When it comes to Supreme Court justices and their views of the Constitution, on the one hand there’s Clarence Thomas, and on the other there’s everyone else in the 227-year history of the Court, suggested CNN and New Yorker legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin in a Tuesday piece. Toobin called Thomas, who just marked a quarter-century as a SCOTUS justice, “not a conservative but, rather, a radical” who’s driven to advance “his own idiosyncratic interpretation of the Constitution.”
How idiosyncratic is it? Toobin claimed that Thomas cares only about “his own understanding of what the words of the Constitution mean rather than what the other hundred and eleven people who have served on the Court…have judged them to mean.” Thomas’s jurisprudence is, in Toobin’s words, “reactionary” and “antediluvian.”
According to Toobin, Thomas’s beliefs are so extreme that chief justices William Rehnquist and John Roberts have “never trusted [him] to write an opinion in a big case that could command a majority of even his conservative colleagues.” Toobin admitted that Thomas “has introduced certain conservative ideas into the bloodstream of Supreme Court opinions that have later commanded majorities,” but added, “For the most part, Thomas has been on a Court of his own.”
Toobin foresees increased isolation for Thomas within the SCOTUS (bolding added):
Thomas was a young man of forty-three when he joined the Court, and he is now sixty-eight. His views, which never really found favor even in the years of conservative ascendancy, appear headed even further from the mainstream. The Court is now evenly divided between liberals and conservatives, and Hillary Clinton appears poised to fill the ninth seat, giving liberals a majority for the first time in decades. After years at the periphery of the Court, Thomas looks destined to serve out his term at the even more distant fringe.
