Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is often viewed as a cipher, considering that for years he sat silent on the bench and for a decade didn’t ask a single question during proceedings. He’s been more vocal in recent times, however, and on Friday at a conference of the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Point Clear, Alabama, he was anything but quiet.
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Political operatives in the nation’s capital are simply “awful,” he told the audience:
Thomas… described Washington as a place where “people pride themselves in being awful.”
“It is a hideous place as far as I’m concerned,” Thomas said.
“It’s one of the reasons we like RVing,” he added. “You get to be around regular people who don’t pride themselves in doing harmful things merely because they have the capacity to do it or because they disagree.”
Thomas should know—he was at the center of the Anita Hill fiasco—overseen by then-Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Joe Biden—where he was subjected to evidence-free, humiliating claims of sexual harassment during his SCOTUS confirmation hearings in 1991. Biden not surprisingly—in a preview of what has befallen us—utterly failed to control the proceedings, and t hey became a national embarrassment that decades later led to the equally clownish Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not minimizing sexual harassment, but if you bring wholly unsubstantiated allegations with virtually no evidence, it should not taint a man’s career forever—which unfortunately, both Thomas and Kavanaugh have endured.
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The left has never stopped hating Thomas because he has strong conservative constitutional principles and doesn’t rubberstamp their desire for on-demand abortions until the moment before birth, so in 2023 they tried to create a controversy over his friendship with a billionaire businessman. The liberal tears continued to flow after Thomas amended his financial statements, but the outcry was a nothingburger because he had been advised at the time that he was not required to report his travels with his wealthy friend.
Things quickly quieted down when it was revealed that liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor had her own ethics questions—turns out she was prodding public institutions to buy her books. Suddenly the stories went away.
Thomas decried “the nastiness and the lies” he and his wife Ginni have “had to endure” in recent years. Nevertheless, he remains unbowed by the constant attacks:
There’s certainly been a lot of negativity for my wife and I in the last few years…
But we choose not to focus on that.
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The conservative justice also explained his judicial philosophy, noting that just because something has been previously judged doesn’t mean the decision was based on logic:
[Moderator US District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle] asked Thomas about his tendency to write separate or dissenting opinions that question the wisdom of long-standing precedent, as he did with the constitutional right to abortion prior to the court striking down that right in 2022 with its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision.
“My granddaddy would always say, ‘boy, if it don’t make no sense, it don’t make no sense,’” Thomas said.
“I’m not going to reflexively go along with something simply because others have always gone along with it,” he added.
Clarence Thomas has been under attack since the day his nomination was announced. The left despises conservatives, but they save their true hatred for minority conservatives—especially black ones. It’s interesting to hear what Thomas really feels, because it’s easy to forget amid all the drama and leftist hate that there’s a human being at the center of this story—one that has been unfairly targeted since the 1990s for daring to be a black man who doesn’t buy progressive orthodoxy.
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It’s nice to hear what he really thinks after all these years. Remember, when people tell you who they are, believe them:
More:
Biden Attacks Clarence Thomas in New Interview—but Accidentally Levels Himself
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SCOTUS Adopts Code of Conduct, but It Won’t Stop the Left’s Continued Assault on the Top Court