Remembering what was done to Clarence Thomas.

[Geee]

American Spectator

 

Here we go again.

The Justice Stephen Breyer retirement announcement hits the headlines, and the media and Democrats are gushing over a Biden promise. To wit: he will nominate a “black woman” to Breyer’s Court seat.

Let’s be clear. What’s about to unfold is decidedly not about nominating a black woman. To refresh, recall the case of Clarence Thomas.

In June of 1991, Justice Thurgood Marshall announced he was retiring from the Supreme Court. Justice Marshall had been an appointee of Democrat President Lyndon Johnson — and notably was the first black to sit on the Court.

 

Thus it was that the moment Marshall announced his retirement the New York Times was writing that Republican President George H. W. Bush was now under “pressure to appoint a black justice.” Indeed he was. With that, he turned to the young Federal Appeals Court Judge Clarence Thomas, a black man, for the nomination. And in a blink the American Left and Democrats went crazy.

Former Bush Vice President Dan Quayle, writing in his memoirs Standing Firm, said the moment the Thomas Nomination was announced:

[W]e knew that the long knives of “political correctness” were being sharpened for use against this strong, independent man who did not fit the liberals’ idea of what a black jurist — in fact, any black man — should stand for. 

… But the forces lining up against Thomas were considerable, and the nature and rhetoric of their opposition was sometimes almost sickening. (Washington Post African-American) Columnist Carl Rowan said that “if you gave Thomas a little flour on his face, you’d think you had [KKK leader] David Duke talking.” A leader from the (leftist) National Organization for Women said, “We’re going to ‘Bork’ him. We need to kill him politically,” while one black (Democrat) Congressman declared that “a black conservative is a contradiction in terms.”

All of them refused to accept that black men and women could make a rational decision, for the good of their race and the good of their country, to leave what some have called “the liberal plantation.” Even so, the administration was surprised by the number of civil rights groups, including the NAACP, who wound up opposing the nomination. I had hoped it would split the black community right down the middle and inject some freshness into the national debate. But the black civil rights leadership, bent on maintaining political correctness and their own political clout, became some of Thomas’s strongest opponents.