WELL, YES: Why doesn’t Clarence Thomas get his due? He’s a black man who challenged liberal orthodoxy.

Mainly, though, it’s that Thomas, throughout his career, never wavered from a set of principles that many liberals don’t think a black man can legitimately hold. He believes in individual rights, not group rights, a view enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. He opposes racial preferences both because they are bad policy and because they have no basis in the Constitution. Thomas held those views long before he arrived on the court, but they have been powerfully expressed in many of his opinions.

The point of such treatment is not just to minimize Thomas’s accomplishments, but to warn any black jurists who want to follow in his footsteps that they, too, will be marginalized and abused.