Clarence Thomas Admits That He’s Coming for Our Rights

In an interview at the Catholic University last weekThe judge of the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas said that he clearly thought over the past 30 years: the precedents of the Supreme Court have no importance, and he comes up with a situation when he goes together to fulfill his own political agenda.

Of course, he did not say it in this way. People would have noticed it. Instead, he passed his selfish philosophy in legal jargon, which will fly under the radar of most people, including journalists. Here is what he said: “At some point, we need to think about what we are doing with Stare Decis … [I]T is not any talisman transaction in which you can just say “look, decisis” and not think, turn off the brain, right? “

To translate: “Stare Decis” is a fundamental legal principle in this country and All countries that follow the system of “common law”. In simple terms, this means that previous court decisions regulate future court decisions. For example, if the court rules that “gay has the same fundamental rights as everyone else in this country, including the right to marry other people”, then this decision should regulate all future cases regarding gay rights.

Thomas, in the visible, disagree. Instead of respecting decis and precedent, he says that old things should not be able to control new ones. For Thomas, only because the courts decided that LGBT icons should have rights in the past, including the right to marriage, does not mean that he feels forced to decide that they should save them.

Obviously, the courts change the rules and take things all the time. Sometimes old cases are just old, and their solutions should not be constantly transferred to the future. There are legitimate ways to overcome decisis start – in particular, three ways – but this is not what Thomas offers. Nevertheless, it is useful to understand what they are.

The first is legislation or amendments. Congress could adopt a new law stating that “gay does not have the same rights as that of other Americans,” or amended the Constitution to do the same. The most famous time when this happened in American history was when the amendments to the reconstruction (13th, 14th and 15th amendments) rejected Drede Scott solution. But new legislation or amendments rarely happen.

Usually the congress does not violate the Decisis Stare; Judges are doing. The most common way for them is to “distinguish” the matter of them from business in the past. These are my friends, where the most legal appeal is performed. Show the lawyer, the rule that controls the “trees”, and prepare for the dissertation of the botanist, distinguishing the “bushes” from the noble tree. A famous example of the differences was that John Roberts revoked Obamacare as “tax” (it wasn’t), so as not to make another precedent that allows the government to use a clause on commerce for health regulation.

The third way to ignore the precedent and break decisis start is to say that everything has changed significantly since the time of the old solution. It is a judicial equivalent to say: “When we thought that the earth was flat, but now we know that it is round, so our previous decisions, requiring the destruction of telescopes, are canceled.” The most famous historical example of this is Brown against the Council of Ed overturning Plesy v. FergusonField in BrownThe court said that the segregation causes black pain Plessi (Note: they knew damn).

The penetrating reader will note that in no case the judges should say that the previous precedent was wrongThey should not go out and say: “We turn this old case because we don’t like it anymore, and we wish you different political and legal results. Thank you for having come to my conversation about Ted. ” Congress is allowed to do this, but not the courts.

Clarence Thomas says: Damn it with all this. He knows that the normal way to cope with Stare Decisis is not to “turn off your brain.” His problem is that the legal methods of canceling previous opinions do not force him where he wants to go. He cannot say that, for example, has changed significantly since then Obergefell v. Hodges, who recognized same -sex marriages. He cannot distinguish new cases of equality in marriage from the old, and Stephen Miller did not provide him with a new constitutional amendment in order to prohibit practice. But he, of course, does not want gays to get married. Watch Decisis blocks it from stopping them, so it tells people to ignore Stare Decis. Thomas believes that some previous decisions were simply wrong, and he decides that not so, but what is right, even if no one has chosen it to do this work.

Here is another quote from his Catholic University of conversation: “We never go to the front [to] See who leads the train where he goes. And you can climb there in the machine department, find an orangutan that controls the train, but you want to follow this just because it is a train. ”

First of all, I swear, Thomas is the only black public intellectual that I am familiar with, which uses analogies from the monkeys, describing what he considers stupid. They need to add it to DSM as a new form of “hatred for themselves.”

In any case … Thomas says that if he does not like where he leads the Stare Decisis train, he can just go out and go in a different direction. Remember that Thomas's war against the 20th century cannot reach victory if the opinions of the Supreme Court have weight.

Instead of Stare Decisis Thomas, this invented frame: “The precedent must respect our legal tradition and our country, and our laws, and be based on something, and not just that someone had dreamed, while others have gone.”

The problem is that the question of which precedents “respect our legal tradition, our country and our laws” can quickly turn into what Clarence Thomas considers “respectful” to these traditions or laws. He did not completely get stuck from anything real or proved. This is not even text. “Respect” means that, damn it, Thomas wants it to mean at any time.

We have seen this according to Thomas in recent years. In 2022, he said in a separate, but confirming opinion in Dobbs case, this Row against Wade did not respect our legal traditions, but Love against Virginia is. Why? Good because Caviar gave women the right while while Love He gave Thomas the right to marry his white wife, and if you have the best legal difference between these cases, except for Thomas’s own personal preferences, I would like to hear how you explained this. Thomas also decided (in this case, by writing for the majority) that simple laws on registration of weapons do not respect our traditions in this country, but he signed an opinion, giving the president the powers of the king himself, to whom we rebelled. You simply cannot outline the course through what passes for logic in Thomas’s head, not understanding its preferred politics results.

If Thomas were the only judge who thought so, it would be a restrained problem. But the entire republican bondage in the Supreme Court is ruled in the same way as Thomas says, without respect for a precedent or a viewing deputy. In the upcoming period, the Republicans in court will probably cancel the precedent of the voting right, which they established for themselves just a couple of years ago. Republicans can literally be trusted to respect their own decisionsField

The entire Trump administration was a “mask” from the conservatives of the Supreme Court. It turns out that they really do not care about the precedent (regardless of how many times they lied and claimed that they care during the hearing to confirm in the Senate). They really do not care about the text. They really do not care about judicial restraint. They want to get the political results that they want, and they have votes to do it.

Thomas speech is a statement that there is no judicial precedent who is safe from the current Republicans in court. Watch Decisis will not stand in their way to get what they want. You could read the whole speech as a shot through a bow Obergefell v. HodgesAnd this is so, but this is also a rare moment when Thomas told the truth that he and his friends are actually doing. They do not care about the traditions, norms or the very basis of the adoption of court decisions in the common law system. They only care about victory.

All this will be very bad for those of us who in the near future are not a white cis-ghetero, but there is a silver lining. Thomas’s speech at the Catholic University literally establishes plays for how to defeat him and all the evil and cruelty that he made during his time on the bench. According to Thomas, the future judges of the Supreme Court do not need to fight the precedents set forth by Thomas and his brothers Roberts-Kort. They do not need to distinguish future cases from those that are resolved today. They do not need to wait until the Congress accepts new laws or in accordance with the amendments. They do not need to stay on the train Clarence Thomas.

And I'm here for this. By his own admission of Thomas, the power of the court of Roberts dies at the moment when there are more liberals on the bench than the Republicans. This can happen as soon as the next presidential election, if the Democrats accept their act together in order to take control of the Supreme Court. If Glate Decis is dead, then it is dead forever. What cannot happen is that future democratic judges will try to resurrect him, preserve the power of the people who killed her.

Clarence Thomas will soon become the most long justice in American history. It is pleasant to know that he thinks that his opinion will not be important after he dies. On this he and I agree.