God bless Justice Clarence Thomas. A true American Patriot.
Posted on 08/31/2011 5:01:34 AM PDT by markomalley
In the glossy pages of the New Yorker, in graceful prose and with good reporting, the dreams and nightmares of the admirers of President Obama and his policies lay exposed.
The dreams include Ryan Lizza's report last April in which he quoted an Obama adviser saying the president's policy on Libya was "leading from behind." This week, as Tripoli seemed about to fall, the magazine's editor David Remnick hailed Obama's "calculated modesty."
The nightmare appeared in last week's issue, in Jeffrey Toobin's lengthy article on Supreme Court jurisprudence, titled "Partners" and subtitled "Will Clarence and Virginia Thomas succeed in killing Obama's health-care plan?"
It's possible to read Toobin's article as a partisan hit job, echoing the demands of 74 Democratic House members that Justice Thomas recuse himself from sitting on a case challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare because of his wife's involvement in the Tea Party movement.
Never mind that this is a standard neither Toobin nor the Democrats apply to other public officials with spouses active in public affairs -- and that they're not asking Justice Elena Kagan to recuse herself because of her work in the Justice Department on the issue.
The bulk of the article is worthy of attention because Toobin, despite his obvious distaste for Thomas' views, takes him seriously as a judicial thinker and pathfinder.
"In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court," Toobin writes. "Rarely has a Supreme Court Justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication."
Toobin is on particularly strong ground when he discusses the Second Amendment's right to keep and bear arms. For years it was considered a dead letter in sophisticated legal circles, protecting only the right to bear arms as a member of the National Guard.
But in 1997 Thomas wrote a concurring opinion in a case invalidating one provision in a 1993 gun control law. Thomas pointed to the emerging legal scholarship, some of it the product of liberal law professors like Sanford Levinson, arguing that the Second Amendment was intended to protect a personal right to own guns.
Toobin notes that Thomas' concurrence was cited in a 1999 federal appeals court opinion and helped inspire the legal challenge to the District of Columbia's effective ban on handgun possession. In June 2008 the Supreme Court overturned that law as a violation of the Second Amendment, with Justice Antonin Scalia's opinion closely following Thomas' reasoning.
Thomas's leadership on the Second Amendment reflects his frequent forays into history. Many of his opinions track the development of the law from the 18th or even 17th century, and in many such cases all or almost all his colleagues concur.
In addition, as Toobin accurately reports, Thomas is the strongest originalist on the court, the justice who most consistently seeks to apply the provisions of the Constitution as they were originally understood.
This has led him to take positions, sometimes in lonely dissent, that most New Yorker readers abhor. The 18th century understanding of what constituted the "cruel and unusual punishment" banned by the Eighth Amendment is not widely shared these days on the Upper East Side of New York.
And Thomas' interpretation that the three post-Civil War amendments ban all racial quotas and preferences is anathema to the university administrators and corporate apparatchiks who employ them every day.
They might, however, be embarrassed if they actually read the parts of his opinions where, in searing prose, he draws on his own experiences growing up in segregated Georgia and on his considerable knowledge of the history of oppression of black Americans.
And he brings up the embarrassing facts that the first gun control laws and limits on corporate campaign contributions were advanced by those who sought to deny rights to blacks.
Toobin's article represents the end of the fashionable left's attempt to portray Thomas as an intellectual lightweight. He admits that Thomas' silence on the bench, while colleagues pepper lawyers with questions, doesn't mean he's stupid.
Instead he paints Thomas as a brilliant Svengali, ready to disregard precedent and -- the president's nightmare -- overturn Obamacare.
Congress has never before passed and the Supreme Court has never upheld a law requiring individuals to buy a commercial product, as Obamacare does. On this the Obama Democrats, not Clarence Thomas and judges following his lead, are the ones sweeping aside precedent.
Toobin has no moral high ground from which to speak:
http://abovethelaw.com/2010/05/the-jeffrey-toobin-casey-greenfield-drama-rolls-on/
Entire Toobin piece here:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/29/110829fa_fact_toobin
I just printed it out.
Revenge is a dish best served up cold.
It is so typically leftist to want Thomas to recuse himself and the “wise latina” not to, even though she has more involvement in this issue than Thomas.
I have come to the conclusion that there is not one Dem with a conscience. Happily I believe that the rest of the country is FINALLY waking up to the same conclusion.
God bless Justice Clarence Thomas. A true American Patriot.
You're right. It is typical, predictable, and disgusting. Liberals are so transparent, so self-serving, that it is insulting that they don't think we see right through them.
Makes sense the Left would want him recused. He's in the way again.
They say he's dumb, he's a lightweight, but I've never seen them, not even once, print one of his opinions in full, for the public to read and decide. We're supposed to assume he's dumb, because they say so.
After Thomas’ confirmation hearings, he and his wife were asked how they got through the grueling and unfair process.
I recall the reply was that they drew on their faith. They prayed together and with friends and also played hymns and praise music continually while at home.
That was a wonderful quote from nominee Thomas. He kindly identified Ted Kennedy and the rest of the liberals as racists, as is the case with most leftists.
The last Black man lynched in America.
Pray for America
Of course, the press never gave that story legs as it would have destroyed Anita Hill's narrative.
We can be thankful for Orin Hatch's work in getting him through, because it was a squeaker.
We do, but does Joe Sixpack?
Toobin goes into great detail of how Thomas has influenced the path of the entire court. It's a reluctant love letter to Thomas’s brilliance and discipline. (I read the book “Supreme Conflict” years ago and it chronicled Thomas’s entrance into the court. From the very beginning, he was changing his colleague's opinions.)
Whether the left will publicly admit it or not, once again, a “dumb conservative” has turned out to be anything but.
I would like to see the brilliant constitutional scholar Obama debate the issue with Thomas.
“I have come to the conclusion that there is not one Dem with a conscience.”
All 60 democrat senators voting for Obamacare should no longer leave any doubt. That’s what amazed me most of all.
That not ONE democrat senator voted FOR freedom, liberty, property and the right to choose. All voted for a law that has been shown 2 out of 3 times to be unconstitutional.
It is all party and power for these guys, and that includes that so-called patriot Lieberman who laughed when military votes were cast aside in 2000.
They need to be sent to the wilderness for 40years to search for their souls and conscience.
When are they going to notice the intellectual lightweight who resides at 1600 Pennsyvania Ave?
You can ask him!
"From the moment Thomas arrived on the Court, he has been a committed originalist; he believes the Constitution should be interpreted as the words were understood by the men who wrote it. “When faced with a clash of constitutional principle and a line of unreasoned cases wholly divorced from the text, history, and structure of our founding document, we should not hesitate to resolve the tension in favor of the Constitution’s original meaning,” Thomas wrote in an opinion from 2005."
"When interpreting a constitutional provision,” Thomas wrote earlier this year, “the goal is to discern the most likely public understanding of that provision at the time it was adopted.” To that end, he plumbs the words of the framers and the eighteenth-century (and earlier) thinkers who influenced Jefferson, Madison, and their contemporaries. No other Justice, not even Scalia, studies the historical record with as much care, and enthusiasm, as Thomas. In June, Thomas dissented from Scalia’s opinion holding unconstitutional the California law limiting the sale of violent video games to children. “A complete understanding of the founding generation’s views on children and the parent-child relationship must therefore begin roughly a century earlier, in colonial New England,” Thomas wrote. Following a survey of child-rearing in the eighteenth century, Thomas concluded that the “founding generation would not have considered it an abridgment of ‘the freedom of speech’ to support parental authority by restricting speech that bypasses minors’ parents.”
Three cheers for the greatest Supreme Court justice of the 20th century.
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