For 30 years Clarence Thomas has sat mute... until now.

[Joinfortmill]

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-26-2022

Letters from an American:

'While we have been focused on the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade more news has come out about the attempt of Trump and his allies to overturn the government....

'...there is a relationship between the insurrection and the radical Supreme Court decisions coming out. Justice Clarence Thomas has been writing opinions and footnotes that are to the right even of the rest of the radical court, and today he suggested he would like the court to revisit the 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan decision that provides some protection to media outlets from being sued for defamation by requiring a plaintiff to prove the outlet acted with “actual malice.” Thomas wants to make it easier to sue media outlets because, he wrote, the “New York Times and its progeny have allowed media organizations and interest groups ‘to cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity.’”...

“[s]elf-protection (and protection for corrupt family members) is a huge driver of authoritarian behaviors. He feels threatened and will try and change the legal order to avoid scrutiny. Radicalized people no longer care about ‘how it looks’ to outsiders.”

'There is another link between the recent Supreme Court decisions and the January 6 attempt to destroy our democracy that creates an unprecedented situation. If Trump is prosecuted as the leader of an attempted coup, a coup that may have included some of those who voted for Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees, what does that do to their positions on the court?'

[dchill]

2. His seat on the Court is for life. There are only two...

... possible outcomes. Death or impeachment. The Supreme Court is poisoned by this man and his inability to perceive that HE is the problem - not whoever put the pubic hair on his Coke can, or liberals, or even his traitorous wife.

He, the despiser of liberals, has sat idly by for 30 years on a government stipend, mute. Now he lashes out at the very country he has professed to serve - ready to upend and destroy every "liberal" ruling he can reach out and pull before the Court. Like Trump, the position he fills was never designed to repel an ill-intentioned interloper.

And John Roberts is Chief Justice of right-wing Fight Club.

[empedocles]

3. Suspect thomas is, has always been very angry, but is now open

to being fed, - like his recent 63 page opinion.

[My opinion, he doesn't have the tools, IQ, motivation, etc., to do that kind of research].

[leftyladyfrommo]

4. He is a real wierdo. Just the look on his face says

volumes.

He is just out for revenge.

These radical groups really attract wierdos. I think some know how wierd they are and hope to find salvation for their sins and some of those compulsions and unholy drives. Of course it doesn't work. They just start having delusions about God speaking to them through the TV and go on to do awful things.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

5. The Five Worst Supreme Court Justices In American History, Ranked

In the legal community, Thomas is considered to be one of the worst SCOTUS justices in history

Link to tweet

https://thinkprogress.org/the-five-worst-supreme-court-justices-in-american-history-ranked-f725000b59e8/

5) Justice Clarence Thomas

Justice Clarence Thomas is the only current member of the Supreme Court who has explicitly embraced the reasoning of Lochner Era decisions striking down nationwide child labor laws and making similar attacks on federal power. Indeed, under the logic Thomas first laid out in a concurring opinion in United States v. Lopez, the federal minimum wage, overtime rules, anti-discrimination protections for workers, and even the national ban on whites-only lunch counters are all unconstitutional.

Though Thomas’s views are rare today, they have, sadly, not been the least bit uncommon during the Supreme Court’s history. He makes this list because, frankly, he should know better than his predecessors. As I explain in Injustices, many of the justices who resisted progressive legislation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were, like Field, motivated by ideology. Many others, however, were motivated by fear of the rapid changes state and federal lawmakers implemented in the wake of the even more rapid changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. It was possible to believe, in a world where factories, railroads, and the laws required to regulate factories and railroads were all very new things, that these laws would, as Herbert Hoover once said about the New Deal, “destroy the very foundations of our American system” by extending “government into our economic and social life.”

But Thomas has the benefit of eighty years of American history that Hoover had not witnessed when he warned of an overreaching government. In that time, the Supreme Court largely abandoned the values embraced by Justice Field, and the United States became the mightiest nation in the history of politics and the wealthiest nation in the history of money.