"Hey c'mon; this is the wrong black guy. Just say it!"

This is the trailer for the documentary that is coming out at the end of this month on the life of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Is Justice Thomas laying groundwork for taking a new look at Roe v. Wade?

What is Justice Clarence Thomas up to? In a recent ruling, he wrote in part,

"A demonstrably incorrect judicial decision ... is tantamount to making law, and adhering to it both disregards the supremacy of the Constitution and perpetuates a usurpation of the legislative power."

Some on the Left think he is referring to Roe v. Wade, and they are worried. Read more here.

Biden to Specter: Anita Hill was lying!

Mollie Hemingway writes in the Federalist about the Clarence Thomas hearings chaired by Joe Biden.

...Much revisionist history has been drafted by partisans who oppose Thomas’s judicial philosophy. It’s true that Biden did his best to help Hill, including concealing witnesses who would have been a disaster under examination. But even he admitted to his colleague Specter that Hill was lying.

Hill’s allegations against Thomas were far from convincing when she made them, and the passage of time has done nothing to bolster the veracity of her accusations. But based on the uncritical acceptance of the revisionist history of the Clarence Thomas hearings, it’s crystal clear that journalists would do well to familiarize themselves with the actual facts of what happened and call Biden to account for his treatment of Thomas.

Read more here.

"You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. -- U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree."

As we get closer to whatever hearings might be held on the Gorsuch nomination, let's take a step back to 1991 and listen to Justice Clarence Thomas's speech to Democrats who were trying to smear him.

Senator Biden: The committee will please come to order. Judge, tough day and tough night for you, I know. Let me ask, do you have anything you'd like to say before we begin? And I understand that your preference is -- which is totally and completely understandable -- that we go one hour tonight, 30 minutes on each side. Is -- Am I correct in that?

Judge Thomas: That's right.

Senator Biden: Do you have anything you'd like to say?

Judge Thomas: Senator, I would like to start by saying unequivocally, uncategorically, that I deny each and every single allegation against me today that suggested in any way that I had conversations of a sexual nature or about pornographic material with Anita Hill, that I ever attempted to date her, that I ever had any personal sexual interest in her, or that I in any way ever harassed her.

A second, and I think more important point. I think that this today is a travesty. I think that it is disgusting. I think that this hearing should never occur in America. This is a case in which this sleaze, this dirt, was searched for by staffers of members of this committee, was then leaked to the media, and this committee and this body validated it and displayed it at prime time over our entire nation. How would any member on this committee, any person in this room, or any person in this country, would like sleaze said about him or her in this fashion? Or this dirt dredged up and this gossip and these lies displayed in this manner? How would any person like it?

The Supreme Court is not worth it. No job is worth it. I am not here for that. I am here for my name, my family, my life, and my integrity. I think something is dreadfully wrong with this country when any person, any person in this free country would be subjected to this.

This is not a closed room. There was an FBI investigation. This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It's a national disgrace.

And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I'm concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. -- U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.

hat tip American Rhetoric

Footprints

Ann Althouse makes an interesting observation today about a New Yorker article by Jeffrey Toobin. Toobin writes about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas under the headline, "Clarence Thomas's Twenty-Five Years Without Footprints." How easy it is for liberals to deny the existence of a black man! Toobin presumes to know that the two Chief Justices under whom Thomas has served did not "trust" Thomas to write the majority opinion in any significant cases. Althouse writes,

How does Toobin know enough to speak about "trust"? Perhaps he's merely relying on Thomas predilection for strong originalist principle:

Originalism and adherence to text is a bad thing in Toobin's view, but to describe it is to destroy the assertion in the headline. These are very distinct footprints.

Read more here.

Standing apart

Dan McLaughlin writes in The Weekly Standard about the stellar record of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

...This is the second time in three years that Thomas has written the most opinions, and they are not filled with breezy rhetoric, but thick with citation to the roots of our constitutional system, from the Magna Carta to John Locke to Blackstone’s Commentaries.

But mere volume is not the measure of Thomas’s jurisprudence. For that, one must take a closer look at the many times he has stood against the prevailing winds, warning his colleagues that the Court should consider its own errors and limitations. The cases in which he has split from Scalia — his closest colleague philosophically — are telling.

...Clarence Thomas is an affable man, if one who does not forget his scars, and by all accounts he gets on well enough with his colleagues. But given that few of them other than Scalia bother responding to his lone opinions, one wonders if some of them look at him a little funny—“that guy who keeps going on about the Constitution.” He is known to prefer the company of almost anyone to the company of his fellow judges and lawyers; he meets more often than any other justice with groups of visitors to the Court and travels the country in his RV during the Court’s recesses. But that distance makes him uniquely suited among the justices to look at this country not from the perspective of a member of the judicial high priesthood, but as a citizen ruled by it. Some critics suggest that he may be biased by the fact that his wife is active in Tea Party groups, but after his nearly quarter of a century on the Court, suggesting that Thomas’s view of the Constitution is influenced by the Tea Party is rather like suggesting that Newton’s physics were influenced by Einstein.

...Thomas’s opinions this term form a coherent whole, one that places no trust in institutions—in the wisdom of judges, the expertise of bureaucrats, or the evenhandedness of either—but depends instead on clear, written rules and structural checks and balances. And his philosophy, while grounded in the same principles as our Constitution itself, should not surprise us. Thomas is not so far removed from his upbringing in segregated Georgia that he cannot remember what it was like to live in a place and time in which the government was staffed and run by people who had no intention of treating you fairly.

Two strategies are available to a citizen confronted by such a government. One is to keep for himself as large a space as possible free of the government, in which to exercise true liberty. The other is to insist on the punctilious observance of the letter of the law. The whims of administrative agencies and the discretion of judges to fashion new rights and rules according to their own policy preferences threaten both of these strategies, to the detriment of whomever the people in power regard as beneath their concern. It is perhaps a supreme irony, but a fitting one, that the man most concerned with keeping alight the flame of these old concepts of liberty and dignity is the justice of the Supreme Court who grew up under a government that wished to accord him neither liberty nor dignity.

Read more here.

Hollywood activist slurs Justice Thomas for telling the truth

Can I confess that I have never seen any of the Star Trek shows? Therefore, I did not know who George Takei is. Wikipedia says he is an American actor, director, author, and activist. Okay, now I understand why he is angrily celebrating the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage by making racist slurs against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas: Emma-Jo Morris reports at the Free Beacon,

George Takei went on a racist rant Monday in an interview in Phoenix, unleashing on conservative Justice Clarence Thomas in response to Thomas’ comments regarding the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, NewsBusters reported.

“He is a clown in blackface sitting on the Supreme Court. He gets me that angry. He doesn’t belong there,” Takei said, later adding, “This man does not belong on the Supreme Court. He is an embarrassment. He is a disgrace to America. I’ll say it on camera.”

Takei’s rage came in light of the Justice’s contrary stance on the recent equal marriage decision, where the Court ruled 5-4 that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage. Thomas released a statement saying that the government does not grant human dignity, and as such cannot take it away. Thomas argued that human dignity is inherent, and that the Supreme Court cannot issue it.

As for Takei’s “blackface” remark, liberals seem pretty pleased by it.

And he will suffer absolutely no consequences.

Uppity

Victor Davis Hanson asks why do liberals hate certain people so much? For example,
Sarah Palin:

Middle-class white conservative Christian moms from Alaska are not what liberals mean when they talk of diversity.

Why do liberals despise Rush Limbaugh more so than, say, conservatives hate Bill Maher or Chris Matthews? Yes, he is vastly more successful and influential, and does them, as the president so frequently whines, a lot of political damage. Of course, the Left hates the fact that Limbaugh went from middle-class to a billionaire, and without the proper educational credentials and anguish along the way to contextualize his wealth. (Keeping millions of listeners entertained for three hours, 250 days a year, is supposedly easy; in contrast, teaching a graduate seminar fifteen times a semester on your dissertation is an ordeal, full of deep thinking and contemplative heavy lifting.)

Liberals hate entire countries too, especially Israel. Why? Is it because unlike its neighbors it follows the rule of law? Is Israel too fair to gays and women?

Liberals hate Israel because like a Palin or Limbaugh, it seems too self-assured. Does not Jerusalem care that Harvard or Oxford professors despise it? Cannot it do the calculus of seven million versus the 300 million who hate it in the Middle East? Apparently not.

Liberals sure hate the Koch brothers. At first glance, this too baffles. It is not the money per se. After all, they idolize George Soros, who predates the Kochs in subsidizing political causes.

And like Palin, the Kochs have pretensions, in their case of giving to the fine arts and humanities, as if they think they are something more than they are. Yes, they are uppity as well.

Then there is Clarence Thomas. Liberals despise him too. He is a free thinker who makes no apologies for his past or present. Moreover, he is a far better representative of the black American experience of the late 20th century than, say, is the Hawaii prep-schooled, choom-ganger Barry Dunham, son of a white PhD and rather odious Kenyan hustler, whom we now know in his final and most successful reincarnation as Barack Obama.

Finally, liberals really hate Fox News. It trumps the audience of MSNBC and CNN combined and then some. Envy of its success accounts for a lot of the ire. Fox really believes they are a news agency.

How uppity is that?

Read more here.