Doubting Thomas

Back in 1991, Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas faced a difficult burden for confirmation. He had to go up against a Democratic-Senate majority, but his entire career up to that point had been defined by taking extreme conservative positions in an effort to distinguish himself as a leading black conservative for just this opportunity.

But the same positions that perfectly situated Thomas to be nominated for the Supreme Court also posed the potential to derail his nomination before the Democratic-controlled Senate. Thomas, or those advising him on his confirmation, apparently decided that there was only one path for confirmation: lie about his beliefs.

Over and over again during his confirmation hearings, Thomas walked away from his prior right-wing positions on a litany of issues. The impression he left with the Senate was that his ideological views were by no means settled and he hadn't made up his mind on a lot of critical issues. He conveyed a sense that he was not an extremist and was open to all points of view as he decided what path to take in his legal jurisprudence and analysis.

And he almost certainly was lying. Repeatedly. Under oath. (And this doesn't even evaluate whether he was truthful about Anita Hill or when he said he had never discussed Roe v. Wade with anyone when it was issued in 1973... when he was in law school!)

Indeed, one powerful example of this is to compare his open-minded statements about Roe during his confirmation hearings with the extreme position he took during his first term on the Court in Casey. Interestingly, Thomas went from an undecided moderate to a extreme right-winger in a matter of months, an amazing transformation!

Now, a new book by ABC News legal analyst Jan Crawford Greenburg provides additional evidence of Thomas' perjury. In this WSJ op-ed that is based on her book, Greenburg tries to argue that, rather than Thomas being a follower of Scalia, in many ways Scalia was following Thomas and the more extreme positions that Thomas chose to take. Ignoring or overlooking the perjury implications of these extreme positions by Thomas, Greenburg cites examples from Thomas' first term on the court:

Immediately upon his arrival at the court, Justice Thomas was savaged by
court-watchers as Antonin Scalia's dutiful apprentice, blindly following his
mentor's lead. It's a grossly inaccurate portrayal, imbued with politically
incorrect innuendo, as documents and notes from Justice Thomas's very first days
on the court conclusively show. Far from being a Scalia lackey, the rookie
jurist made clear to the other justices that he was willing to be the solo
dissenter, sending a strong signal that he would not moderate his opinions for
the sake of comity. By his second week on the bench, he was staking out bold
positions in the private conferences where justices vote on cases. If either
justice changed his mind to side with the other that year, it was Justice Scalia
joining Justice Thomas, not the other way around.

"By his second week on the bench"? Greenburg makes this same point later in the piece as well:

But the forcefulness and clarity of Justice Thomas's views, coupled with
wrongheaded depictions of him doing Justice Scalia's bidding, created an
internal dynamic that caused the court to make an unexpected turn in his first
year.

Just nine months earlier, Thomas had repeatedly told the Judiciary Committee that he hadn't formed any firm views on a number of critical legal issues. Those statements were almost certainly lies. Yet it allowed him to garner the votes of several Democrats willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Immediately upon his 52-48 confirmation, Thomas suddenly veered violently to the right, all pretense of objectivity and fair-mindedness were gone, as he mapped out a path, Greenburg claims, even to the right of Scalia.

The reward for Thomas' perjury: a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.
- posted by Joshua @ 6:54 PM