Is Clarence Thomas the Supreme Court's Future?

NY Times ^ | 08-02-2018 | Linda Greenhouse

[NRx]

...Against this backdrop, I want to focus on Justice Clarence Thomas and specifically on the record he compiled during the past term. There is something almost discordant about including Justice Thomas in a discussion of “the future” because his highly personal and eccentric jurisprudence would take the court and the Constitution hurtling backward into the past.

That’s no great revelation. He has long insisted that the only legitimate way to interpret a constitutional provision is to give it the “public meaning” it supposedly had at the time it was written. So in 2011, for example, he dissented from a majority opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia that struck down, on First Amendment grounds, a California law that made it a crime to sell a “violent” video game to a minor without parental permission. “The founding generation,” Justice Thomas wrote in dissent, “would not have considered it an abridgment of ‘the freedom of speech’ to support parental authority by restricting speech that bypasses minor’s parents.”

While Justice Thomas’s unyielding view of originalism has been evident since he took his seat on the court 27 years ago, his output in the most recent term was little short of astonishing. In a term that produced only 59 signed opinions, I counted six important and long-enduring precedents that Justice Thomas would have wiped off the books as inconsistent with the original understanding

[Pollster1]

kids get money other than from their parents. the store is the appropriate choke point.

Is it? Why is it government's role to control that purchase for the family? I'm okay with store policy or even the clerk refusing to make a sale, but I get squeamish every time even more government force is introduced into our lives.

[morphing libertarian]

sometimes in a”free market” where adult items are sold, kids have to be prevented from making the purchase. you may disagree. i showed run my first post parents cannot always control what their kids by or the source of their money. I want the liquor stores to not sell to my kids and i want the porn shops and video stores to not sell them adult products. i understand libertarian philosophy as well as anyone I know, , but sometimes you have to be practical and not theoretical. Protecting kids is one of those times.

[FLT-bird]

Let’s hope so. Clarence Thomas is one of the best and brightest jurists to ever sit on the Supreme Court. That he would have wiped out several bad decisions by activist left wing judges is something for which he should be praised. Let’s hope future justices will interpret the constitution according to the original intent of the Founders as it is supposed to be interpreted.

[Lazamataz]

Good old NYT, the New York Terrorists, who recently defended their hiring of a white-genocide-loving Korean-supremacist racialist for their editorial board.

Everything they write must be viewed through that hideous lens.

[Jack Hammer]

Another BS attack on one of this nation’s premier men of integrity.

[LS]

No insider info except what Thomas himself told a group of us years ago. He’d have no trouble retiring and running around the country in his Winnebago. I think he may be considering it knowing the Court is safe in Trump’s hands.

Won’t surprise me to see Trump get three more USSC picks.

(Oh, BTW, he already has a RECORD 24 Circuit court confirmations, with two more coming up next week. Trump will break the EIGHT-YEAR record in his first term alone.)

[itsahoot]

So, that means that the NYT is now the old Pravda.

I think NYT preceded Pravda, and has the same goals.

[Slyfox]

You are probably right.