THE JUSTICE WHO STANDS ALONE: Giving Clarence Thomas His Due:

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.

Supreme Court justices are often little known or understood by the general public, and in Thomas’s case, his image is further obscured by his race, the controversies surrounding his 1991 confirmation, and his famous refusal to ask questions at oral argument. Thomas’s critics outside the legal profession tend to fall back on open attacks on his race (a “clown in blackface,” said Star Trek actor, Facebook meme-sharer, and gay-rights crusader George Takei recently) or unsubtly coded attacks (such as Harry Reid’s assertion that Thomas wasn’t smart or a good writer like Scalia, though Reid couldn’t name any of his opinions).

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