The Injustice of Justice Thomas
How Joe Biden aided Clarence Thomas
The New Yorker has an article on Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni. The article describes how the Court has moved to adopt many of his hard right views. And it summarizes the case corroborating Anita Hill’s testimony against Thomas:
Thomas was confirmed in the Senate by a vote of fifty-two to forty-eight, and neither the Judiciary Committee nor any other part of the government has since seen fit to reëxamine the Thomas-Hill controversy. Still, a good deal of evidence has since emerged about the protagonists and their testimony. Even near the end of the hearings, several other women who had worked for Thomas were prepared to testify and corroborate Hill’s testimony that Thomas had a history of making female subordinates uncomfortable with personal and sexual talk. The group included Angela Wright, Rose Jourdain, and Sukari Hardnett; other associates of Thomas, among them Kaye Savage and Fred Cooke, would have testified about the nominee’s long-standing interest in pornography, which would have corroborated Hill’s account. But Joseph Biden, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee at the time, decided not to call these witnesses. This year, Lillian McEwen, a Washington lawyer who had a long-term romantic relationship with Thomas before he met Ginni, published a memoir, “D.C. Unmasked & Undressed.†She, too, remarked on the Justice’s “strong interest in pornography,†and she also said that Thomas scrutinized his work colleagues as prospective sexual partners. In short, virtually all the evidence that has emerged since the hearings corroborates Hill’s version of events. This, of course, makes Ginni Thomas’s phone call to Hill all the more puzzling. (Ginni Thomas did not respond to a request for comment; in an interview with the Daily Caller, a conservative Web site, she called her voice mail “a private matter†that was “probably a mistake on my part.†Justice Thomas also declined to comment.) Read more
Having succeeded in re-interpreting the First Amendment (on Citizens United) and the Second Amendment (on gun rights), Thomas’ next target is the Eighth Amendment: declaring “Obamacare”, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare unconstitutional. Don’t think it can’t happen.