Giving Thomas His Due

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Weekly Standard: Giving Thomas His Due The justice who stands alone

JUL 20, 2015, VOL. 20, NO. 42 • BY DAN MCLAUGHLIN

For political observers, the story of the Supreme Court’s recently concluded term was the clash of two great colliding forces. On one side stood the Court’s always-unified liberal bloc, fortified by the apostasies of Republican-appointed Justice Anthony Kennedy and sometimes Chief Justice John Roberts, most prominently in cases involving same-sex marriage and Obamacare. On the other side stood Justice Antonin Scalia, a lion in winter, caustic and witty in his dissents. But for close watchers of the Court, another theme ran through this term: the breadth and depth of Justice Clarence Thomas’s institutional critique of the Court itself for straying from the Constitution, failing to apply its own precedents evenhandedly, neglecting the separation of powers and federalism, and allowing itself to be manipulated by runaway executive agencies.

 

Like a medieval monk preserving Western culture through the Dark Ages, Thomas soldiered doggedly on, carrying the largest writing workload on the Court, pressing his point in cases small and large, sometimes at odds with his conservative colleagues, often alone. Perhaps history will never return to the path he is marking, but no one can say we weren’t warned