Speaking in Dallas at the American Enterprise Institute conference, Clarence Thomas made many specious and radical claims against the left, not at all fitting for a U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
In a lengthy interview and Q&A conducted by John Yoo, the man who wrote the torture memo for George W. Bush, Thomas neglected to mention his wife's right-wing activism, including her active participation in trying to overthrow the 2020 presidential election.
Thomas claimed that liberal Supreme Court nominees were never treated badly by the right. Obviously he was in a coma when Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was smeared by Republicans as being pro-pedophile and pro-child porn.
Thomas then spent a lot of time bemoaning the leaked draft opinion from Alito overturning Roe v. Wade, but made it all about the leak itself.
"If someone had said that one line of one opinion would be leaked by anyone, you would say, ‘That’s impossible. No one would ever do that.’ There was such a belief in the rule of law, a belief in the court that that was verboten,” Thomas droned.
He continued whining, "When you lose that trust, especially in the institution that I’m in, it changes the institution fundamentally. You begin to look over your shoulder. It’s like kind of an infidelity that you can explain it, but you can’t undo it.”
The court lost the trust of the American people when the GOP stole Merrick Garland's seat by refusing to hold hearings or even meet with Obama's nominee. Then they reversed course and filled Ruth Bade Ginsberg's seat with lightning speed to stack the court with extreme religious right-wing justices hand-picked by the Federalist society. This was done specifically to overturn Roe v. Wade which, by the way, all the conservative justices had told the Senate under oath they wouldn't do. It's not the leak, that caused the public to lose trust, Justice Thomas, it's your actions.
Old Parkland Conference from Sound Ideas Production Grp on Vimeo.
At the 1:29:00 mark or so, Thomas continually claims the right never acts inappropriately.
"And we've never done it," he said. “You would never visit Supreme Court justices’ houses when things didn’t go our way. We didn’t throw temper tantrums. It is incumbent on us to always act appropriately, and not to repay tit for tat.”
"We are supposed to conduct ourselves better than they conduct themselves," Thomas pronounced.
Maybe he should speak with Officer Fanone, since he survived the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, where thousands of people cheered on by Thomas' wife didn't conduct themselves too well when things didn't go their way.
Thomas claimed the only credible thing the left could be upset about was that Garland didn't get a hearing. He then justified it by citing Joe Biden's remarks from decades earlier, asserting that Biden made an actual rule that no nominee would ever get a vote in an election year. What absolute BS.
