thomas began to speak up in virtual hearings during the covid-19 pandemic. His jurisprudence has never been shy. He did not recuse himself from cases involving challenges to the result of the general election in 2020 even though his wife, Ginni Thomas, had put pressure on Donald Trump’s chief of staff and more than two dozen Arizona legislators to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. (Mrs Thomas was recently interviewed by the House January 6th committee about these activities.) His votes in favour of the death penalty and gun rights and against abortion and affirmative action are often accompanied by strident written commentary. Justice Thomas claims the mantle of “originalism”—the view that the constitution is best understood in light of its public meaning when drafted and ratified—but the historical analysis in his opinions get mixed marks from scholars. According to Saul Cornell of Fordham University, his opinion in June striking down New York’s limits on concealed-carry permits for guns was “one of the most intellectually dishonest and poorly argued decisions in American judicial history”.

And yet, that opinion in Bruen v New York State Rifle & Pistol Association commanded the signature of each of his five fellow conservatives. After years of complaining, often alone, that the right to keep and bear arms was being treated as a “constitutional orphan”, Justice Thomas had persuaded his colleagues to expand the freedoms justified by the Second Amendment in radical fashion: with a new test that shoots down any gun-control law that lacks an analogue in his curated version of American history. Paving the way for sharp right turns is not unfamiliar territory for him. In 2009, he was the only member of the court to say that the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—which shielded minorities from discrimination at the polls—was unconstitutional. Four years later, he joined a 5-4 majority to gut that very provision. ■

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