WASHINGTON (AP) — Clarence Thomas has been a Supreme Court justice for nearly three decades. It may finally be his moment.
1 / 7FIILE - In this Nov. 30, 2018, file photo, Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, appointed by President George H. W. Bush, sits with fellow Supreme Court justices for a group portrait at the Supreme Court Building in Washington. Thomas is now the longest-serving member of a court that has recently gotten more conservative, putting him in a unique and potentially powerful position, and he’s said he isn’t going away anytime soon.
Thomas, for the first time, is on a court where there are at least four votes for some"pretty radical" decisions, said political science professor Corey Robin, the author of a Thomas book due out in September. Robin says the question will be whether the court's more conservative justices — Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito — can get Chief Justice John Roberts, a more moderate conservative, to go along.
More than 20 of the men and women Thomas mentored as law clerks have gone on to hold political appointments in the Trump administration or been nominated to judgeships by Trump . Thomas and his wife, Virginia, herself a well-known conservative activist, have dined with the president and first lady. "He stakes out a position more forthrightly or vigorously than other justices are willing to go, but they're kind of sucked along in his wake," Rossum said, adding that, like a magnet,"Thomas drags the court in his direction. They may not go as far as he goes, but they go further than they would have otherwise."
Just this term, Thomas called on the court to reconsider a landmark 1964 First Amendment case, describing it and later decisions extending it as"policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law ." He also criticized a 1963 Supreme Court decision that guarantees a lawyer for anyone too poor to hire one. And he equated the court's Roe v.
At the high court, Thomas rarely asks questions during arguments, a contrast with his vocal colleagues. When in March he asked a question during arguments for the first time in three years, it was headline news ."Clarence knows the name of every employee in the courthouse, from the lowest position to the highest ...
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