ShqipClarence Thomas’ Influence On The Supreme Court
cheap Canada Goose Twenty years ago, Justice Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court by the narrowest margin in 100 years. He’s the most conservative justice since canada goose coats on sale the 1930s, and, in his passion for his own version of “original intent,” he’s willing to reverse whole lines of previous rulings. He’s an enigmatic figure silent at oral arguments, beloved by his law clerks and court employees. Most analysts say that his extreme views limit his influence on the court, except to set markers for where a future court could go. NPR’s Nina Totenberg reports. cheap Canada Goose
canada goose uk outlet Twenty years ago, Justice Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court by the narrowest margin in 100 years. He’s the most conservative justice since the 1930s, and, in his passion for his own version of “original intent,” he’s willing to reverse whole lines of previous rulings. He’s an enigmatic figure silent at oral arguments, beloved by his law clerks and court employees. Most analysts canada goose say that his extreme views limit his influence on the court, except to set markers for where a future court could go. NPR’s Nina Totenberg reports. Supreme Court. What came to be known as the Clarence Thomas Anita Hill hearings took place after NPR disclosed that Hill, a University of Oklahoma law professor, had told the Judiciary Committee that she was sexually harassed by Thomas when she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. After three days of tumultuous hearings, Thomas was confirmed by the smallest margin in a century. canada goose uk outlet
Today, NPR legal affairs correspondent Canada Goose Parka Nina Totenberg examines the Thomas record since then.
buy canada goose jacket NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Clarence Thomas is not just a member of the conservative block of canada goose outlet Supreme Court justices, he is without a doubt the most conservative justice, willing to regularly strike down long accepted case law that has been in place for decades, in canada goose clearance some cases as much as a century. buy canada goose jacket
cheap canada goose uk He is the only justice willing to allow states to establish an official religion; the only justice who believes teenagers have no free speech rights at all; the only justice who believes that it’s unconstitutional to require campaign funders to disclose their identity; he’s the only justice who voted to strike down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act; and the only justice to say that the court should invalidate a wide range of laws regulating business conduct and working conditions. cheap canada goose uk
uk canada goose Though his defenders shy from calling his views radical, they trumpet Thomas as the only justice to consistently return to what they see as the original meaning of the Constitution when it was adopted in 1789. uk canada goose
canada goose black friday sale UCLA law professor and academic blogger, Eugene Volokh, compares Thomas to the Supreme Court’s canada goose deals most famous justices: Brandeis, Holmes, John Marshall, buy canada goose jacket cheap in the sense that he has a clear vision of where he thinks canada goose coats the court should go. canada goose black friday sale
Canada Goose Jackets PROFESSOR EUGENE VOLOKH: Thomas is somebody who has articulated the sharpest and clearest originalist vision of anybody on the court. Canada Goose Jackets
canada goose clearance sale TOTENBERG: But that vision is so far removed from modern constitutional law that critics see it as little more than trying to turn the clock back. Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman. canada goose clearance sale
buy canada goose jacket cheap PROFESSOR PETER EDELMAN: I think it’s fair to call Thomas a radical conservative He’s the Tea Party of the Supreme Court. buy canada goose jacket cheap
TOTENBERG: Even former Reagan administration solicitor general, Charles Fried, canada goose clearance sale who admires Thomas, sees his views as off kilter. His opinions, says Fried, are well written and researched.
CHARLES FRIED: They are high quality work, there’s no question about that. They’re just completely out of the mainstream.
TOTENBERG: Scholars note that Thomas’s views are canadian goose jacket in fact so extreme that he is considerably to the right of the court’s most heralded conservative, Justice Antonin Scalia. Supreme Court advocate Tom Goldstein says that Scalia balances purism and pragmatism, while Thomas is a purist.
TOM GOLDSTEIN: Justice Scalia has his foot hovering over the brake pedal. Justice Thomas’ is firmly planted on the gas.
TOTENBERG: Conservative blogger Ed Whelan says Thomas is the only justice who’s willing to trust the Founding Fathers, even if that means, for instance, that states are free to prefer one religion over another.
ED WHELAN: You can call that un pragmatic if you want, but I think it reflects a deeper faith in the citizenry.
TOTENBERG: Thomas, the cheap Canada Goose second African American appointed to the court, has proved to be the ideological opposite of the man he replaced, Canada Goose sale Thurgood Marshall, the first African American. A stark example of their differences is in cases involving prisoners beaten or denied essential medical care.
Marshall wrote key decisions declaring such treatment a violation of the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. At his confirmation hearing, Thomas seemed to agree, noting that every day as an appeals court judge, he looked out the window at the federal courthouse to see busload after busload of criminal defendants being brought to court.
Canada Goose sale JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS: And I say to myself almost every day, but for the grace of God, there go I. So I can walk in their shoes and I could bring something different to the court. Canada Goose sale
TOTENBERG: Two months later, Thomas, now a Supreme Court justice, dissented from a Supreme Court opinion upholding an $800 damage award to a prisoner who was beaten so severely by prison guards that his teeth and dental plate were broken. Thomas, joined only by Scalia, said that quote, “a use of force which causes only insignificant harm to a prisoner is not canada goose black friday sale cruel and unusual punishment.”
canada goose clearance Perhaps no subject has engaged Thomas more on a personal level than race. He votes often against civil rights claims, and his own feelings of being underestimated because of his race come out most clearly in Affirmative Action cases. canada goose clearance
canada goose uk shop Although Thomas is widely believed to have been the beneficiary of Affirmative Action programs, he sees them as a scar, not a benefit. And when the Supreme Court reaffirmed the Canada Goose online use of race as one factor that can be used in university admissions, Thomas railed that these programs were https://www.getcanadagooseoutlet.com quote, “nothing more than a facade, a cruel farce of continued racial discrimination that stamp minorities with a badge of inferiority.” canada goose uk shop
canada goose factory sale Can someone who is so untethered to the big decisions of the last century be Canada Goose Jackets influential on the court? Yes and no. For now, it is his dissents, not his majority opinions, that are the attention grabbers. canada goose factory sale
Canada Goose Online Supreme Court advocate Tom Goldstein. Canada Goose Online
GOLDSTEIN: I think he’s planting flowers in a garden that he thinks are going to bloom a long time from now. And whether that’s going to happen is going to depend on the court’s membership.
TOTENBERG: Other scholars note that Thomas makes the other very conservative justices on the court look centrist by comparison. UCLA’s Volokh observes that studies show people like to be seen as in the middle.
VOLOKH: That means canada goose store that if you influence what the extremes look like, then you can shift the middle.
Canada Goose online TOTENBERG: And Volokh adds that by just staking out a previously inconceivable position, Thomas, even though alone, makes that position plausible Canada Goose online.