Clarence Thomas says marriage equality ruling should be overturned 

[Behind the Aegis]

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas urged the U.S. Supreme Court to feel they are not bound to upholding precedent. The case was about legal double jeopardy, in which you can’t be tried twice for the same crime. By a 7-2 vote, the Court upheld current interpretation of the law, allowing both state and federal governments to pursue the same charges against an Alabama man.

Thomas wrote a separate concurring opinion, however, that the Supreme Court should reconsider how it respects legal precedent (or stare decisis). He said the justices should not uphold precedents that are “demonstrably erroneous,” and the case he suggested to make his argument was Oberfell v. Hodges, the case that made marriage equality a national right in 2015.

“I write separately to address the proper role of the doctrine of stare decisis,” Thomas said in his opinion. “In my view, the Court’s typical formulation of the stare decisis standard does not comport with our judicial duty under Article III because it elevates demonstrably erroneous decisions—meaning decisions outside the realm of permissible interpretation—over the text of the Constitution and other duly enacted federal law.”

He cited Chief Justice Roberts’ dissent in the marriage equality case.

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Just remember, after they come for my marriage, yours may not be far behind. Speak out!

[Skittles]

1. fuck him

he's a homophobic piece of garbage

[pangaia]

26. beat me to it...

[Skittles]

34. this has been very much overlooked by people commenting on Anita Hill

she was trying to save us from what would become hands down one of the worst Supreme Court justices *EVER*

He is DISGUSTING beyond belief, completely unqualified and UNFIT.

[Hekate]

38. Took the words right out of my mouth

That was my immediate response.

[JaneQPublic]

2. Pretty judgmental...

... considering his own marriage was illegal not too long ago.

[Demovictory9]

3. he is such a bigot

[Maru Kitteh]

4. He and Trump need to gorge themselves on as much fried food

as possible so cholesterol can do it’s patriotic duty and rid us of this madness

[malaise]

5. There are folks who would like to overturn his inter-racial marriage

Fugg the tool - Uncle Tom

[dalton99a]

6. Another reason why Democrats must expand the court.

We're not dealing with normal people anymore

[MagickMuffin]

7. And . . . Does he think interracial marriages should be revoked as well???

Maybe someone should ask him about it.

[smirkymonkey]

8. Interesting how someone who was once a victim of marriage discrimination now

sees fit to discriminate against others for the same thing. What a flaming hypocrite. Fuck him!

[Va Lefty]

9. Is anybody surprised by this? When someone shows you who they are, believe them

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

10. This, from a man whose marriage would not have been legal not all that long ago

in his own state.

Hypocrisy, hypocrisy, hypocrisy.

[bitterross]

11. Right after Loving v. Virgina Clarence.

F you and your wife. You got yours and you just love keeping other people oppressed so you can feel better about yourself. So you can feel you won more than everyone else.

[Buckeyeblue]

12. He should have to recuse himself

In all of these right wing cases, because his wife is making bug bucks by being part of of an ultra conservative organization. She makes far more than he does. Would she be just as welcome if he was liberal judge?

I get the spouses should be free to pursue their interests but what she does pushes the boundaries.

[LuvNewcastle]

45. They got caught trying to get away with not paying taxes on some of her income.

It was several years ago. He should have been impeached then.

[Buckeyeblue]

46. Right. And there is some sort of ethics form that he left the income off of

And then claimed it was an oversight. It was close to $800k. Quite the oversight.

[sarabelle]

13. Clarence Thomas is the one thing I will hold against Joe Biden forever...but I will vote for

Biden if he is the nominee. Go Joe!

[emmaverybo]

23. It's Clarence Thomas you should hold responsible for Clarence Thomas's behavior Biden managed to

get Hill a hearing against Republican resistance, voted against Thomas, twice, and was not among the members who vocally discredited her during the hearings. Biden has been on record as always championing her credibility, which yes, given her complaints fell 1O years later and that she had maintained a relationship of sorts with Thomas, were easy to discount.
Simpson, Grassley, Specter, Heflin were the ones she should have been speaking out against next to Thomas who cynically misappropriated painful Black history to his own case when he called the hearings a “high tech lynching,”thereby shutting down the white male Dems on the committee except for Joe who got in some jabs.
Edward Kennedy was all but not present.
Neatly, Republicans had handed a kind of Sophie’s choice to Dems in nominating Thomas, a hyper conservative, to fill Thurgood Marshall’s seat. Thomas became only the second Black person in
history to go on to the Supreme Court.
At the time, this hearing and its outcome was never a case of Biden vs. Hill, but deconstruction has
afforded absolute freedom with the truth to anti-Biden folks.
Get a transcript or see what you can of the hearings on YouTube. I watched them in the context of the times. No, Hill did not have a great many black people in her corner. Thomas had many more.
Biden comes away far better than other Dems and miles from the sick stuff Heflin threw Hill’s way.
Biden was not her defense attorney. Her defense of herself, her own credibility, she understood out the gate would be required. She was not very effective, which is understandable.
What is not is why she blames Biden more than those who harassed and humiliated her.

[Skittles]

24. whataboutism

[emmaverybo]

25. No actually. They were the true villains, not Biden. And yes, to this day the process is flawed.

We do not vet Supreme Court nominees with even the same thoroughness an FBI or Fed Marshall applicant, or even, in the case of many PD’s, a police candidate would be background checked.
And in the case of sex abuse or harassment (Ms. Hill complained of verbal sex harassment) which can not go forward as a criminal charge, we should never have open hearings in a non-trial setting pitting accuser against accused in what can only become a partisan circus, another source of trauma for alleged victim.
So Biden, who admittedly negotiated a hearing—otherwise there would have been none—had this tremendous leeway in format, could cut off Republicans, force the Dems to hard questioning? Decide a time line allowing for him to subpoena a reluctant witness?
No!
The one thing Biden won’t say, but I will, is that Thomas, complicit with his craven sponsors, played the race card. He will also not say that Hill’s case was not a slam dunk. And she could not explain her ongoing contact with Thomas unless she admitted what she should never have been ashamed about: she needed his recommendation. She needed to network with him.
A woman of color in that day was far more expendable than the nominee who represented the many, many Black males excluded from power by guys who looked just like the men on the
hearing committee, on both sides. And no, Black women, their aspirations, their representation, their activism was not, on behalf of their agency, a thing then,
Get yourself a transcript or a video and then get back to me. A whole transcript.

[mr_lebowski]

35. Very well said Emma ... I'm with you on this one ...

It's unfortunate we ended up stuck with Thomas, but it's by no means all on Joe. This wasn't the #MeToo days, and we're talking about the sort of verbal sexual harassment that was still considered de rigeur, sadly, for young attractive women in the workplace at the time. And she didn't shun him socially afterward ...

I felt like he did about all he could have done at the time, and the whole thing was a political minefield for Democratic leaders.

[emmaverybo]

36. "Political minefield" for the Dems. YOU said it right! Bottom line, Biden was against Thomas, as

his vote demonstrated, and for Ms. Hill, whose credibility and courage he has lauded for years.

[Hortensis]

41. Mostly agree. Although he could have done more,

and I believe Biden and his fellow Democrats should have kept this very unfit person off the court, support for Thomas continued to rise during the hearings, including something like 3/4 of all blacks. Thomas's claim that that the senate confirmation hearings were a "white collar lynching" may have been a disgustingly cynical lie, but he didn't invent what was already an old phrase evoking real attacks on many other black people.

In any case, they didn't have a looking glass into today's era, so didn't know the corruption in the Republican Party would grow and morph it into an authoritarian, fascistic monster. Even Gingrich's language as a "mechanism of control," which infused into the culture the ideas that Democrats were sick, radical liberal traitors and that any press coverage exposing what they were doing was lies from "liberal, elite media", was mostly in the future.

[emmaverybo]

44. Biden voted against Thomas twice. He could have subpoenaed the reluctant witness and treated her

as a hostile witness but legal counsel had advised against that believing it would not help but perhaps damage Hill’s case. Biden has said perhaps he should have brought her in as a hostile. He could have yelled his head off at Heflin when he called Hill delusional and a fantasist.
He could have talked about the political minefield and how it scared the Dems present so that they barely lay a glove on Thomas.
But we see today that hearing protocol does not allow a chairperson to stop the Gym Jordans and Mike Goetz’s.
Honestly, there was not much at all Biden could have done and the outcome was part of the whole rigged thing.
The grace is in what Biden has never said to try to get himself off the hook. But enough. I hope he stops apologizing for the whole mess.

[CurtEastPoint]

14. Hello black man with white wife! Loving v. Virginia? Asshole.

[Zambero]

16. Climbing up the civil rights and affirmative action ladder

Once he found himself in a lofty enough position, Thomas set about doing everything in his power to pull the ladder up and out of reach, lest others might benefit as he had.

[CincyDem]

15. Maybe his next desent will highlight the difference between Oberfell and Loving.

That would be a literary pretzel worth reading.

[demosincebirth]

17. He speaks?

[Amaryllis]

18. See how he feels wehn they go after BRown VS Board of Education.

[TomSlick]

19. I would not defend Thomas, J. He is usually beyond a reasonable defense.

However, Thomas J.'s citation to Roberts C.J.'s dissent in Obergefell had nothing to do with the ruling in that case. Rather, the citation was for the purpose of making his argument against stare decisis when, in his view, the precedent is erroneous. The argument against stare decisis is dangerous to the very foundation of our legal system. However, as dangerous as Thomas, J's position seems clearly to be, it is not a direct attack on Obergefell (at least no more than any other precedent with which he disagrees).

The dissent by Ginsburg, J. also alarms me. I can make the argument that the separate sovereigns rule in double jeopardy cases can have a seemingly unjust result. However, the rule is the result of venerable precedent. To abandon such precedent puts the concept of stare decisis at risk. If stare decisis fails, so does the concept of equal justice under the law.

While I am concerned anytime I disagree with Ginsburg, J., it should alarm her when she agrees with Thomas, J.

[SHRED]

20. He's an activist judge

[JudyM]

47. This. No objectivity, no genuine respect for democracy.

[Cha]

21. Joe Biden says LGBT+ rights will be his number one priority if he wins 2020 election

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1287&pid=138280

[StarfishSaver]

22. Next, maybe he'll overturn Loving v. Virginia, so the State can roust him and Ginny out of their bed

and prosecute them for miscegenation - as happened to Mildred and Richard Loving, who brought the landmark case that Thomas' "I don't need no danged precedent" position could jeopardize.

[COLGATE4]

27. Slappy is just trying to somehow be relevant now in

the waning years of his irrelevant life on the court. The living proof of Lincoln's thought that "better to keep one's mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and prove it."

[Freethinker65]

28. Irony is dead

[sakabatou]

29. So he'll divorce his wife?

[TruckFump]

31. No.

He would not have to divorce her if Loving got overturned. There would be no interracial marriages.

[TruckFump]

30. Geeeeeeeeeeez!

The Marriage Equality ruling was based on Loving v. Virginia. Helloooooooooooooooooo, Clarence. You really, really wanna do that -- overturn gay marriage? What's next to go? Loving?

What an absolute idiot.

[TygrBright]

32. Clarence can kiss my pasty-white bisexual ass. n/t

[emmaverybo]

37. That is a classic.

[MarcA]

33. Perhaps start with Santa Clara vs. Southern Pacific or Citizens United.

How about those Clarence?

[Kid Berwyn]

39. Something is wrong with that guy.

No sense of history or time, for a start.

No understanding of law, either, take Loving v Virginia.

[orleans]

40. he's a fucking freak and

never should have been allowed to sit court-side.

fuck him

[Celerity]

42. Fuck this homophobic piece of shit. The day the US invalidates

our marriage is the day before we are out. May leave before that. It is good to hold multiple passports. Options FTW.

IF Rump wins re-election, and we fail to retake the Senate and the SCOTUS goes 7-2 or even 8-1 hard RW, I fully expect most all major civil rights cases post Brown v Board (and including Brown too) to be reversed and binned.

This is how the US breaks up.

Again, fuck Thomas, with a rusty spanner.

[Mike Nelson]

43. I wonder if...

… this might be the next goal, if he and his allies are able to ban abortion... I think it may be the next logical step. I would have to figure out their plan, but I think it will be easier - even though the public support for the idea is not great. Of course, if the have the Judges, why concern yourself public support?