Clarence Thomas

Associate justice of the United States (1991– )

• Born: June 23, 1948
• Place of Birth: Pin Point, Georgia

Clarence Thomas was only the second Black American to serve on the US Supreme Court. His judicial opinions show a literal interpretation of the US Constitution, making him an outspoken advocate of the theory of constitutional interpretation by original intent. His votes have affected constitutional law by narrowing the scope of individual rights and expanding governmental authority. His legal theory has included advocacy for a color-blind Constitution, which implies rejection of affirmative action and other such government-sponsored programs.

Early Life

Clarence Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, to a teenage mother who worked in a factory that processed seafood; she later worked as a maid. Thomas’s father left the family before his son was two years old. The house in which the family initially lived lacked electricity and plumbing, a common condition in Black households in the southern United States during a period in which racial discrimination was widespread and explicit. At the age of seven, Thomas was sent to live with his grandfather, who owned a fuel-oil delivery business and who lived in a more comfortable home. Thomas credited his grandfather with teaching him the value of hard work and individual initiative, as he spent the remainder of his youth working for his grandfather and devoting himself to his studies in school.

After briefly studying to become a priest, Thomas attended Holy Cross College. He subsequently earned his law degree at Yale Law School. He worked as an assistant attorney general for the state of Missouri and then briefly in corporate law before moving to Washington, DC, as a staff member for Republican US senator John Danforth of Missouri. During Ronald Reagan’s presidency (1981–89), Thomas was chair of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a government agency that investigated and enforced employment discrimination laws. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC.

In 1991, Thomas was nominated to fill a vacancy on the US Supreme Court after the retirement of Justice Thurgood Marshall, the court’s first Black American justice. However, highly publicized confirmation hearings, which included allegations that Thomas had sexually harassed coworkers, namely his subordinate Anita Hill, consumed the country. Nevertheless, the Senate confirmed his nomination by a narrow 52–48 vote.

Life’s Work

Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court strengthened a shift in the court’s decision-making trends that began during Reagan’s presidency, as new justices took a narrower view of individual rights and sought to grant more authority to government officials. Thomas frequently joined with the four justices who were seated during Reagan’s presidency to form narrow majorities that reduced the scope of rights for criminal defendants, limited the government’s ability to use affirmative action to promote diversity, and approved increasingly restrictive abortion regulations.

Justice Thomas claimed that he interpreted the US Constitution strictly, that is, according to the theory of original intent. Most other contemporary justices of the United States have attempted to determine how ambiguous constitutional principles apply in the context of modern society. By contrast, Thomas sought to identify the intentions of the Constitution’s framers and apply those eighteenth-century intentions to modern legal cases, even if those intentions resulted in outcomes considered harsh or extreme by many Americans. In Thomas’s view, federal judges should not shape public policy; therefore, if the original intent of a theory led to harsh results, it was up to elected officials in state legislatures and Congress to create laws that advanced public policies preferred by the voters. For example, other justices established limited constitutional rights under the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment for prisoners serving their sentences in corrections institutions. These rights include limited entitlements to medical care, food, water, and sanitation, as well as protection against beatings by corrections officers. By contrast, Thomas has concluded that the authors of the Eighth Amendment did not intend to provide protections for convicted offenders, except to prevent the announcement by judges of excessive sentences. Thus, Thomas argued that no constitutional rights have been violated if prisoners are denied medical care or assaulted by corrections officers.

The legal views of Thomas often led him to join opinions that expanded police officers’ authority to conduct searches or supported states’ efforts to restrict abortion rights. In other cases, however, his original intent theory led him to be markedly more conservative than the Reagan-appointed justices with whom he usually agreed. For example, in a case concerning a civilian US citizen held as a terrorist suspect at a military prison, Thomas was the only justice who supported claims of President George W. Bush’s administration that an American can be detained indefinitely without formal charges, without access to the courts, without access to an attorney, and without presentation of evidence of wrongdoing (Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 2004). Furthermore, Thomas’s singular viewpoint, along with the strong language of his opinions, generally has kept him from being selected by the chief justice to write opinions on behalf of the Court majority in controversial cases.

Thomas arguably has been the Court’s most controversial member, in part because public debates lingered for years after Thomas was accused during his nomination hearings of sexual harassment. He believes any limits on campaign contributions to be unconstitutional, leading him to vote with the majority in the Court's controversial ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. His strident views in judicial opinions, especially in opinions concerning matters of race, also have been controversial and perplexing to many. Although appointed the court’s second Black justice, his strong views against affirmative action and similar policies put him at odds with many Black political leaders throughout the United States.

Furthermore, Thomas remains the only Supreme Court justice to have criticized the court’s famous landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the case that barred racial segregation in public schools and the case in which Marshall, Thomas’s Black predecessor on the court, was deeply involved. Although Thomas believed that the government should not discriminate by race, he argued that the Brown decision’s discussion of segregation’s harms to Black children implied that Black students are inferior and must attend school with White students if they are to learn. Similarly, Thomas argued that affirmative action harms Black people by stigmatizing them and indicating to others that they are not equally capable of succeeding at anything on their own merits.

Thomas’s critics have found his viewpoints to be perplexing and ironic, in part because historical analyses of the original intent theory indicate that the theory actually supports the existence of racial segregation. The intent of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause was not to end racial segregation, yet Thomas did not emphasize that aspect of the theory that he purported to follow.

By the early 2020s, Thomas, at that point the longest-serving justice then on the Supreme Court, had continued to make similar decisions about such views, including as an even larger number of states passed particularly restrictive abortion laws that were often legally challenged. Still typically quieter during oral arguments than other justices, by the late 2010s he had begun to raise more questions than in the past, with most of his participation coming during the period when the COVID-19 pandemic declared in early 2020 had forced such proceedings to occur remotely for a time. In March 2022, around the same time that he was taken to a Washington, DC, hospital to recuperate, ultimately for about a week, from what was described as an infection other than COVID-19, it was reported in the Washington Post that Thomas's wife, Virginia, had communicated via text messages with Donald Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, about the 2020 election results. According to the reporters' study of the messages, copies of which were available due to the House committee investigation into the insurrection that had occurred at the US Capitol in January 2021, Virginia Thomas had made several attempts to convince Meadows to seek to have the 2020 election results, which had gone in favor of Joe Biden, overturned. Because Virginia Thomas had long been involved in conservative activism and Justice Thomas had been the only justice to dissent in the decision to deny Trump's January 2022 effort to withhold his administration's documentation from the committee, some began suggesting investigating and even impeaching Thomas; critics also cited his refusal to recuse himself from litigation pertaining to the election.

In June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade by upholding the Mississippi abortion ban that was challenged in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, and Thomas, in his opinion for the decision, alarmed many by arguing that the Supreme Court should revisit other past decisions involving due process (the mechanism by which courts establish rights for citizens that are not explicitly mentioned in the US Constitution). Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Thomas and other members of the Supreme Court were the targets of nationwide outrage and protests, and a petition calling for the removal of Thomas from the Supreme Court soon reached one million signatures.

By early 2023, ethical concerns surrounding Thomas, this time focusing on financial dealings, had only grown following additional reports of questionable, largely undisclosed perks, gifts, and payments that both he and his wife had received from conservative-backing organizations and figures over the years. While ProPublica published information about Republican billionaire donor Harlan Crow gifting Thomas and his family with luxuries such as trips, prompting pushes for misconduct investigations as well as an adjustment of Supreme Court standards and for the Senate Judiciary Committee to call for a complete account of the funds Crow had gifted to Thomas, the Washington Post reported that Virginia Thomas had been given large consultancy payments off of the record by a judicial activist. Some members of Congress, largely Democrats, subsequently increased petitioning to have Thomas impeached and removed from the court.

In June 2023, Thomas's long-held beliefs against affirmative action came to light when the Supreme Court overtuned decades of precedent to effectively end race-conscious admission programs at elite colleges in the US. In his concurring opinion, which Thomas read from the bench, he stated that such policies "fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution."

In July 2024, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez filed articles of impeachment against both Thomas and fellow Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, claiming both justices failed to disclose gifts from billionaires and to withdraw from cases in which they clearly had conflicts of interest.

Significance

Thomas’s legacy as a justice of the United States includes his strict conservative voting record and his literal interpretations of the Constitution, making him an outspoken advocate of the theory of constitutional interpretation by original intent and one of the most conservative justices to ever serve on the Supreme Court. His votes have affected constitutional law by narrowing the scope of individual rights. His theory has included advocacy for a color-blind Constitution, which implies rejection of affirmative action and some school desegregation programs.

In case after case, Thomas presented legal theory and identified a way to analyze legal issues that differed from the approaches utilized by most contemporary justices. In so doing, Thomas laid the groundwork for future like-minded justices hoping to follow the same legal path of original intent.

Thomas’s widely discussed viewpoints also reminded the public that diversity of opinion exists among Black leaders and that politically conservative Black Americans exist in powerful positions in government, politics, the news media, and elsewhere. Finally, and perhaps ironically, the sensationalism of the Thomas confirmation hearings in 1991 helped bring the problems of workplace sexual harassment and gender discrimination, traditionally issues addressed and confronted by liberal lawmakers, to the public stage.

Bibliography

Astor, Maggie. "Ocasio-Cortez Files Impeachment Articles Against Justices Alito and Thomas." The New York Times, 10 July 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/07/10/us/politics/aoc-samuel-alito-clarence-thomas-impeach.html. Accessed 15 July 2024.

Banks, Christopher, and John C. Blakeman. The US Supreme Court and New Federalism: From the Rehnquist to the Roberts Court. Rowman, 2012.

Baum, Lawrence. The Supreme Court. Thousand Oaks, 2013.

Durkee, Alison. "Clarence Thomas: Here Are All the Ethics Scandals Involving the Supreme Court Justice amid New Revelations." Forbes, 5 May 2023, www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2023/05/05/clarence-thomas-here-are-all-the-ethics-scandals-involving-the-supreme-court-justice-amid-new-revelations/. Accessed 9 May 2023.

Epps, Garrett. "Clarence Thomas's Unusual Evolution." The Atlantic, 14 July 2015, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/clarence-thomas-unusual-evolution/398471/. Accessed 29 Sept. 2015.

Foskett, Ken. Judging Thomas: The Life and Times of Clarence Thomas. Morrow, 2004.

Holzer, Henry Mark. The Supreme Court Opinions of Clarence Thomas, 1991–2011. 2nd ed. McFarland, 2012.

Liptak, Adam. "Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade." The New York Times, 24 June 2022, www.nytimes.com/live/2022/06/24/us/roe-wade-abortion-supreme-court. Accessed 13 July 2022.

Lutz, Eric. "Calls for Recusals, Resignations, and Even Impeachment: Democrats Escalate Ethics Campaign around Clarence Thomas." Vanity Fair, 30 Mar. 2022, www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/democrats-call-for-clarence-thomas-impeachment-resignation-recusal-january-6. Accessed 11 Apr. 2022.

Merida, Kevin, and Michael Fletcher. Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas. Doubleday, 2007.

Oshin, Olafimihan. "Petition Calling for Clarence Thomas Removal from Supreme Court Gets 1M Signatures." Yahoo News, 6 July 2022, news.yahoo.com/petition-calling-clarence-thomas-removal-205103823.html. Accessed 13 July 2022.

Smith, Christopher E., and Joyce A. Baugh. The Real Clarence Thomas: Confirmation Veracity Meets Performance Reality. Lang, 2000.

Thomas, Andrew Peyton. Clarence Thomas: A Biography. Encounter, 2001.

Thomas, Clarence. My Grandfather’s Son: Memoir. Harper, 2007.

Totenberg, Nina. "Supreme Court Guts Affirmative Action, Effectively Ending Race-Conscious Admissions." NPR, 29 June 2023, www.npr.org/2023/06/29/1181138066/affirmative-action-supreme-court-decision. Accessed 16 July 2024.