Page 19 - Pierce County Lawyer - March April 2025

MARCH/APRIL EDITORIAL B Y R O B H E N R Y
Inside Justice Thomas,
There Are Two Wolves…
RIGHT?
BOOK 1:
The People’s Justice: Clarence Thomas and the
Constitutional Stories that Define Him
by Amul Thapar, Simon and Schuster (2023)
There was a time not too long ago when Senators could
be seen walking down K Street with gold bars rattling
around in their briefcase like Scrooge McDuck. Foreign
dignitaries could be seen expensing astronomical happy-hour
tabs at a gilded hotel with the President’s name on it—located
a block from the White House—right before meeting with the
Big Man himself to practice The Art of the Deal. And around
that same time, the public began to learn in great detail how
various Supreme Court Justices were also “just having fun with
friends” in their off-time.
Public graft and other varieties of corruption are not new,
of course, but they remain ubiquitous. Occasionally there
are consequences and even prosecutions—if one’s graft is
cartoonishly absurd enough, or if one’s falsehood-to-truth ratio
nears infinity, aka “The Santos Threshold.” Generally though,
large amounts of corrupt behavior from our highest officials go
unpunished, and are even tolerated.
There could be many reasons for this—like the general
difficulty of proving any crime (fact); or, perhaps there’s an
unwritten baseball-like Code between the two parties, and
everybody is on the take, including the press (fantasy). The
main reason we tolerate it from our elected officials is that we
prefer The Democratic Process™ to run its course. When the
system is working, rotten representatives that are deemed too
putrid will get clipped and voted out. Then, in their place, the
fresh clean bud of a new representative will sprout.
The Process doesn't apply to unelected officials though—
federal judges in particular. Ours is the world’s only major
constitutional democracy in which Justices have lifetime
tenure. So, when the country grows and ripens a rotten federal
judge, natural expiration is the only remedy. That fact—
combined with the carefully crafted myth of an “apolitical
institution” that is “self-governed” —means that when news
drops of Supreme Court justices engaged in long-standing
behavior that is undeniably corrupt-ish, it just hits differently.
There is no defense or legitimate excuse for the Justices’
behavior that was reported. Partisans hardly tried, arguing
the technicalities of the lazy coverup reporting errors instead.
Alito gave it a go—publishing a defense so preposterous it
calls into question his basic capacity to reason. Wisely, no
other Justice really commented. The public response has also
been predictably futile and impotent: How Was That Legal?
Will Anyone Be Held Accountable? Impeachment? Court
Expansion? Term Limits? Recusal From Specific Benefactor’s
Cases? Basic Oversight? Pinky Swears to Do Better? All a Big
No? Gosh, Then what can be done?... Nothing apparently,
except adopt a new “Supreme Court Code of Conduct” that
reiterates the basic rules of conduct already in place for every
other lawyer, jurist, and federal employee in the country.
None of that really interests me, though. What does and
has always interested me is the inner workings of Clarence
Thomas. These new developments have only increased my
curiosity. I am not intrigued by this jurisprudence or his
‘work’ on the Bench. There is nothing original about Thomas’s
brand of Originalism, the roots of which reach way back to
Robert Bork. Thomas perfected Originalism and carried the
project across the goal line, and his long campaign of lonely
dissents are now the bedrock of major rulings and brand new
‘doctrines.’ He could be the most influential Justice of my
lifetime. Super.
But I want to know the man behind the man…behind the
robe…behind that big Winnebago steering wheel driving to
National Parks; the foundational beliefs and motivations that
explain why, in a slowly shuffling coterie of Ivy League cookie-
cutouts (two current Justices were prep-school classmates),
Thomas has always been wholly unique.
There simply has to be more to the man than venal depravity.
Maybe there is a beleaguered angel on his shoulder that has
simply been outvoted 2-1 on every decision since the turn
of this century? Surely there are the proverbial ‘two wolves’
within?
…
Near the bottom of my mostly decorative stack of books to
read is a 2019 biography by Corey Robin. It promises to answer
Continued on next page.
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