Thomas: Leak was damaging to court
The leak of a draft opinion has done irreparable damage to the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas said at a conference in Dallas on Friday night, adding that it had destroyed trust among the members of the court.
“What happened at the court is tremendously bad,” Thomas said. “I wonder how long we're going to have these institutions at the rate we're undermining them.”
The leak of the opinion, which would overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion, was “like kind of an infidelity,” Thomas said.
He drew a contrast with the court that sat for 11 years without a change in personnel before the arrival of Chief Justice John Roberts in 2005.
“This is not the court of that era,” he said, adding: “We actually trusted each other. We may have been a dysfunctional family, but we were a family.”
The setting for Thomas' remarks was a conference sponsored by several conservative and libertarian groups — the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute and the Hoover Institution — that said it meant to “reexamine the problems of social, racial and economic inequality in America.”
Thomas, the longest-serving member of the current court, has been a fierce opponent of Roe.
On Friday, he said opposition to his nomination in 1991 was “by those people who were trying to keep me off the court over abortion.”
At his confirmation hearings, however, he said, to the astonishment of many, that he had never discussed Roe, even though it was issued while he was a student at Yale Law School.
The next year, he dissented in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the majority reaffirmed the core of the Roe decision. Thomas joined opinions saying Roe was “plainly wrong” and “should be overruled.”
On Friday, he suggested that respect for precedent — stare decisis, in legal jargon — was no reason to retain an incorrect interpretation of the Constitution.
“I always say that when someone uses stare decisis that means they're out of arguments,” he said. “Now they they're just waving the white flag. And I just keep going.”