Hillary Clinton piled on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Tuesday, calling him a “person of grievance” full of “resentment” and “anger.”
The former first lady, US senator and secretary of state — as well as twice-defeated presidential candidate — made the jaw-dropping comment during an interview with “CBS Mornings” host Gayle King.
“I went to law school with him,” said Clinton, a 1973 graduate of Yale Law School. (Thomas received his J.D. from the school a year later.) “He’s been a person of grievance for as long as I’ve known him. Resentment, grievance, anger.”
Thomas has been the subject of an onslaught of outrage over his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center, which overturned the court’s landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and returned the issue of abortion to each of the 50 states.
In his opinion, Thomas insisted the court “reconsider” and “correct” precedents based on the legal doctrine of “substantive due process” — including decisions that established the right to free contraception use and same-sex marriage across the country.
Clinton said the concurrence was Thomas’ way of “signaling” conservatives and Republican-led state legislatures to “find cases” and “pass laws” targeting those rights.
“‘I may not win the first, the second or third time, but we’re going to keep at it,’” Clinton claimed Thomas was saying.
“The people he is speaking to … are the, you know, right-wing, very conservative judges and justices and state legislatures,” she added. “And the thing that is — well, there’s so many things about it that are deeply distressing — but women are going to die, Gayle. Women will die.”
Conservatives ripped Clinton for her comments while defending Thomas’ personal character.
“Deplorable, irredeemable, a person of grievance, resentment, and anger … The hatred Hillary Clinton has for conservatives is palpable,” tweeted Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
“Just an absurd accusation,” added Ohio GOP Senate candidate J.D. Vance. “Justice Thomas is one of the warmest people I’ve ever met. He has this amazing quality where he treats everyone with kindness regardless of their station.”
“Thomas is a happy, gracious, compassionate guy who has the reputation for literally none of these things,” agreed Hudson Institute senior fellow Rebeccah Heinrichs.
“Clarence Thomas is literally the one person on the Supreme Court even the libs who work there say is always smiling and happy,” tweeted radio host Erick Erickson. “Clinton is literally the one politician in America whose paid staff have to assure us she’s likable.”
Others implied a racial motivation for Clinton’s remark.
“Difficult to ignore how Thomas — who didn’t even write the majority opinion in Dobbs — is seemingly always the target of this kind of ire,” tweeted The Federalist senior editor David Harsanyi.
“So they’ve settled on the ‘angry black man’ and it’s totally fine to do this on national tv,” opined Spectator contributing editor Stephen L. Miller.
Thomas’ critics have included Jim Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the 2015 ruling legalizing gay marriage across the US.
Obergefell accused Thomas of protecting himself in his concurrence by omitting the 1967 Loving v. Virginia ruling that declared it unconstitutional to ban interracial marriage. Thomas, who is black, has been married to his wife, Ginni, who is white, since 1987.
“It’s a clear indication that if it’s a case that impacts him directly, it’s safe,” Obergefell told “CNN Newsroom” on Sunday. “But if it’s a case that protects other people, other people who are unlike him, then we’re not very safe.”
“The right to interracial marriage is only six years older than a woman’s right to abortion,” Obergefell added. “Half of your country lost the right to control their own body, and that should terrify everyone in this nation who believes in our ability.
“Our nation has a much longer history of denying interracial marriage. Do we want to go back to the late 18th century, the originalist who’s saying we can only interpret the Constitution as of the time it was written? When that Constitution was written, ‘We, the People’ did not include blacks, indigenous people, it did not include women, it did not include queer people. That is not a more perfect union,” he continued.
“We should be moving forward, not backwards,” he added. “And this court is taking us backwards, this extreme court is taking us backwards.”
