Fanatical, radical reign of Thomas
“What is happening here?” a distraught Nancy Pelosi said on Friday.
It’s a good question.
Over the last three decades, I have witnessed a dismal saga of opportunism, fanaticism, mendacity, concupiscence, hypocrisy and cowardice. This is a story about men gaining power by trading away something that meant little to them compared with their own stature: the rights of women.
It started innocently enough on a beautiful summer day in Kennebunkport.
I was covering the first President Bush’s nomination of a 43-year-old U.S. appeals court judge for the D.C. Circuit to take the seat of retiring Justice Thurgood Marshall. Clarence Thomas looked uneasy as Bush defended his conservative choice.
The warnings were clear even then. Democratic Sen. Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio threatened to investigate Judge Thomas’ record on abortion, saying, “I will not support yet another Reagan-Bush Supreme Court nominee who remains silent on a woman’s right to choose and then ascends to the court to weaken that right.”
As a Texas congressman, H.W. was christened “Rubbers” by his colleagues because he was such a cheerleader for family planning in the U.S. and around the world.
But when Bush joined Ronald Reagan on the ticket in 1980, he adopted Reagan’s more restrictive position. The right remained suspicious of Bush, though, and hoping to bring it around for his re-election, he appointed the ultraconservative Thomas. He also wanted to appeal to Black voters, still angry at the Willie Horton ugliness that had helped propel him to the White House.
Women’s rights had to take a back seat to re-election.
Three months later, Anita Hill told her story to Congress about her boss, Thomas, tormenting her with unwanted attention and dirty talk about the pornographic films he liked to watch. Joe Biden was the chairman of those Senate hearings.
He let Hill be viciously ripped apart by Republicans and then abruptly ended the hearings, canceling the appearance of her two corroborating witnesses. Hill was smeared as a perjuring erotomaniac, and Biden, wasting a Democratic Senate majority, allowed a liar, a pervert and a sexual harasser to be elevated to a lifetime seat on the court.
Women’s rights had to take a back seat to Biden’s desire to foster bipartisanship with his conservative colleagues. And with Thomas, those conservatives got the justice of their dreams, the first in a line of right-wing radicals.
When Donald Trump came along, trailing a history of lurid sexual transgressions, the family-values Republicans and religious right didn’t care. He could bring them to Valhalla on the Supreme Court.
Mitch McConnell and his Federalist Society minions used Trump as the host body. After wrecking the rules to keep Merrick Garland off the court, McConnell jammed through Amy Coney Barrett.
Women’s rights had to take a back seat to Trump’s ego and ambition and McConnell’s desire for a conservative court that would pull back the reach of the government, denying protections to Americans who need or value them. They pushed through three conservative justices and that was checkmate for Roe.
Neil Gorsuch and another Trump appointee, Brett Kavanaugh, face accusations from senators that they dissembled to get on the court and played down their intentions to throw out Roe.
Thomas’ concurring opinion to the fanatical Samuel Alito’s majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade chillingly warned that he would apply the same rationale to contraception, same-sex marriage and same-sex consensual relations.
On Thursday, in the middle of an epidemic of mass shootings, with Congress finally getting a mild victory on gun control, Thomas wrote the majority opinion overturning a New York law limiting the right to carry a handgun in public, throwing out a requirement more than a century old.
In another ruling this past week, the justices chipped away at the First Amendment’s separation between church and state, a foundation of the Republic.
The court is out of control. Clarence Thomas has helped lead us to unaccountable extremists dictating how we live.
And that is revolting.