Clarence Thomas and the Self-Governing Court Docket

When Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court docket in 1991, he discovered with dismay that it was deciphering a really completely different Structure from the one the framers had written―the one which had established a federal authorities manned by the individuals’s personal elected representatives, charged with defending residents’ inborn rights whereas leaving them free to work out their particular person happiness themselves, of their households, communities, and states. He discovered that his predecessors on the Court docket had been complicit in step one of this transformation, when within the 1870s they defanged the Civil Conflict amendments supposed to provide full citizenship to his fellow black People. Within the subsequent era, Woodrow Wilson, dismissing the framers and their work as out of date, got down to exchange legal guidelines made by the individuals’s representatives with guidelines made by extremely educated, trendy, supposedly nonpartisan “specialists,” an concept Franklin Roosevelt supersized within the New Deal businesses that he acknowledged had no constitutional warrant. Then, beneath Chief Justice Earl Warren within the Fifties and Sixties, the 9 set about realizing Wilson’s dream of a Supreme Court docket sitting as a everlasting constitutional conference, conjuring up legal guidelines out of smoke and mirrors and justifying them as expressions of the spirit of the age.

Thomas, a new addition to the Court, spent eight years in administrative roles before joining. He harbored doubts about the new governmental system, valuing the concept of free, self-governing citizens shaping their own destinies. His background in segregated Savannah and experiences with different ideologies led him to question the authority of unelected experts and justices. In his numerous opinions over a quarter-century on the Court, he has critiqued the constitutional basis of the current order, aiming to restore the original, more authentic form of governance. The Court now seems poised to follow the path he has paved.

In a free and self-governing nation, having independent-minded and self-reliant residents is crucial. The biography of Thomas, vividly presented here, exemplifies the type of character that the founders believed would always define Americans. The future of America relies on its culture and institutions to cultivate even more individuals of this caliber.