IANAL and even I know what this means — the ultra-conservatives on the Supreme Court, led by Clarence Thomas, are going after Roe, Obergefell, and every other decision that’s ever favored civil rights, labor rights, and human rights. Reuters reports:
[Clarence Thomas] demonstrated his willingness to abandon precedent in February when he wrote that the court should reconsider its landmark 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan ruling that made it harder for public officials to win libel lawsuits.
[…] Thomas said the court should “restore” its jurisprudence relating to precedents to ensure it exercises “mere judgment” and focuses on the “correct, original meaning” of laws it interprets.
“In our constitutional structure, our rule of upholding the law’s original meaning is reason enough to correct course,” Thomas wrote.
Want to reopen the detention camps for incarcerating Japanese-Americans during WWII and use them for immigrant babies and asylum-seekers? Rule in favor of ICE/CBP and simply ignore Korematsu. Want to promote taxpayer funding of vouchers to send kids to segregated schools? Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education was just a precedent; it’s not binding on future decisions.
The conservative court-packing scheme is working, and we are royally screwed.
Update: someone asked in the comments whether Thomas supported stare decisis during his Senate confirmation hearings. It appears he did, though his actions demonstrated otherwise:
Stare decisis is not and should not be an ironclad rule -- otherwise Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld segregation, would still be on the books. But almost everyone agrees that respect for the doctrine is indispensable for a Supreme Court justice. As Thomas himself explained at his confirmation hearing, "stare decisis provides continuity to our system, it provides predictability, and in our process of case-by-case decision making, I think it is a very important and critical concept."
It is unlikely that any nominee of any president would be confirmed to the Supreme Court if he or she admitted to a disbelief in the doctrine of established case law. Court watchers know that Scalia's statement about Thomas goes to the heart of a jurisprudential chasm that separates the court's two most conservative justices. Scalia is fiercely conservative, but by and large he judges within the parameters of the rules laid down by predecessors. Thomas rarely appears to feel so confined.
The proof is in 35 lone Thomas opinions that express a willingness to reexamine a breathtaking range of well-settled constitutional law. A little-known but telling example is a 1998 opinion by Thomas that expresses a willingness to reexamine the court's opinion in Calder v. Bull, which decided that the Constitution's prohibition against retroactive punishments applies only to criminal (not civil) laws. Regardless of what one thinks of the merits of the case, it is a unanimous 1798 opinion by the court that has not been seriously challenged in more than 200 years. It is the dictionary definition of established case law.
“Scalia’s statement about Thomas” refers to this (from the Reuters article):
In a widely quoted comment, Scalia once told a Thomas biographer, Ken Foskett, that Thomas “doesn’t believe in stare decisis, period,” and that “if a constitutional line of authority is wrong, he would say let’s get it right. I wouldn’t do that.”