Holding forth on the Fourth

 

A decade ago, one of the Waco Tribune-Herald’s more frequent letter-writers regularly labeled the Democratic Party the party of slavery and racism in the context of whatever else he was arguing that day. As a fierce but rational First Amendment advocate, I as opinion-page editor let this pass a couple of times before insisting he fuse reality to his talking points: The Republican and Democratic parties had largely and famously swapped positions on race, a consequence of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” of 1968.

I would similarly call out Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas given his delusional and incendiary April 15 speech on “progressivism” and the Declaration of Independence at The University of Texas. I doubt he’d take my call from his perch of judicial pretension.

Although the speech garnered little attention in the mainstream press, it did set academic and political circles abuzz with right-wing fervor. Southern Seminary theology professor Andrew T. Walker, for instance, branded it “stunning,” described it as “suffused with the Christian natural law tradition” and praised our nation’s second African-American Supreme Court justice for condemning progressivism as a “civic, moral and theological cancer” that “must be fought against and defeated if there is to be an American order and moral decency.”

One-eyed Texas Congressman and war veteran Dan Crenshaw, vanquished in the March 2026 Republican primary election for being insufficiently right-wing by his white Houston-area constituents, reveled in Thomas’ speech “on the Declaration, the Constitution and living up to our Founding Fathers’ values,” including its “ripping apart the progressive movement.” Yet other observers heartily welcomed Thomas’ evisceration of progressives’ supposed contention that “our rights and our dignities come not from God but from government."

By contrast, Erwin Chemerinsky, eminent law professor at the University of California’s Berkeley School of Law, dismissed Thomas’ linking progressivism to the past century’s most horrific monsters, stressing “it is wrong to think of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini as progressives by any definition of that term, and though Mao considered himself a progressive revolutionary, his actions had no resemblance to what we considered progressivism in the United States. It is also wrong to say that progressives reject the principles of the Declaration of Independence.” 

Finally, retired federal Circuit Judge J. Michael Luttig, who still breathes and speaks that old-fashioned American conservatism abandoned by President Trump’s heady, fact-free Make America Great Again movement, labeled Justice Thomas’ speech “the single most important speech of political and constitutional philosophy that never should have been given.” Luttig argued that Thomas’ views are “emphatically not what the Founders of this nation and the Framers of the Constitution of the United States contemplated, envisioned or ever intended.”

Indeed, Justice Thomas argued that President Woodrow Wilson and fellow progressives early in the 20^th century touted and embraced German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s “state-centric society” as nearly perfect and claimed that, in Thomas’ estimation of Wilsonian progressives, “America needed to leave behind the principles of the Founding and catch up with the more advanced and sophisticated people of Europe.” As subsequently employed in its Americanized form, Thomas argued, such progressive overreach “has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life. It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever.”

Then the justice offered this damning generalization to a delighted audience of self-described federalists who in their continued adoration of Trumpism above federalism aren’t federalists anymore:

The century of progressivism did not go well. The European system that Wilson and the progressives scolded Americans for not adopting, which he called nearly perfect, led to the governments that caused the most awful century that the world has ever seen. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Mao all were intertwined with the rise of progressivism, and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our Declaration was based. Many progressives expressed admiration for each of them shortly before their governments killed tens of millions of people. It was a terrible mistake to adopt progressivism’s rejection of the Declaration’s vision of universal, inalienable natural rights.

Such rhetoric conjures up not only some bone-headed contentions I heard from Make America Great Again zealots over eight long hours of interviews before Trump’s appearance at a 2023 campaign rally in Waco but that resolute letter-writer from my newspaper days, conveniently leaving out critical facts in order to more easily hammer down his arguments. In short, Justice Thomas’ remarks are not the coherent, contextual, thoughtful comments I’d expect from a Supreme Court justice of nearly 35 years. It is, rather, a delusional, contrived tribute to a cherished founding document poisoned by the hostility, resentment and grievance that Justice Thomas arguably embodies.

For instance, Thomas in judging a “century of progressivism” in his hour-long address ignores all those America First Committee advocates who stymied President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts to aid beleaguered European allies, right up till the Empire of Japan, Hitler’s ally, bombed Pearl Harbor in late 1941. The sneak attack not only killed 2,400 people and temporarily crippled U.S. naval forces in wartime but left red-faced America First advocates including automaker and anti-Semite Henry Ford, aviation hero and Hitler champion Charles Lindbergh and Catholic priest and radio demagogue Charles Coughlin – none of whom could even remotely be described as “progressive.” Incredibly, this movement congealed in America after Hitler’s successful conquest of France, our main ally in the American Revolution, and Germany’s devastating aerial assault on Great Britain, home base of so much of the robust intellectual thought informing America’s Declaration of Independence. None of this, however, fit Justice Thomas’ diatribe.

Nor did the shadowy “Wall Street Putsch,” in which a group of Wall Street financiers sought to recruit an army of U.S. veterans to overthrow FDR, rate mention by Justice Thomas. Outraged by New Deal programs unleashed by the Roosevelt administration to battle a severe economic downturn that left a fourth of the population out of work, these moneyed individuals could hardly be described as “progressive.” They sought to replicate the Old World success of Hitler and Mussolini by tapping a decorated war hero to lead a coup against a president elected decisively by 57 percent of the voters in 1932. As retired Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler reportedly told the plotters who approached him: “If you get 500,000 soldiers advocating anything smelling of fascism, I am going to get 500,000 more and lick the hell out of you and we will have a real war right at home.” Butler informed FBI director J. Edgar Hoover of the plot in the fall of 1934, effectively defusing a plot that at best moved at snail’s pace. Despite an investigation by the “Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities,” the conspirators escaped any real accountability, fading into the Wall Street backdrop.

At one point, Justice Thomas resorted to Trump’s incendiary rhetoric, though through pseudo-intellectual terms:

Progressives strove to undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident. To Wilson, the inalienable rights of the individual were “a lot of nonsense.” Wilson redefined “liberty” not as a natural-right antecedent to the government but as “the right of those who are governed to adjust government to their own needs and interests.” In other words, liberty no longer preceded the government as a gift from God but was to be enjoyed at the grace of the government. The government, as Wilson reconceived of it, would be “beneficent and indispensable.” Progressives such as John Dewey attacked the Framers for believing that “their ideas [were] immutable truth good at all times and places” when instead they were “historically conditioned, and relevant only to their own time.” Now, Dewey and the progressives argued, those ideas were to be repealed.  

Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government. It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God but from the Government. It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights. You will not be surprised to learn that the progressives had a great deal of contempt for us, the American people.

Do latter-day progressives and liberals – the terms are practically interchangeable nowadays – such as Texas state Rep. and Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico, Maryland Congressman and constitutional scholar Jamie Raskin and former president and Harvard-educated legal scholar Barack Obama show “a great deal of contempt for us, the American people”? Do they yearn for a people of “subservience and weakness”? Did FDR? Is Thomas’ passing dismissal of American scholar John Dewey’s thoughts fair, given not only Dewey’s pronounced enthusiasm for American democracy but his refinement of such thought amid stunning U.S. population growth, the unrestrained rise of industrialism, the Civil War, two world wars and the devastation of the Great Depression? And has Trump or Thomas excelled Dewey in championing democracy in America? Have they excelled FDR?

“Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife,” Dewey wrote, a reflection that heaps grave and immense responsibilities on the generation raising the next in history, governance and civic responsibility – and is not so very different from Jefferson’s studied estimation in his Sept. 6, 1789, letter to friend James Madison, by then witness to ratification of the U.S. Constitution which he had painstakingly argued for in the so-called “Federalist Papers.” Jefferson, still in France as a U.S. diplomat as that nation erupted in revolution, argued that each generation should be able to craft its own constitution and laws, to subsequently endure so long as they endured. “Every constitution then, & every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years,” the author of the Declaration of Independence wrote. “If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, & not of right.” Jefferson’s idea – one that he retained through his many years – probably would have consigned the United States to a degree of anarchy but might also have compelled more societal reflection on founding documents than now exists. One can only imagine how different the federal judiciary would have been had Jefferson’s idea been fully implemented, especially in a closely divided nation where mere amendment to the U.S. Constitution is now nearly impossible.

For his part, Justice Thomas defends his originalist interpretation of foundational documents to the point he sees anyone applying their declaratory principles vigorously to latter-day wrongs as sacrilegious. Yet historian Ted Widmer, editor of the new Library of America edition “The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text” (2026) observes of Jefferson’s authorship of the Declaration under a committee that included John Adams and Benjamin Franklin: “The Declaration speaks eternal truths, but it was composed in a precise time and place, full of thoughts that were specific to July 1776. In the first two paragraphs, Jefferson uses a soaring language to describe the rights that inhere in all human beings. But the bulk of the document is an angry philippic against King George III for his refusal to uphold those rights. In a series of detailed accusations, departing from the universal generalities at the beginning, Jefferson lists violations, like an irritable prosecutor.” And what Justice Thomas in his ivory tower misses – and historian Widmer and other Americans do not – is how later events can compare with the very transgressions Jefferson and his editors cited in 1776 – and that the relevance of Jefferson’s inspirational passages are determined by how subsequent generations have applied those principles to new, often unforeseen challenges.

Justice Thomas’ Declaration of Independence speech may have commanded more attention than it deserved. Such speeches, once familiar fodder for Independence Day celebrations, are no longer customary in America with citizens’ short attention span and focus on more gratifying pursuits. For many Americans in the Age of Trump, the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was highlighted by a testosterone-ridden June 14 birthday party for the 80-year-old chief executive of the United States featuring an Ultimate Fighting Championship Freedom 250 mixed-martial arts competition on the White House lawn, complete with the pummeling to a pulp of lightweight fighter Ilia Topuria as the main event, while TV spectators subscribed to Paramount Plus, consulting their cellphones during commercial breaks championing our military might, learned the 80-year-old chief executive being so honored had effectively lost America’s congressionally unauthorized war against Iran, at least judging from early returns seeping into American homes between fights. And the president promised in a Truth Social post the day after the UFC fights that, on the fast-approaching Fourth of July, after entertainers embarrassed him by cancelling to save their reputations, “we are going to host the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all, a ‘TRIBUTE TO AMERICA.’ Starting at 7 P.M. EST, this HUGE Celebration will honor our Country's People, Spirit, Strength, Resolve and Triumphs.” A massive fireworks display was also promised.

        President Trump kicks off the Great American State Fair on June 24  

Yet the first of the president’s speeches on occasion of the Fourth of July was primarily devoted to what he regarded as his own triumphs, not those marking 250 years of American history. He even compared his 2024 presidential reelection to the American Revolution. “Tonight as we stand on the edge of our 250th year of independence, I am thrilled to declare that America is back,” he declared in a June 24 speech kicking off a 16-day exposition replicating a modern-day world’s fair. “As you know very well, a short time ago we were a dead country. We were dead. Now, we're the hottest country anywhere in the world. We're respected by everybody. Nobody's laughing at us anymore. Two years ago, they were laughing. Now, we're the most respected anywhere. Think of it, anywhere in the world. Where were we two years ago? We weren't respected. We were a joke. We're not a joke anymore. Most powerful country in the world. But just like those patriots of 1776, over the past 17 months, we have taken power back from the far-off political class. They're trying to gain it back, but it's not going to happen. We have reclaimed our sovereignty, regained our liberty, restored our prosperity and we have saved our country in all things. We're once again putting a thing called America First.”

The president for whom Justice Thomas has shown such deference – including allowing greater leeway than even his right-wing colleagues on the court did in the downright dangerous 2024 Trump v. United States presidential immunity ruling – is a man who has shown contempt at almost every turn for the very constitutional checks and balances Thomas pretends to revere alongside the Declaration of Independence. “The Constitution is the means of government,” Thomas said in his University of Texas address. “It is the Declaration that announces the ends of government.” Yet Thomas is hardly one to be making such claims. While the justice claimed to cherish the Declaration of Independence a few months short of its 250^th anniversary, it was clear the braggart with whom Thomas is linked has little understanding of it, notwithstanding President Trump’s glee in compelling civil servants to frame and mount in the Oval Office a vintage copy of the founding document that he can show off to enthralled visitors. When Trump pulled back the dark blue curtains to reveal it to Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham in March 2025, two months after his inauguration, he used possession of the document to belittle the man he hates most for vanquishing him in the 2020 election and whom he regularly belittles as senile and ineffectual and blames for his own administration’s constant bungling. “Isn’t it great?” the president asked Ingraham, a former law clerk to Justice Thomas who could muster only “Wow” in acknowledgement. “Just went up yesterday,” Trump boasted. “Think Joe Biden would do this? I don’t think so. Do you think he’d think of it? Do you think he knows what it is?”

And when the following month the president showed his framed Declaration of Independence to visiting ABC newsman Terry Moran, the latter at least had the good sense to ask: “What does it mean to you?” To which the president replied: “Well, it means exactly what it says. It’s a declaration, it’s a declaration of unity and love and respect. And it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.”

Trump’s answer to Moran conjures up the wayward student who has failed to read the assigned lesson of the day and attempts to wing his response to a skeptical teacher’s question. Sure, one could stretch and argue the signatories, in making their mark, reflected the unity of various British colonies in their resolve to separate from King George III’s rule and domain; that, in support of this joint resolve, they pledged to one another “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor,” which, sure, conveys a bond possibly approaching love; and that, in their list of complaints regarding the king and their insistence on “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God” entitle them, they are demanding a certain overdue respect. Yes, the Declaration of Independence is just that – a declaration – but what’s relevant about it are the values it claims to hold dear and the examples it offers as transgressions against those values. Certainly, such values are not mirrored in Trump’s infamous comment in June 2018 to a Fox News reporter who inquired about the possibility of the president’s inviting North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to the White House: “Hey, he’s the head of a country – and I mean he is the strong head, don’t let anyone else think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.” The president dismissed subsequent concern over this comment by insisting, typically, he “was kidding and you don’t understand sarcasm.”

In fairness, Justice Thomas never mentioned President Trump in his speech. Still, it’s hard to forget that, in Trump v. United States, the justice in his concurrence ventured well beyond the majority opinion providing the president of the United States “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority” – itself an invitation by the president’s men to wildly rationalize before God and country that anything a president does, up to and including carting off classified documents to the Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida or conspiring to overturn a national election, could fit into this “conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority.” Justice Thomas concurs with the majority, then goes off to answer questions unasked – generally frowned upon by legal scholars. He questions U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel to investigate and, if necessary, prosecute then-former President Trump for federal crimes including conspiring to overthrow the 2020 presidential election and carting off those aforementioned classified documents that, as a former president, he by law could no longer possess. Thomas raises the specter of whether Garland – once nominated to the high court and undone by Republican obstinance and sabotage – violated the Constitution “by creating an office of the Special Counsel that has not been established by law.”

Nor is it easy to forget that congressional investigators of the January 6, 2021, violence at the U.S. Capitol, sparked by Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of a rigged election, questioned Justice Thomas’ wife Ginni over her texts to then-Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and others encouraging desperate efforts to overturn election returns – an undemocratic scheme that, again, can hardly be blamed on American progressivism. "Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!...You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America's constitutional governance at the precipice," the justice’s wife wrote in a spasm of patriotic fervor. "The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History." It’s interesting to reflect on Ginni Thomas’ refusal to respect the many decisions of numerous lower court jurists regarding claims of electoral fraud and irregularity, given her husband’s role in government. During a Sept. 29, 2022, interview by the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, conservative Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, the daughter of a former vice president, reminded Ginni Thomas that, of the legal claims President Trump and his allies brought before the courts, “they lost 61 out of 62 of those challenges.” To which Justice Thomas’ wife replied: “I still believed that there was fraud and irregularity, as millions of Americans do, Representative Cheney.” Ginni Thomas then added upon further questioning: “I just think there's still a lot of things that are still being uncovered. And so I believed there was fraud and irregularity, contrary to clearly what you believe.” In her claims, Ginni Thomas echoed the courtroom testimony of many January 6 rioters and insurrectionists, some by then pleading for leniency given what they acknowledged to be their ignorance and the astounding ways in which they were manipulated by malevolent political forces headed by President Trump. Yet, facing no real consequences for her own skullduggery and rumor-mongering, Ginni Thomas held firm to her claims of election fraud despite admitting she had no evidence whatsoever to justify it.

When Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin during this same interview asked the justice’s wife what case of election fraud she was most concerned about, she replied: “I can't say that I was familiar at that time with any specific evidence. I was just hearing it from news reports and friends on the ground, grassroots activists who were inside of various polling places that found things suspicious. So l don't know. I was not an expert of the fraud and irregularities that were starting to be talked about.” The exchange between the progressive congressman and the MAGA-fied Supreme Court justice’s wife continued:

Mr. Raskin: I see. And what are the episodes of fraud that still concern you, even in the wake of more than 60 federal and state court decisions rejecting allegations of fraud and irregularity?

Mrs. Thomas: What do I think today?

Mr. Raskin: Yes. I thought you were saying that you continue to say that things were being found about fraud.

Mrs. Thomas: Right. There seems to be a lot of people still moving around, identifying ways that there were – we'll see. We'll see what happens. I don't know specific instances. But certainly I think we all know that there are people questioning what happened in 2020 and it takes time to develop an understanding of the facts.

Mr. Raskin: Which states concern you the most?

Mrs. Thomas:  I don't know.

Mr. Raskin: OK. Are you concerned that you're moving into a different kind of political system if—

Mr. Mark Paoletta, Mrs. Thomas’ counsel: OK. I think we want to talk about what happened during the post-election activities. What Mrs. Thomas thinks today about the future I don't think is relevant to this discussion.

Mr. Raskin: OK. Well, I asked about which post-election activities concern her, but I think the answer is she couldn't identify any, unless I missed that. Mrs. Thomas, were there specific episodes that concerned you after the election?

Mr. Paoletta (to Mrs. Thomas): Do you recall? At the time?

Mrs. Thomas: I can't think of anything right now.

As this exchange continued, the justice’s wife repeatedly acknowledged a limited knowledge of the allegations of election fraud and irregularity being hurled about, even as she arguably used her connections as a jurist’s wife to encourage those in power to take them seriously. “I'd say I was generically involved,” she told Raskin. “I mean, you know, the hope of going to the rally on January 6th was that there would be a robust discussion in the Congress on January 6th about fraud and irregularity. And, you know, I don't think I had a very sophisticated understanding at that point of what would happen, Congressman, but I guess I hoped that something – something could change in a limited period of time before what I thought was a mistake was going to happen.”

In an exchange with a congressional committee attorney, the justice’s wife acknowledged unfamiliarity with subsequent materials setting the record straight, including a report co-authored by former Republican Sen. John Danforth, for whom Clarence Thomas early in his career served as a legislative clerk and who in support sat alongside Ginni Thomas during Senate hearings over her husband’s besieged nomination to the Supreme Court.

Q: Is it fair to say that your view of the existence of fraud at the time was based on what other people said and not your own consideration of the actual evidence?

Mrs. Thomas: That is true.

Q: And have you ever read a report titled "Lost, Not Stolen"?

Mrs. Thomas: No.

Q: OK. That's a report that was written by a number of prominent conservatives, including Sen. John Danforth, Professor Michael McConnell, Judge Michael Luttig and a number of others.

Mrs. Thomas: Uh-huh.

Q: So you've never read that—

Mrs. Thomas: No.

Q: —report or seen it?

Mrs. Thomas: No.

One can understand the skepticism of Congresswoman Cheney, Congressman Raskin and the committee attorney regarding Ginni Thomas’ answers. By the time of the interview, far more was known about the deceit fueling the violent MAGA uprising on President Trump’s behalf. For instance, the same day that Fox News stalwart Laura Ingraham – again, Justice Thomas’ former law clerk – texted White House Chief of Staff Meadows pressing him to get the president to tell supporters overwhelming the Capitol on January 6 to "go home," she appeared on Fox News in the evening promoting the unfounded claim that members of antifa had actually participated in the storming of the Capitol. “Mark, the president needs to tell people in the capital to go home,” Ingraham texted Meadows. “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.” Yet, in her on-screen deceit, Ingraham kept her job and years later was still dutifully promoting the Trump administration on Fox News. And when Trump, restored to power by voters, pardoned the rioters and insurrectionists, Ingraham again rationalized the executive order. “Clearly there were a small minority who engaged in violence, but the overwhelming majority were charged with misdemeanors, with trespassing and parading in the Capitol. Plus were defendants given their due process rights, is another argument." And, yes, the J6 defendants were indeed given their due process rights, as Ingraham must have known, given the preponderance of federal court records available online.

                                         The January 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol

Given the justice’s argument in his speech that progressivism “strove to undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights” and is responsible for all manner of catastrophe and mayhem, to whom, one wonders, does he credit cries of “1776!” and “Revolution!” and the like as an angry mob incited by the president of the United States – a self-serving figure who fancied himself anything but “progressive” – stormed the U.S. Capitol, some vowing to hang the vice president of the United States because he bowed to the U.S. Constitution and not the president in certifying the 2020 election results? Clearly what constitutes one of the greatest disgraces to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution arose not because of progressivism but, if claims by Trump and his rabble are to be believed, unbridled conservatism rooted in wild-eyed conspiracy theories that the courts and the president’s own men in his first administration stressed were unfounded? In fact, what remained of conservatism by this time required rescuing from those who proclaimed the philosophy but demonstrated few of its principles.

Certainly Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his infamous Texas v. Pennsylvania lawsuit in December 2020 to scuttle the ballots of U.S. voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia, thus securing Trump the electoral win he so craved, is no progressive. “The cascading series of compounding defects in Texas’ filings [in Texas v. Pennsylvania] is only underscored by the surreal alternate reality that those filings attempt to construct,” then-Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, arguably a progressive, wrote in a stinging Dec. 10, 2020, filing regarding the Paxton lawsuit. “That alternate reality includes an absurd statistical analysis positing that the probability of President-elect Biden winning the election was ‘one in a quadrillion.’ Texas’ effort to get this court to pick the next president has no basis in law or fact. The court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated.” To quote James Harrington, a founder of the Texas Civil Rights Project, a former adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law and a signatory to the unsuccessful Lawyers Defending American Democracy complaint against Paxton subsequently filed with the State Bar of Texas: “The injunction Mr. Paxton sought with the Supreme Court would have usurped the presidency for the next four years and cast doubt on whether truly democratic presidential elections would ever have been restored in America.”

Given the context and setting of his speech, Justice Thomas’ contorting of U.S. history isn’t so surprising: The speaking event was linked to the University of Texas at Austin’s new School of Civic Leadership, home base of the Civitas Institute. The latter is a think tank funded by right-wing donors that has yet to truly distinguish itself, even as it offers thought-provoking essays and online interviews, including one with conservative activist and Thomas champion Leonard Leo, a Federalist Society architect whose success in placing a conservative supermajority on the high court was motivated in reaction to (quoting Leonard) “the politics of personal destruction” employed by Senate Democrats against conservative jurist Robert Bork and later Thomas during Senate confirmation hearings. Since fall 2025 the school has pursued its mission to, quoting Gov. Greg Abbott, “get back on the pathway of ensuring that we’re educating our students with the leading concepts that have led to the great country we are today.” It lends intellectual heft to how America’s oligarchs and the politicians they install in power want us to see America – obedient and right with the Lord above all else. “We are a nation that was birthed in prayer and built on the Judeo-Christian ethic,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said upon the University of Texas System announcement of a $100 million investment in its School of Civic Leadership in 2025. “We’ve been given a magnificent inheritance from our founders and today is the day in Texas we begin to claim our inheritance once again.”

Which invites the question: Who among us hijacked the “inheritance” we’re now reclaiming? Thomas would no doubt blame the progressives.

Two weeks after his speech in Texas, Thomas and five other Republican-tapped Supreme Court justices, three of them nominated by President Trump – in a gesture that defines the “judicial activism” conservatives supposedly hate – in essence gutted the Voting Rights Act. Its passage 61 years earlier helped remedy a century of racist Jim Crow law that hindered African-American representation in state legislatures and Congress. Crass partisanship now remains sufficient grounds to gerrymander to undemocratic extremes. Yet ensuring a few seats are set aside for America’s racial minorities to atone for centuries of wrongdoing including enslavement and lynchings is now unconstitutional. None of which might matter except that one of the two main political parties has by now so clearly embraced racism as to become the prevailing “white” party.

Justice Samuel Alito’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling is brimming with scattershot citations of legal precedents, flawed racial data and tortured protestations of “we-ain’t-racist-no-more.” But it’s easy enough to categorize: It fits comfortably alongside the 1883 Supreme Court Civil Rights Cases ruling that in essence struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and gave a pass to whites-only establishments such as hotels and theaters to continue their racial discrimination on the grounds the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to “state actions,” not private establishments. This spurred African-American abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass to rousingly exclaim before a subsequent civil rights gathering: “Where slavery was strong, liberty is now weak. O for a Supreme Court of the United States which shall be as true to the claims of humanity as the Supreme Court formerly was to the demands of slavery.”

In his two-paragraph concurrence finishing off legislation for which civil rights leader John Lewis suffered severe beatings on Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and Martin Luther King fell to assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, Justice Thomas – black like them but really not at all like them – spat venom: “Today’s decision should largely put an end to this ‘disastrous misadventure’ in voting-rights jurisprudence.” Justice Neil Gorsuch – just days before release of his children’s book, “Heroes of 1776: The Story of the Declaration of Independence” – joined in Thomas’ tidy and hateful concurrence, notwithstanding the troublesome Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and an act of Congress repeatedly reauthorized by that body on a bipartisan basis. So much for Thomas’ claim, made during a Q&A session at the April 15 event at the University of Texas, that the federal judiciary doesn’t make law, merely interprets it: “I think if you ask most judges, we operate within the sphere of our authority. And, as federal judges, of course, that’s Article III [of the Constitution]. And we do not draft the laws. We may not like them. We may not as a policy matter – if we were legislators, we might not even vote for them. But we take what is given and we apply that. It doesn’t mean you do it with glee.” 

Within hours of the April 29 Louisiana v. Callais ruling nixing the Voting Rights Act, Americans witnessed a sickening display of the racist malignancy that has consumed the Party of Lincoln, now the Party of Trump. Republicans in Southern states scrambled excitedly to gerrymander out of existence their few remaining Democratic congressional districts, many of them represented by blacks. In the most extreme case, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry suspended a primary election already in progress (with reportedly 42,000 mail-in ballots cast) on the grounds that “[a]llowing elections to proceed under an unconstitutional map would undermine the integrity of our system and violate the rights of our voters.”

In short, Jim Crow has been resurrected in what now seems the Old Confederacy. And Justice Thomas’ loyalties are unquestioned. History need not tarry long in judging him.

Ironically, the day the Supreme Court of the United States gutted the Voting Rights Act, it heard, in oral arguments involving an unrelated immigration case, Mullin v. Doe, a Trump Department of Justice official assure justices that past remarks by President Trump disparaging Haiti as a "shithole" country and immigrants as "poisoning the blood" of the United States weren’t in fact racist and shouldn’t hinder the government’s scrapping temporary protections for migrants. Solicitor General John Sauer insisted the president’s remarks, “none of them, not a single one of them, mentions race or relates to race in any way.”

That's a matter of perspective. Two months later, by the usual 6-3 rendering in Mullin v. Doe, the high court sided with the Trump administration in its efforts to remove protections for Haitians in the United States under a federal program that permits foreign citizens to remain in America so long as the U.S. government believes that returning such people to their homelands would endanger them. In his concurrence, Justice Thomas ruled the federal statute “makes Congress’ intent to preclude judicial review clear," thus neutering lower court decisions to safeguard such individuals. Yet Justice Elena Kagan made clear in her dissent that racism clearly motivated the Trump administration's efforts to deport Haitians and she ridiculed the Republican justices for ignoring such evidence submitted by Haitian plaintiffs.

"The evidence they have offered includes statements by the president so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print," Kagan notes in her June 25 dissent. "Indeed, one measure of the president’s way of speaking about Haitians is to compare it with the majority’s, which is unfailingly respectful. So here are some of those statements: Haitians are ‘eating the dogs . . . . They’re eating the cats. They’re eating – they’re eating the pets of the people that live [in Springfield, Ohio].’ And: Haitians are also eating ‘other things too that they’re not supposed to be.’ And: Haitians in the United States ‘probably have AIDS.’ And: Haiti is a ‘shithole country,’ which is ‘filthy, dirty [and] disgusting.’ And: Haitian immigration is ‘like a death wish for our country.’ And: Haitians, along with some others, are ‘poisoning the blood’ of our country. And: ‘Why is it we only take people from shithole countries’ like ‘Haiti [and] Somalia’? ‘Why cannot we have some people from Norway [and] Sweden?’ The [court] majority briefly replies that those remarks are not ‘overtly racial’ but it is hard to know what that means. Haitians are black. Norwegians and Swedes, not so much. The references – of filth, disease and primitiveness — are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes. It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any white community."

Thus far, two white justices – Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts – have drawn more negative attention than Thomas for crippling the Voting Rights Act: Alito for shoddy scholarship in citing flawed black voter turnout stats apparently cribbed from a manipulative Department of Justice filing, Roberts for capping his career on the court in Louisiana v. Callais in a continuation and arguably a conclusion of his long-ago crusade in the Reagan administration’s Department of Justice to neuter of the Voting Rights Act, including challenges under Section 2, which a court in another era and another America deemed a “restatement of the protections afforded by the 15th Amendment.” In Roberts’ words decades earlier, legal challenges under Section 2 “provide a basis for the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes.” And Section 2 was what Roberts, Alito, Thomas and other justices dismantled in the April 29 ruling. In her angry dissent outlining the long, concerted effort by right-wing justices to kill the Voting Rights Act, Justice Kagan credited the majority’s use of “untenable readings of statutory text, made-up and impossible-to-meet evidentiary requirements, disregard for precedent and disdain for congressional judgment. And in that way, it greenlights redistricting plans that will disable minority communities – in Louisiana and across the nation – from electing, as majority communities can, “representatives of their choice.”

Shaming Justice Thomas for snuffing out the Voting Rights Act and setting off a wave of racism across the Old Confederacy has been largely left to African-American voices portraying him as the hypocritical beneficiary of affirmative action policies and diversity initiatives by both Democrats and Republicans generations earlier before pulling up the ladder for others upon his elevation to the high court. They ridicule white supremacists who dismiss Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as a “DEI hire” because she’s African-American and progressive while praising Thomas to the heavens. Yet the heavens may not be listening: Harlem pastor and former Texan Kevin R. Johnson in May referred to Justice Thomas as the “Supreme Court n**ga.” In short, he’s working hard for the rich and the powerful, most of them white and thoroughly regressive in their politics.

The Clarence Thomas appearing at the University of Texas on April 15 was a far cry from the grandfatherly, seemingly benign jurist appearing at McLennan Community College on Sept. 7, 2017. In Waco, Thomas gently explained how originalism works in complicated latter-day cases and rhapsodized about the imagined life as a farmer rather than, say, a jurist. When a local history professor acting as moderator during the Q&A session likened Thomas to Lincoln in their adoration of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas sagaciously observed of its most famous Jeffersonian passage: "We're inherently equal. We have certain inalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But in order to be governed, we give up some of those rights, but only so much as we need to give up to have a government."

By contrast, Justice Thomas’ speech at the University of Texas championed the Declaration of Independence by savaging “progressivism” in government as contrary to the Declaration of Independence’s “commitment to equality and natural rights.” The fact Thomas largely limited his criticism to the progressivism of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson – undertaken to rein in mighty industrial and financial corporations then crushing the interests of everyday workers and consumers – while completely ignoring the robust, similarly well-intentioned progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt – an enormously respected Republican president who in fact preceded Wilson and employed progressivism to benefit working-class Americans abused and neglected by cavalier American industrialists in the realms of health, working conditions and financial stability – confirms that Justice Thomas was cherry-picking his facts in partisan fashion.

In his speech, Justice Thomas takes an astonishing ideological leap for a man elevated to serve lasting justice: He questions the motives of present-day progressives without suggesting we do the same of President Trump or Thomas himself. Progressives assume the positions they do, he charges, because they’re “controlled by criticism, so fearful of negative attention that they find ways to avoid doing the right thing.” They “fall prey to the enchanting siren songs of flattery,” he charges, and are “enticed by access to things that were previously unavailable to them.” That’s a neat trick for a jurist who has clearly traded the ethics of his position on the bench for “access to things” once inaccessible, delivered to him with flattery by oligarchs arguably seeking to retain their power and wealth through him while keeping people like his long-dead, deeply influential, much-beloved, much-idolized grandfather effectively marginalized. Such “gifts” include, of all things, a Bible once owned by civil rights crusader Frederick Douglass, estimated at $19,000 in value and gifted to Justice Thomas by Dallas billionaire and real-estate developer Harlan Crow. And for Thomas to suggest latter-day progressives “fall prey to the enchanting siren songs of flattery” ignores the multi-million-dollar makeover campaign overseen by Leo and fellow elites to rehabilitate Thomas’ scarred public image extending back to 1991 when his Senate confirmation hearings exploded over shocking allegations of sexual harassment by a black female co-worker – a challenge Thomas memorably characterized as a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks,” one he no doubt blamed on the white liberals sitting on the Senate Judiciary Committee sitting in judgment of him. The campaign to recast Thomas’ image – apparently undertaken with the justice’s cooperation – included what the Washington Post described as the “creation and promotion of a laudatory film about Thomas, advertising to boost positive content about him during Internet searches and publication of a book about his life.” In condemning those susceptible to “enchanting siren songs of flattery,” Thomas also ignores the colossal spectacle of his latter-day “America First” beacon, a political figure feverishly addicted to and distracted by popularity polls, crowd sizes, awards, ceremonial displays of deference and taxpayer-funded monuments and pageantry acknowledging his own greatness.

I might add, since Justice Thomas does not in his speech, that the Republicans of Lincoln’s era, who pressed the ideas of the Declaration of Independence into reality through passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, are hardly mirrored in today’s Republicans. Given the chance, latter-day Republicans failed to mend the Voting Rights Act Justice Thomas first seriously mauled in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. And Republicans say little of Trump’s executive orders cleansing from our museums and national parks the tumultuous history of American efforts to live up to Jefferson’s declaration “that all men are created equal.”

I might add, since Justice Thomas does not in his speech, that Jefferson devoted much of the Declaration of Independence to listing instances of executive overreach (27, count ’em) by King George III, including keeping “among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislatures,” refusal of his assent to the laws, “the most wholesome and necessary for the public good,” and instigating “domestic insurrections amongst us.” Justice Thomas should reflect mightily on his own decisions from the bench, many allowing similar executive overreach and thus endorsing the constitutional chaos we now witness.

I might add, since Justice Thomas does not in his speech, that he falters in his own historical perspective in belittling latter-day intellectuals who, he sniffs condescendingly, “want you to believe that our founding principles are matters of esoteric philosophy or sophisticated debate” and even in supporting those principles “too often talk about them as if they were academic playthings.” He overlooks the fact that the signers of the Declaration of Independence debated with similar intellectual vigor and patriotic passion both the specific crimes of the king chronicled in the document and whether “unalienable rights” should include black men. 

I might add, since Justice Thomas does not in his speech, that Jefferson, in his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, stressed “Nature’s God,” while Thomas and his fellow right-wing ideologues vacillate between it and the Judeo-Christian god sustained by worshipers’ obedience, adoration and expectation of heavenly reward – a god Jefferson knew from history had been prostituted time and again for self-gain by his supposed agents on Earth: “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”

All of which explains why government, as repugnant as the prospect may be to revolutionaries such as Jefferson and Paine, is ultimately critical to sustaining the rights of man, regardless of whether those rights originate from an intelligent force of nature defying Darwinian explanation or a god whose existence is chronicled, however haphazardly, by long-ago disciples. Certainly, Clarence Thomas’ stern, independent-minded grandfather – whom Thomas warmly credits on all occasions with forging in him the qualities of self-reliance and diligence – recognized the potential role of government in righting wrongs: While raising orphaned Clarence, then in his early teens, Myers Anderson used his hard-earned money to bail out of jail those demonstrators mounting anti-segregation protests in Savannah in the early 1960s. Voting rights proved key to the demonstrators’ ultimate success in compelling the government to scrap segregationist initiatives, even before passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By all that is right, this should have played more of a role in Justice Thomas’ address than it did:

The Declaration is, in fact, along with the Gospels, one the greatest antislavery documents in the history of Western Civilization. It did not establish a form of government – that was the job of the Constitution that followed – but it stated the purpose of government. The Declaration made clear in clear prose that the purpose of government is to protect our God-given inalienable rights, rights that all individuals equally possess. As Abraham Lincoln declared in 1858, in the midst of his great debate with Stephen Douglas, “drop every paltry insignificant thought for any man’s success. It is nothing; I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of Humanity – the Declaration of American Independence.”

The ideas of the Declaration were so powerful that our nation could not coexist with the contradiction created by the great evil of slavery. Those principles were so powerful that hundreds of thousands of Americans fought and died in the Civil War to make men free. Those ideas have been so powerful that they convinced our nation to finally end segregation. They continue to be so powerful today that they have inspired people throughout the world to throw off the shackles of their oppressors.

And it all began with our Founders declaring in 1776 in the Declaration of Independence that: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

We should also not forget the important sentence that follows: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The principle of consent follows from the principle of equality. We the people can never legitimately consent to the violation of our God-given equality.

One can only marvel at Thomas’ offering a fairly straight, seemingly earnest championing of the Declaration of Independence in the first part of his speech at the University of Texas before detouring into taunts questioning supposed skeptics of the document – perhaps academic scholars if not Thomas’ progressive-minded court colleagues – before sliding into square-peg-in-round-hole contortions of history for the ignorant and the gullible, all to draw blood from enemies real and imagined to satisfy the bloodlust of his intellectually stunted audience. “It did not take me long in Washington to stop wondering why the Supreme Court took 60 years to overrule Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision that endorsed government racial segregation and validated the Jim Crow South that I grew up in,” Thomas said at one point. “It could not have taken my court 60 years to know that Plessy was a hideous wrong and that racial segregation was grossly incompatible with our colorblind Constitution. The justices must have known it all along. The right thing to do, as Justice [John Marshall] Harlan spelled out his lone dissent at the time, was obvious, as it so often is.” Yet Justice Thomas here conveniently ignores the fact that the Eisenhower-appointed chief justice who led the high court in overturning Plessy v. Ferguson and stamped much of the latter-day progressivism that then marked the court was, in fact, frequently denounced as a California-styled Republican progressive – Earl Warren. And given the Roberts court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act and furthering national division and racism by unleashing unrestrained gerrymandering and Thomas’ role condoning all of this, the justice has little justification for castigating jurists behind Plessy v. Ferguson and claiming “my court” would do better.

Is it appropriate to add that Justice Warren – so castigated today for evolving from conservatism to progressivism based on what came before his court – also decided Virginia v. Loving, a case that jettisoned laws forbidding interracial marriages such as that enjoyed by Justice Thomas and wife Ginni since 1987? I think so. Two residents of Virginia – Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving – were married in June 1958 in the District of Columbia, pursuant to its laws, then returned to their home state of Virginia where their interracial marriage violated state law. Upon their conviction in court, the judge sentenced them to a year in jail, then suspended the sentence on the condition they leave the state. "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents,” the trial judge declared. “And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix." Chief Justice Warren’s uncompromising response: “To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the state's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.”

                                                        President Woodrow Wilson

So far as Justice Thomas’ tying toxic “progressivism” to President Wilson and Democrats goes, know this: It is only what will one day be said of the mislabeled “conservatism” tied to President Trump and Republicans as historians and political scientists dissect and pass judgment on what will more accurately be labeled “fascist populism” or, simply, “fascism.” And surely, given the readiness with which Trump maligns critics at rallies and in press conferences as “Marxists,” “communists,” “fascists,” “vermin,” “radicals,” “enemies of the people” and “enemies within,” return fire of equal kind is fair. Trump after all has the bully pulpit of the presidency from which he can calm tempers in America or inflame them – and he has regularly chosen to inflame them. Many of us remember his words from January 6, 2021, in riling up supporters already rankled over what he convinced them was a nationally rigged election he lost: "We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."

In my youth, Wilson was held in steep regard, largely for efforts to push the League of Nations as part of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. I remember listening to his speeches in support of Senate ratification of U.S. participation in the league on radio journalist Edward R. Murrow’s “I Can Hear It Now” series of historical recordings – an influential set that helped acquaint me as a youth with our century’s tumultuous history, only glancingly covered in public schools because so much of it still provoked controversy and inconvenient inquiry. “Five men sat in the White House between 1919 and 1933,” Murrow deadpanned between speech excerpts. “Two were great, two were average and one was a bad president. And the greatest of these was the most hated. The fact he was for a time the most beloved man on earth made the tragedy of Thomas Woodrow Wilson even greater.” I recall some of the recorded speeches (courtesy of Murrow and CBS archives) that Wilson gave during his cross-country tour in support of the league. One of them: “[M]y fellow citizens, I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert this method by which to prevent it.” While critics from Wilson’s time feared membership in the league would threaten national sovereignty and thus managed to kill Wilson’s effort, the post-war generation in America that raised me appreciated Wilson’s effort after the second world war that he predicted. Yet all too familiar is the criticism of Sen. William Borah – interestingly, a progressive Republican from Idaho – who in responding to the notion of membership in the League of Nations quipped: “It took George Washington seven years to gain independence from George III, and now, my friends, they want to give it back to George V!”

Within another generation, another world war indeed ensued.

In my graying years, Wilson understandably plummeted in historians’ rankings because of his undisguised racism at a time when the Ku Klux Klan soared in popularity. Wilson played to this sentiment, famously hosting at the White House on Feb. 18, 1915, a screening of filmmaker D.W. Griffith’s epic “The Birth of a Nation” – a historic glorification of the Klan and perpetuation of the face-saving “Lost Cause” narrative that Southerners have long touted. He also oversaw resegregation of federal government offices. All of this was sufficient to prompt the Princeton University Board of Trustees to remove Wilson’s name from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs in 2020 following the racially explosive deaths across America of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks. (“Identifying a political leader as the namesake for a public policy school,” trustees explained, “inevitably suggests that the honoree is a role model for those who study in the school.”) Nor has Wilson’s less-known sabotaging of women’s suffrage helped his rankings among historians. Yet, for all of his faults, he is also tied to a “progressivism” focusing on government reform and economic policy, including reining in tariffs. At his inauguration, he vowed to scrap “a tariff which cuts us off from our proper part in the commerce of the world ... and makes the government a facile instrument in the hand of private interests.”

President Trump, by contrast, consistently used government overreach to impulsively and irrationally set tariffs in ways unauthorized by Congress, setting loose inflation and economic chaos ultimately suffered by his constituents and U.S. commerce. And when time came in 2026 for Justice Thomas to rule against the sort of government overreach he attributes to President Wilson, he sided with President Trump, who clearly lacks insight into the strategic employment of executive power that Wilson, for all of his faults (including partisanship), possessed, no matter how flawed he might have been about political science or racial equality. While Justice Gorsuch in writing for the 6-3 majority in Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump seized upon the approaching Declaration of Independence’s anniversary as justification for delivering a brilliant history lesson to President Trump, MAGA and clueless Americans about the constitutional limits of executive power – perhaps authorship of “Heroes of 1776: The Story of the Declaration of Independence” inspired him – Justice Thomas offers a fussy, convoluted interpretation that detours around the U.S. Constitution’s Article I, Section 8, ordinarily reserving to Congress “Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises,” and instead confers on the president certain powers once reserved to kings. “The power to impose duties on imports was a conventional method for governing foreign trade,” Justice Thomas writes in his Feb. 20, 2026, dissent. “It originated as a ‘prerogative right’ of the King.”

And while President Wilson may have sought ways to render government more effective in meeting the needs of the people in new, disorienting times when, to quote Wilson’s “New Freedom” of 1913, “most men are the servants of corporations” – the emerging Wilsonian statecraft for which Thomas condemns him – Wilson understood, certainly by the time of his presidency, the Declaration of Independence as a document of enlightened idealism which Americans of each generation must apply to the circumstances of their times – anathema, perhaps, to justices too rigorously advocating originalism going back to the times of kings. If Wilson has taken hits from critics like Thomas for belittling the stirring Jeffersonian preamble of the Declaration of Independence, one should also consider his Fourth of July 1914 address in Philadelphia. It simply asks we look beyond the preamble to better gauge the resolve of the colonists and their actual complaints – the list that Jefferson and his editors in Philadelphia scrutinized with such great care. To quote President Wilson’s address at Independence Hall:

The Declaration of Independence was a document preliminary to war. It was a vital piece of practical business, not a piece of rhetoric; and if you will pass beyond those preliminary passages which we are accustomed to quote about the rights of men and read into the heart of the document, you will see that it is very express and detailed, that it consists of a series of definite specifications concerning actual public business of the day. Not the business of our day, for the matter with which it deals is past, but the business of that first revolution by which the nation was set up, the business of 1776. Its general statements, its general declarations, cannot mean anything to us unless we append to it a similar specific body of particulars as to what we consider the essential business of our own day.

Liberty does not consist, my fellow citizens, in mere general declarations of the rights of man. It consists in the translation of those declarations into definite action. Therefore, standing here where the Declaration was adopted, reading its businesslike sentences, we ought to ask ourselves what there is in it for us. There is nothing in it for us unless we can translate it into the terms of our own conditions and of our own lives. We must reduce it to what the lawyers call a bill of particulars. It contains a bill of particulars, but the bill of particulars of 1776. If we would keep it alive, we must fill it with a bill of particulars of the year 1914.

The task to which we have constantly to readdress ourselves is the task of proving that we are worthy of the men who drew this great declaration and know what they would have done in our circumstances.

In concluding, Wilson has not lost sight of the rights championed in the more soaring passages of the Declaration of Independence but suggests, as Lincoln famously did before him, that America must set an example for generations around the world, not only including the human rights generally referenced but regarding grievances and transgressions that violate such rights and independence.

My dream is that, as the years go on and the world knows more and more of America, it will also drink at these fountains of youth and renewal; that it also will turn to America for those moral inspirations which lie at the basis of all freedom; that the world will never fear America unless it feels that it is engaged in some enterprise which is inconsistent with the rights of humanity; and that America will come into the full light of the day when all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights and that her flag is the flag not only of America but of humanity.

What other great people has devoted itself to this exalted ideal? To what other nation in the world can all eyes look for an instant sympathy that thrills the whole body politic when men anywhere are fighting for their rights? I do not know that there will ever be a declaration of independence and of grievances for mankind, but I believe that, if any such document is ever drawn, it will be drawn in the spirit of the American Declaration of Independence, and that America has lifted high the light which will shine unto all generations and guide the feet of mankind to the goal of justice and liberty and peace.

Ironically, the nation’s first black president stressed the same point nearly 110 years later, arguing the power of people to harness the government to improve matters. During his rousing all-American address on occasion of the June 18 opening of his presidential center – where he urged visitors to “skip the clips of my speeches – you have heard them all before – in favor of the stories of those ordinary citizens who helped make that change happen” – former President Barack Obama noted:

And since we're a few weeks away from America's 250th birthday, it is worth remembering just how radical the whole idea of self-government really was back in 1776. To that point, human history was a tale of conquest and caste and rigid hierarchies, a world where the strong dominated the weak, where power and wealth and status flowed through lineage and the many were ruled by the few.
But out of the fire and steel of a revolution, a different story took flight on this continent, a declaration that we are all created equal, endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights and that in the newly independent United States there will be no kings or lords, no serfs or subjects, but only citizens, each of us free to pursue our own version of happiness and able to determine our collective fate through an elected representative government.
It had not been done. And because it hadn't been done before, the success of this experiment was never a given. In forming our union, the founders fell terribly short of the declarations promised, leaving slavery intact, allowing states to restrict the franchise to white men who owned property. But in drafting a constitution and a Bill of Rights, they did have the foresight, the genius, to provide us with a framework that allows each generation to make our union more perfect. And over more than two centuries, through petitions and protests, marches and strikes, moral appeals from the pulpit and conversations at the family dinner table, men and women from all walks of life, of every color, every faith, every region took up the cause of democracy and made it their own until we the people came to include not just some of us but all of us.

           

              Former President Obama during ceremonies opening his presidential center

Historians have confirmed why President Theodore Roosevelt, a constitutionally astute public servant and a citizen of privilege, saw the need for a progressivism in which government using its muscle in regulation and oversight could not only improve the lives of a mistreated working class in terms of public safety and living standards but widen opportunities for them in “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This was preferrable to allowing a militant class of workers to fester, arise and possibly overturn all. This meant reining in rampaging industrial capitalism and correcting the myopia of the era’s American oligarchs. Using the presidency as a bully pulpit to bring progressivism to the national stage, Roosevelt based his own brand of progressivism on his priorities of economic stability, equality and Christianity. He supported a minimum wage, pressed for an eight-hour workday and structured his administration to ensure fair labor practices and prevent worker exploitation. His famous “Square Deal” stressed the “three Cs” – corporate regulation, consumer protection and conservation of natural resources. And he felt strongly enough about progressivism that he ultimately left the Republican Party.

“Cities, polluted and overcrowded, became breeding grounds for diseases like typhoid and cholera,” Kirsten Swinth, associate professor of history at Fordham University, writes of the conditions that spurred Roosevelt’s progressivism. “A new unskilled industrial laboring class, including a large pool of child labor, faced low wages, chronic unemployment and on-the-job hazards. Business owners didn’t mark high voltage wires, locked fire doors and allowed toxic fumes to be emitted in factories. It was cheaper for manufacturers to let workers be injured or die than to improve safety – so they often did. Farmers were at the mercy of railroad trusts, which set transport rates that squeezed already indebted rural residents. Economic growth occurred without regard to its costs to people, communities or the environment.”

Consider Theodore Roosevelt’s Nov. 15, 1912, letter to Edward Gray after Roosevelt’s defeat in the four-way 1912 presidential election, one in which he was shot:

I regret that you think your government may soon come to an end. As for the political fight here, I did not believe we would win, and I can say quite honestly that I have little or no personal regret in the outcome. But I do feel sorry from the broader standpoint. Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time, and if a country lets the time for wise action pass, it may bitterly repent when a generation later it strives under disheartening difficulties to do what could have been done so easily if attempted at the right moment. We Progressives were fighting for elementary social and industrial justice, and we had with us the great majority of the practical idealists of the country. But we had against us both the old political organizations and 99 percent at the very least of the corporate wealth of the country, and therefore the great majority of the newspapers. Moreover, we were not able to reach the hearts of the materialists or to stir the imagination of the well-meaning, somewhat sodden men who lack vision and prefer to travel in a groove. We were fought by the Socialists as bitterly as by the representatives of the two old parties, and this for the very reason that we stand equally against government by a plutocracy and government by a mob.

In referring to the rousing final sentence in the Declaration of Independence in which the 56 signatories “mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor,” Justice Thomas resorts to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s definition of courage as “not the absence of fear but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” Yet more than President Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal or President Wilson’s New Freedom, FDR’s robust administration constitutes American progressivism at its most radiant and beneficial, aiding citizens humbled and humiliated by the joblessness and hopelessness of the Great Depression when drought infested much of the American Midwest. While Roosevelt’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover, who was in office when the Depression erupted, did seek to right matters through a series of reforms, Roosevelt sustained the nation through far more imaginative programs as varied as the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Recovery Act and Social Security, all buoyed by Roosevelt’s tremendous optimism and avuncular charisma, successfully conveyed via “fireside chats” on the radio. An example: FDR’s Oct. 31, 1936, radio address unveiling a second round of reforms and programs. An excerpt, republished here at some length (given the space I’ve allotted Justice Thomas’ words), captures the engaging rhetoric of Roosevelt as he sought a second presidential term:

What was our hope in 1932? Above all other things, the American people wanted peace. They wanted peace of mind instead of gnawing fear.

First, they sought escape from the personal terror which had stalked them for three years. They wanted the peace that comes from security in their homes: safety for their savings, permanence in their jobs, a fair profit from their enterprise.

Next, they wanted peace in the community, the peace that springs from the ability to meet the needs of community life: schools, playgrounds, parks, sanitation, highways – those things which are expected of solvent local government. They sought escape from disintegration and bankruptcy in local and state affairs.

They also sought peace within the nation: protection of their currency, fairer wages, the ending of long hours of toil, the abolition of child labor, the elimination of wild-cat speculation, the safety of their children from kidnappers.

And, finally, they sought peace with other nations – peace in a world of unrest. The nation knows that I hate war, and I know that the nation hates war.

I submit to you a record of peace; and on that record a well-founded expectation for future peace – peace for the individual, peace for the community, peace for the nation and peace with the world.

Tonight I call the roll – the roll of honor of those who stood with us in 1932 and still stand with us today. Written on it are the names of millions who never had a chance – men at starvation wages, women in sweatshops, children at looms.

Written on it are the names of those who despaired, young men and young women for whom opportunity had become a will-o'-the-wisp.

Written on it are the names of farmers whose acres yielded only bitterness, businessmen whose books were portents of disaster, homeowners who were faced with eviction, frugal citizens whose savings were insecure.

Written there in large letters are the names of countless other Americans of all parties and all faiths, Americans who had eyes to see and hearts to understand, whose consciences were burdened because too many of their fellows were burdened, who looked on these things four years ago and said, "This can be changed. We will change it."

We still lead that army in 1936. They stood with us then because in 1932 they believed. They stand with us today because in 1936 they know. And with them stand millions of new recruits who have come to know. Their hopes have become our record.

I interviewed many aging rural folks early in my career – some of them “yellow-dog Democrats” – who cited such New Deal programs as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration as life-saving and instilling hope during lean times of desperation – and, of course, few Americans beyond a certain age now wish to see Social Security ended. Among those expressing pride in those challenging times: my friend Ralph Schwartz, a much-respected West Texas conservationist who began his career with the CCC, served on the historic Dust Bowl Survey and later served in World War II as an administrative officer with the Army Air Corps. And while economists still debate the effectiveness of FDR’s programs in ending hard times, millions of Americans reduced to a hardscrabble existence in the 1930s sustained their belief in America sufficient that, when the nation was swept into another global war in 1941, significant numbers joined the fight against totalitarian powers that Justice Thomas irrationally links to American progressivism.

Theodore Roosevelt and others throughout the 20^th century recognized what Justice Thomas misses: that the simple, idealistic times of the founding era, up to and including the Age of Jackson and beyond, were forever gone. “Our life has broken away from the past,” Wilson wrote in touting his New Freedom reforms. “The life of America is not the life that it was 20 years ago; it is not the life that it was 10 years ago. We have changed our economic conditions, absolutely, from top to bottom; and, with our economic society, the organization of our life. The old political formulas do not fit the present problems; they read now like documents taken out of a forgotten age.” Even President Andrew Jackson foresaw what was looming, however misguided he might have been in his war against the Bank of the United States. Consider the July 10, 1832, veto message of Old Hickory, an individual so admired by Trump for his abrasive and sometimes abrupt style, after Congress sought through legislation to extend the controversial bank’s charter:

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society – the farmers, mechanics and laborers – who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing. In the act before me there seems to be a wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles.

Theodore Roosevelt also sought to shake entitled industrialists into an awareness and moral responsibility regarding government’s stabilizing role: “A man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the state because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.” Indeed, in my times, I’ve long been astounded at wealthy Americans who fiercely resist paying taxes when those taxes pay for everything from building and maintaining roads and bridges to move consumer product across the nation and around the world to funding a military to ensure safe transport and travel in perilous global venues. Few of the many interviews I conducted during my long newspaper career figure prominently in memory, but one that does was a lengthy and lively Q&A with phenomenally successful Waco-based insurance titan and eager philanthropist Bernard Rapoport, then 91, who proved how a simple but original idea, with hard work through the years, could produce a billion-dollar company. His vigorous record of philanthropy was astounding, focusing on bolstering education, addressing hunger and improving medical care for the poor. During my 2009 interview with this opinionated, well-read, good-humored son of Russian Jews who immigrated to the United States, he sounded a call for more giving by others; criticized successful Americans who turned a blind eye to the plight of the less fortunate; and accurately lamented the death of capitalism and rise of monopolism. And, yes, his beliefs made him a legendary donor to Democratic Party candidates and causes.

“The idea that I pay the same rate of taxes as somebody who makes 20 percent of what I make — I mean, I should be paying more,” Rapoport told me with an air of outrage. “Why don't we think it's a privilege to be an American citizen? Why don't we have a sense of owing our country more? Let's stop all these tax evasions that are available. For me to have to pay half of my income — when you get to where people are making $500,000 or $600,000 a year at a tax rate of 50 percent, I think that's reasonable. And if you make more, it ought to go up. Why don't we really think it's a privilege to be an American? I mean, these people will raise a flag but they don't give!”

Putting aside the considerable favor shown him by such moneyed and influential individuals as Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow, it’s reasonable to consider Justice Thomas in light of Louisiana v. Callais. During his remarks at McLennan Community College, he praised those grandparents who took him and his younger brother in amid family strife, crediting them with instilling not only values but an education from which Thomas sprang into a man of consequence and influence. Thomas said he was every bit the “beneficiary” of his grandparents’ guidance and devotion. He celebrated their sacrifices for him, particularly in the American South, still reluctantly coming to terms with Brown v. Board of Education in which Chief Justice Warren, that great progressive jurist writing for a unanimous court, found “[s]egregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children,” dismissed any “psychological knowledge” determining otherwise at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson; and ruling that, “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”

  A painting of Justice Thomas amid prominent friends including Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow

Thomas correctly paints a picture of heartbreaking self-sacrifice by his grandparents in adopting and raising him and his brother in 1955. “[T]hey made it clear that their lives were not going anyplace – they had no education, they were in their late 40s – but that they could then become the burnt offerings for my brother and I to have a better life,” Justice Thomas said. “So when you speak of them, when you talk [of] my grandparents, you talk of two people who willingly offered themselves up for two boys who showed up on their doorstep in the fall of 1955. So when you hear the reverence [in Thomas’ voice], it’s because you know what they did … so that’s why I say it with pride that I’m my grandfather’s son because that means that I am the son, the offspring, of a great, great man and a great, great woman, Myers and Christine Anderson.”

Consider then the bitter fruit of Myers and Christine Anderson’s investment in their grandson as evidenced by flailing, ethically compromised Republican U.S. Rep. and white “MAGA warrior” Buddy Carter’s call for Georgia state officials to invoke Louisiana v. Callais and junk votes cast in an ongoing election, all to ensure President Trump kept control of Congress: "We need to suspend the House races and go ahead and redistrict so that Georgians would be represented in the next two years by people who represent their values. Georgia is a Republican state. We need to remember that."

Consider the descendants – biologically, spiritually, politically – of the protesters whom Myers Anderson put down hard-earned cash to bail out of jail during the Savannah race protests that ultimately forged a nearly complete boycott of city businesses and spurred voter registration drives that helped elect a more moderate city government that shelved segregationist policies. A historical marker regarding the so-called “Georgia Civil Rights Trail” notes that Martin Luther King Jr. subsequently proclaimed Savannah “the most desegregated city south of the Mason-Dixon Line.”

Consider, too, Mother Jones national voting rights correspondent Ari Berman’s estimation, upon crunching numbers and logistics after the Louisiana v. Callais ruling: "We could see the largest drop in black representation since the end of Reconstruction. We could lose a third of the Congressional Black Caucus." Or, as colleague Pema Levy put it, “If your partisan designs trump everyone else’s rights, then you can just, under the guise of ‘partisan’ gerrymandering, eliminate the voting rights of minority voters simply because they don’t vote for your party. It is absolutely a Jim Crow tool now.”

Consider the Andersons' likely embarrassment had they seen the Republican-led Tennessee Assembly racing to act on their grandson’s judicial machinations by carving up the state’s only majority-black district with such giddiness one legislator sought to wear into the assembly hall a full-length “Trump 2024” flag. "Wore my Trump flag as a cape during the special session and the Democrats started screaming ‘racist’ at me on sight,” state Rep. Todd Warner proclaimed. “They don’t know me. Never met me. Just saw the flag and had a meltdown. That’s the modern Democrat Party in a nutshell. They smear anyone who stands with President Trump.”

Consider the Andersons’ likely outrage at the expressed wish of white Alabama House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter, amidst the scramble to redistrict, that Thomas and fellow Republican justices go beyond simply rendering the Voting Rights Act impotent by rendering null and void the Fourteenth Amendment that granted citizenship and equal protection rights to formerly enslaved African Americans. “Alabama has done its part in helping President Trump maintain a Republican Congress,” Speaker Ledbetter said, “and we will continue fighting to ensure that our elections are decided by Alabamians, not activist judges.”

Clearly aware of the fallout, Chief Justice Roberts on May 6 sought to raise a desperate defense before a conference of dutiful Third U.S. Circuit judges and lawyers, at least some likely baffled by the high court’s overturning established traditions and legal precedent so nobly defining Jefferson’s aspirational goals in the Declaration of Independence. Roberts insisted that he and his fellow justices were not out to forge policy but, rather, apply the law. He told the jurists assembled of the growing chorus of American critics: “I think they view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.”

Yet the justices did not apply and refine the Voting Rights Act but effectively gutted it.

Justice Thomas’ unfounded attack on American progressivism while celebrating the Declaration of Independence, his faulting of latter-day historians and legal scholars and policymakers and possibly fellow jurists in the context of his championing the courage and resolve of men who put their names to the Declaration, ultimately render Roberts’ defense of the high court absurd. Whatever his motivation, warranted or not, Justice Thomas in his address revealed himself to be a political actor of regression and fallacy. And the vehemence with which he concurs in pivotal redistricting decisions such as Shelby County v. Holder and Louisiana v. Callais and with which he condemns progressives of times past betrays his bitterness and anger. Does this stem from left-wing Democrats’ undermining his Senate confirmation hearings as a Supreme Court justice by giving credence to a black woman’s allegations of sexual harassment? Did his “high-tech lynching” by leftists juggle his sense of historical outlook and dispensing of justice? Clearly Justice Thomas’ opinions on redistricting reflect a conviction that the Voting Rights Act violates the Constitution. Yet could he have not suggested, as Supreme Court justices sometimes do, a solution that Congress might consider to eliminate gerrymandering abuses regularly heaped on the American electorate by self-serving lawmakers and governors and presidents, whether out of racial preference or partisanship? Certainly, he is aware redistricting as practiced often defies the Declaration’s concept of “consent of the governed” as demanded by those courageous signers he so admires; to quote historian Ted Widmer again, the Declaration of Independence stresses “a novel theory of self-government” in which “power flowed from the bottom up, from the people to their leaders,” rather than allowing politicians to self-servingly pick their voters. Or does Justice Thomas, secure in his ivory tower with his Frederick Douglass Bible and his narrow view of the Declaration of Independence, even care?

By strong-arming the state of Texas in 2025 to aggressively redistrict mid-decade (rather than once a decade) solely to garner his political party five more congressional seats during the midterms, President Trump and his Department of Justice lackeys triggered a gerrymandering blitzkrieg by both parties that aggravated an equally bitter and angry nation, and on the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence – and all to benefit of one entitled white man, a constitutionally contemptuous individual who has committed far more transgressions against the principles of the Declaration of Independence than Woodrow Wilson. And despite claims that racism is not the problem it once was across America, the Supreme Court in its Louisiana v. Callais decision proved just the opposite, reigniting racism long buried by societal manners and the rule of law, leaving an oozing, gaping wound across our land. Is it fair to ponder how Myers and Christine Anderson, dead and buried since 1983, might have viewed all of this, any more than our greatest scholars ponder how Jefferson, Madison, Paine, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson and the Roosevelts might have viewed all that has befallen us?