America’s longest-serving justice is pulling the Supreme Court to the right
in June, one jurist voting to scrap fifty years of abortion rights saw an opportunity to go further. For Justice Clarence Thomas, shredding the 1973 ruling
was just the beginning. He wrote that Supreme Court decisions protecting the rights to contraception and to sexual intimacy and marriage equality for gays and lesbians rested on the same faulty logic. Since they, like, are “demonstrably erroneous”, the court had a “duty” to strike them down, he argued. None of the other five conservatives signed his opinion. But America’s most conservative and longest-serving justice is influential. He has transformed lonely views into majority opinions.
Mr Thomas was born poor in a small town in Georgia in 1948. After his father abandoned his family, he was raised by his grandfather. He spent his last two years of high school and the beginning of college at a seminary. Mr Thomas then jettisoned his plan to join the priesthood and pivoted to leftist black nationalism.
After law school Mr Thomas joined the Missouri attorney-general’s office under John Danforth, a Republican. He later moved to Washington to serve as an aide to Mr Danforth, who had been elected to the Senate. Mr Thomas became a judge in 1990 when George H.W. Bush appointed him to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and, 16 months later, to the seat that Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American on the Supreme Court and a civil-rights icon, would soon vacate.
Famously reticent during oral arguments for most of his 31 years on the court, Justice Thomas began to speak up in virtual hearings during the covid-19 pandemic. His jurisprudence has never been shy. He did not recuse himself from cases involving challenges to the result of the general election in 2020 even though his wife, Ginni Thomas, had put pressure on Donald Trump’s chief of staff and more than two dozen Arizona legislators to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.
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