The legal profession has no problem with Clarence Thomas publicly railing against the evils of progressivism, as long as he doesn’t mention any colleagues by name.
Last fall, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence in a Supreme Court case about ICE’s practice of arresting people based solely on the facts that they appear to be Hispanic, and were caught speaking Spanish in a public place. In his opinion in Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem, Kavanaugh argued that this unabashed racial profiling does not actually harm anyone, since those with legal status can “promptly go free” after a “typically brief” period of questioning.
Speaking at the University of Kansas earlier this month, Justice Sonia Sotomayor detailed some of the real-world implications that Kavanaugh, a well-to-do federal judge, appears not to have considered during the drafting process. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals, and probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour,” Sotomayor said. “Those hours that they took you away—nobody’s paying that person, and that makes a difference between a meal for him and his kids that night, and maybe just cold supper.”
As far as public responses to bad Supreme Court decisions go, this qualifies as pretty tame: a substantive, factually grounded criticism of a particular aspect of a particular opinion. Yet on Wednesday, Sotomayor nevertheless apologized to Kavanaugh, releasing a brief statement in which she expressed “regret” for her “inappropriate” and “hurtful” comments.
Just a few hours later, at an appearance at the University of Texas, Justice Clarence Thomas took the stage in front of several hundred law students and delivered the functional equivalent of a CPAC keynote address. In it, he bemoaned the emergence of a national sense of “cynicism, rejection, hostility, and animus toward our country and its ideals,” and criticized political leaders for their insufficient “devotion” to “traditional morality,” “free enterprise,” and “religious piety.” He blasted progressivism as an effort to “undo” the Declaration of Independence’s “commitment to equality, natural law, and natural rights,” and to “replace…our form of government.”
To leave no doubt about how he really feels, Thomas also asserted that progressivism “requires of the people a subservience and weakness” that is “incompatible” with the Constitution, and linked it to the rises of Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, and Adolf Hitler.
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