So Much for Judicial Temperament

You had to know that Uncle Thomas was waiting for the day when he could finally tell a version of his story of the Anita Hill fiasco where he wasn't under oath and wasn't under the scrutiny of the media watching his every move, facial tic and breath to make sure that he was telling the truth.

Well, today's the day.

And, neither being under oath nor able to be compelled to be put under oath, what a tale Justice Clarence apparently tells.  According to him, not only was Anita Hill a terrible lawyer and incompetent, but anyone who agreed with her was a terrible EEOC employee too.  We expected that.  Here's the unexpected part:  according to Justice Thomas, Anita Hill's accusation that he was a porno freak and harasser was ludicrous and Uncle Thomas was "one of the least likely candidates imaginable" for the charge of sexual harassment because....wait for it.....he'd purportedly made clear a desire to run an agency staffed mainly by minorities and women.

This is the type of astute logical reasoning that has made reading Supreme Court decisions penned by Clarence Thomas especially painful for lawyers the past 15 years.  If anyone can explain why insisting on a diverse work environment (assuming that this is his true feelings) means that a person can't be a stank ho getting off on porn and chasing skirts at the same time, I'll buy you a cookie.

(It will have to await another diary my discussion of what appears to be Justice Thomas trying to again "put his Black on," since this "I'm for advancement of the historically oppressed" narrative of his is now the second recent reference I'm aware of -- the first being his lengthy diatribe in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District #1 in which he partially garbs himself in his long-discarded Black Nationalist past and tries to evoke the ghost of the late Justice Thurgood Marshall as justification to eviscerate Brown v. Board of Education with a backhanded argument that, basically, Black people can't trust white people to ensure our equality, so we should stop trying to demand that the law ensure it - no, I'm not joking go read it yourself!).
Set aside the Anita Hill story, since 16 years later none of us are going to change our minds about it based on anything written this late in the game (I believed her then, and believed her now; David Brock's memoir admitting that Anita Hill was demonized and viciously attacked solely for the purpose of advancing Republican aspirations of putting a Black face on conservativism on the high court was merely icing on the cake for me.)  Isn't the real issue, for those of us who despite all its flaws respect and value the rule of law that a sitting judge has no business making public statements of a political nature or making intemperate statements about individuals? I thought - but maybe I'm wrong - that this type of behavior was antithetical to the idea of "judicial temperament", i.e. cool and dispassionate perspective remaining above the fray in the interests of justice.

I'm sorry, but I don't consider publishing an attack on a former employee while still sitting on the bench of the highest court in the land to be "above the fray."  I consider it -- 16 years after the fact -- yet another piece of evidence of the bitterness and anger that others have reported possesses and obsesses Justice Clarence Thomas to his soul.  It's just another piece of evidence that he can't just let go and move on, even having won the battle to be confirmed (even if his elevation to the Supreme Court is one of the low points of American racial history, part of the Bush Sr./Reagan strategy of using self-hating Negroes as the mouthpieces to reverse the civil rights legacy furthered by Justice Thurgood Marshall.)  What is surprising is that despite having emerged utterly victorious in his fight to be elevated to the Supreme Court, the reputation of what all agreed was a good lawyer trashed in the process, Justice Thomas is now 16 years later carrying around what I like to refer to as an "OJ" grudge:  a soul-eating, soul-destroying rage that belies all balance and passage of time, a rage that has no rational relationship to the alleged "harm" that was caused.  As was written in the Washington Post a few years ago, when it comes to his confirmation, Justice Thomas is a man with a long, long, vengeance memory:

Thomas retains a special animus for certain civil rights activists and liberal interest groups such as People for the American Way, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Alliance for Justice. He blames them, in large part, for the damage done to his reputation. "These people are mad because I'm in Thurgood Marshall's seat," he told one visitor.

A Thomas friend who talks frequently with the justice said Thomas keeps a list in his head of who was for and against him during his confirmation hearings. "It hurt him a lot, I'll tell you," said this friend, who would speak only if not named to preserve his relationship. "And he's still bitter."

OK that's some scary shit, that a man on the highest court in the land still carries in his heart an "enemies list" from 13 years earlier.  Are we going to make him recuse himself if and when these individuals and groups come before the High Court, as we would with any lower court judge? I've seen no evidence that this has ever happened, with Justice Thomas.  We couldn't even get Scalia recused when the bias issues were far more patent.

Sure, some will call Justice Thomas' new book what he calls it - just his "memoir" or "autobiography", necessarily setting forth his views on a variety of subjects as part of talking about his life.  And, yes, everyone expected it to be written at some point; getting to sell a book is sort of one of the perks of the job, as it is with all high-powered jobs (I'm reading Alan Greenspan's at the moment.)  But at the moment I'm racking my brain to remember any judge who did so while he was still on the bench deciding cases.  What is it about Clarence Thomas' situation that his renewed attack on Anita Hill -- his version of it, anyway -- had to be told now?

(Is he going to retire? Lord, I don't think I can afford to hope that much.)

•  I saw it...

  He tried to come off like Danny Glover, but even with Kroft's softball questions and "let him interview himself" style where justice Thomas rambled on, I found the interview wanting.

  He's reportedly popular in the Court, and finds the Court a nice place.

  Swell....and the civil rights die, and torture becomes legalized, and the Bill of Rights is under attack, and war crimes become winked at...But Justice Thomas is a popular man in the court.

  That says it all for me.

  by boilerman10 on Mon Oct 01, 2007 at 07:59:15 AM PDT

•  Have you seen War Room's deconstruction at Salon?

  Tim Grieve takes a look at Uncle Thomas identifying himself with Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird and Bigger Thomas in Native Son. (What is the irony level in "Tom" being in common among all three?)

  by blonde moment on Mon Oct 01, 2007 at 08:03:18 AM PDT

  •  No, I Hadn't

    Thanks for the link.  It seems that I need to get done that other diary about Justice Thomas relating to his attempt to reassert his former Black nationalism after he's managed to trash his cred rather completely sooner than I thought.

    Egads.

    by shanikka on Mon Oct 01, 2007 at 08:11:27 AM PDT

•  I remember the confirmation hearings

  when Thomas said he had never discussed Roe v. Wade with anybody.

  Iirc, Sen. Ernest Hollings of South Carolina asked Anita Hill if Thomas had ever discussed the case with her, and she said he had.  I kept waiting for the follow-up question, "What was his opinion of the case?" (and Hill looked like she was waiting for it too) but it never came.

  Had that one question been asked, I wonder if he would ever have been confirmed.  

  Cheers.

  by New Deal democrat on Mon Oct 01, 2007 at 08:07:44 AM PDT

  •  I Watched Them Too. Those Hearings Took Out

    Sen. Dixon (D-IL) and they should have cost then-Chairman Biden his seat too.

    Thomas is a two-edged sword undermining the progress on human rights while personally flaunting his bitter, self-loathing and graceless personality that (for too many) reinforces racist notions of superiority/inferiority. As another poster noted, just one of many Bush Blacks.

    by majcmb1 on Mon Oct 01, 2007 at 08:25:03 AM PDT

•  An average student?

  I heard 60 minutes say he was an average student at Yale.  How did student get into the Supreme Court?

  by realtime on Mon Oct 01, 2007 at 08:47:46 AM PDT

•  SCOTUS recusal

  No individual or group can "make" any SCOTUS member recuse themselves and there is no process to appeal.
  There are some situations where recusal is a matter of rule, like having decided a case in a lower court that is later brought to the Supreme Court or having a direct financial conflict. However, while lawyers can argue for Thomas to recuse himself based on statements in his book, it's not going to happen.

  by VClib on Mon Oct 01, 2007 at 08:50:11 AM PDT

•  That interview was appalling...

  Justice Thomas' bitterness was palpable throughout - he clearly intends to follow through on his promise to stay on the bench for 40 years; relentlessly punishing anyone and everyone who may have offended him during his confirmation hearings.

  I wonder what his grandfather would have thought about Thomas' consistent minimization of the 14th Amendment and his efforts - now spanning over a quarter century - to derail the progress that civil rights activists fought so hard to achieve.

  I also wonder how Justice Thomas squares his "principles" of State's Rights and judicial non-intervention and his constant deriding of the equal protection clause with his actions in Bush v. Gore.

  by Viceroy on Mon Oct 01, 2007 at 09:22:00 AM PDT

•  Nina Totenberg Reviewed This Sat.

  You can hear it here.

  She sounds pretty appalled that he would put all of his dysfunction on display ( the conspiracy theories, the victimization, the basic stupidity -- really, if you thought that an employee was not that great, wouldn't you try to replace said employee?).  She is also mystified as to why, after 16 years, he would want to resurrect the arguments of the confirmation hearings -- with the unspoken notation that there is 16 years of Thomas record to now compare against that.

  Jeffrey Toobin is on booktour now and he said last week that Thomas was well liked in the building, but that Thomas did keep a list of the folks who voted against his conformation in his desk -- Nixon-like.

  by cassandra m on Mon Oct 01, 2007 at 09:34:06 AM PDT

•  the bushes bought him for life

  One thing never explained at the Thomas hearings:  how the 3 witnesses from A. Hill's past all heard the same story of the harassment.  If Thomas was telling the truth then all 3 [who didn't even know each other] were lying.  They were all professionals--1 was a republican--and seemed entirely credible.

  I have always suspected that bush had evidence of Thomas's lying and is using it to guarantee his vote--for life.

  by Zacapoet on Mon Oct 01, 2007 at 10:06:51 AM PDT

•  Sexual harassers, of whatever race,

  don't recognize what they do as sexual harassment. They view it as flirting and being friendly--and when you call them on it, they go insane.  Thomas is typical. I, like you, believed Hill then, and still believe her. She had nothing to gain from her accusations.

  I was 21 when I took a  job at a department store because I had only one classs left--and it was a mail-in-the-paper College Scholar independent study--between  Jan. of 71 through August 71 when I left for grad school. I ended up in the budget men's dept. where the manager was a man much like Thomas.  He had a tendency to get too close when showing you how to do something.  Close enough that you could feel his very erect penis pressed against you.  He'd corner you in the stockroom and cop a feel.  it was 1971.  Sexual harassment as an offense was a new idea.  I endured it and avoided him.

  Then one day, a bunch of us took lunch together and went ver to the drug store and talked. He'd done this to every one of us--all 4 of us.    WHen the night shift women came here, we asked them.   They'd put up with this too.  One by one, on her afternoon breaks and dinner break,w e marched upstairs to Personnel, one after another-- seven young women, all telling the same story.  They didn't fire him. They transferred him (he was their Uncle Tom Token) and sent all of us to even lowlier jobs.

  I learned about conservative attitudes toward sexual harassment that day.

  by irishwitch on Mon Oct 01, 2007 at 10:07:36 AM PDT