“Utterly bizarre”
Is this a joke?
Clarence Thomas: The Best and Most Incorruptible Supreme Court Justice in U.S. History
This Friday encomium to Clarence Thomas, is it Steven Calabresi’s or The Volokh Conspiracy’s idea of a joke?
Justice Thomas’s brilliance, and commitment to originalism shine through in all of his opinions. He is more consistent, steady, and reliable than any other justice on the Supreme Court. He almost never follows precedent, but he always follows the original public meaning of the text of the Constitution. He is the very best justice out of 116 to have ever served on the U.S. Supreme Court better even than my old boss Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Thomas not only talks about the importance of being an originalist; he practices originalism in every majority opinion, concurrence, or dissent that he writes.
That’s some bad-ass weed.
“This is utterly bizarre.” — Popehat
Left wing bias, and a disinclination to read Justice Thomas’s opinions, has so skewed our public perception of him that no-one realizes what former Second Circuit Chief Judge Ralph Winter once told me is true: “Clarence Thomas is quite simply a genius.” Moreover, Justice Thomas has such a clear body of rules, which he consistently follows in case after case over 32 years on the bench that it is as obvious as the day is long that he is incorruptible in every sense of that word. Justice Thomas would never “bend” the law to please Justice Scalia, his closest friend; his wife Ginni Thomas, who is active as she has every right to be in politics, or his good and close friend; the Koch brothers; Texas billionaire Harlan Crow; or anyone else. Clarence Thomas cannot be “bought.” He is completely and utterly incorruptible as anyone who takes the time to read the opinions, which he produces prolifically can plainly see.
Why shouldn’t Clarence Thomas accept (and not declare) expensive gifts and luxury vacations from billionaires?
If Congress had adjusted for inflation the salary that Supreme Court justices made in 1969 at the end of the Warren Court, Justice Thomas would be being paid $500,000 a year, and he would not need to rely as much as he has on gifts from wealthy friends.
When was the last time Reason argued for cost-of-living adjustments? No matter. Thomas the Destitute is due what’s his.
“I thought the quotes from here were sarcastic paraphrases but here is one of the most important figures in the conservative legal movement articulating its fundamental principle: the rules do not apply to us because we are special” — Adam Serwer
Clarence Thomas grew up dirt poor as is made clear in his superb autobiography My Grandfather’s Son. He has devoted his entire professional life as a lawyer to serving in government jobs in which he has been grossly underpaid. Under these circumstances, Thomas, who again is incorruptible, as his 32 years of judicial opinions all show, has every right to accept gifts from wealthy friends.
It’s his friggin’ right, dammit! Like women’s right to bodily autonomy … except not.
So was this post by Calabresi (8/10/2023) a joke too?
Trump Is Disqualified from Being on Any Election Ballots
Don’t bother looking. A month later Professor Calabresi (Northwestern University) made “an extraordinary about-face” (New York Times, 9/18/2023):
In a letter to The Wall Street Journal, he said he had been persuaded by an opinion article in that newspaper that the provision — Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — did not apply to Mr. Trump.
That would be the “Trump is not an officer of the United States” (and the presidency not an office under the Constitution) argument soundly rejected by the Colorado Supreme Court last week.
“Let me be clear,” Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale, said [in September] on his podcast. “This is a genuinely stupid argument.”
But self-serving, so what of it? (There’s more than rum in that eggnog, ya think?)
“the crudeness of that column was something else. it’s not even really an argument so much as an assertion that clarence thomas deserves to have whatever he wants because he’s clarence thomas, which is a weird thing for a libertarian magazine to publish.” —GOLIKEHELLMACHINE
Oh, what goodies will Justice Thomas and the the Federalist Society find under their trees tomorrow morning? A little coke … I mean Koch?