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 20th century touted and
embraced German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s “state-centric society” as
nearly perfect and claimed that, in Thomas’ estimation of Wilsonian progressivism,
“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 not only the bone-headed contentions
I heard from Make America Great Again zealots over eight 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 in its wake 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 remotely be described as
“progressive.” Incredibly, this movement formally 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 launched 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 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 conspiracy that at best moved at a 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 displayed President Trump’s impulses,
in this instance making wild generalizations about long-dead Americans to
foster resentment, even hatred:
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 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 display “a great deal
of contempt for us, the American people”? Do they yearn for a people of
“subservience and weakness”? Did FDR? Do or did they seek to replace “the basic
premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government”? Is
Justice 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 thoughts 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?
“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. It’s 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 “Federalist Papers.” Jefferson, still in France
as a diplomat as that nation also erupted in revolution, argued 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 else applying their declaratory
principles too 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 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 is
determined by how subsequent generations applied those principles to new, often
unforeseen challenges.
Justice Thomas draws, in part, from Wilson’s pre-presidential
thoughts such as those offered to the Jefferson Club of Los Angeles on May 12,
1911. Wilson here is not quite arguing for the jettisoning of Jefferson’s
aspirational thoughts, only consideration of how circumstances of the present
day compare or do not compare to Jefferson’s list in the Declaration of
Independence indicting King George III. The latter offers a guide to what is
and is not acceptable. “Now, the business of every true Jeffersonian is to
translate the terms of those abstract portions of the Declaration of
Independence into the language and the problems of his own day,” Wilson said. “If
you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the
preface. Make a new table of contents, make a new set of counts in the
indictment, make a new statement of the things you mean to set right, and then
call all the civilized world to witness, as that great document does, that you
mean to settle these things in the spirit of liberty but also in the spirit of
justice and responsibility.”
I can imagine Wilson’s putting his thoughts differently, more
diplomatically, given the awe that so many of us have for the Declaration’s preamble
– “American scripture,” to quote the late, great Pauline Maier, a far better scholar
than Wilson. Yet he makes a legitimate point worthy of debate: Too many tinpot
patriots of our times celebrate Jefferson’s preamble without reflecting on whether
we the descendants of those enlightened, courageous patriots measure up to the
challenges and circumstances arising before us. To quote President Franklin D. Roosevelt
in his Fourth of July 1941 address: “It is simple – I could almost say
simple-minded – for us Americans to wave the flag, to reassert our belief in
the cause of freedom, and to let it go at that.” Surely, for instance, Americans
have failed time and again to apply that self-evident truth “that all men are
created equal.” This failure spurred not only a bloody civil war but more than a
century of Jim Crow suppression and terrorism.
Even Republican Sen. JD Vance, in his 2024 speech accepting the
Republican nomination for vice president during the party’s national convention
after possibly gauging the party’s restlessness for extra-constitutional action,
exhorted Americans not to get too caught up in Revolutionary era idealism of foundational
texts such as the Declaration of Independence. In blaming illegal immigrants
for the difficulty of citizens in securing “precious housing” and advocating “a
leader [Trump] who fights for the people who built this country,” Vance
arguably recycles the old Nazi concept of “blood and soil” without employing
those explosive words. He says that while the United States “was indeed founded
on brilliant ideas like the rule of law and religious liberty,” America is “not
just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common
future. It is, in short, a nation.” One could argue that Vance here is speaking
less of idealism and more of inherent rights in those Americans with long,
ancestral lines in the country and that ancestors alone determine certain entitlements.
Speaking of an old Kentucky cemetery and the graves of several generations of
Americans who fought and died for their country, he adds in his speech to
Republican delegates: “Now that's not just an idea, my friends. That's not just
a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that
is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions,
but they will fight for their home. And if this movement of ours is going to
succeed, and if this country is going to thrive, our leaders have to remember
that America is a nation, and its citizens deserve leaders who put its
interests first.”
Wilson’s headstrong way of putting matters renders him an
easy foil for Justice Thomas and others targeting progressivism. Wilson’s scholarly
contempt, for instance, for separation of powers – particularly Congress – are
shocking till one considers not only some of Jefferson’s ideas on governance
(including separation of powers) but the whining of many chief executives about
Congress and the courts down through history. Yet two months after Thomas’ speech
in Texas – and six days before the Declaration of Independence’s anniversary –
he joined the court’s five other Republican-appointed justices in increasing
President Trump’s authority over some two dozen multi-member agencies Congress
intended to be independent. The June 29 Trump v. Slaughter decision was
another example of chameleon-like American conservatism in the Age of Trump,
shifting colors to accommodate favored or intimidating politicians as well as crackpot
legal theories bouncing around in academic lounges and Federalist Society
circles – in this case, the so-called “unitary executive theory.”
None of which fooled 85-year-old George Will, author of “The
Conservative Sensibility” and one of the few remaining champions of that graying
American conservativism so resolutely stamped into irrelevance by Trump, unmoored
Federalist Society members and MAGA followers eager to further embolden Trump’s
crash-and-burn impulses regarding institutions, principles and liberty. “On
Monday, the Supreme Court enlarged presidential power far beyond its already
menacing dimensions, which are beyond anything the Founders could have imagined,”
Will wrote in a July 1 Washington Post column. “Self-described ‘originalist’
justices did so in the name of assuring the president’s democratic ‘accountability.’
The original originalists, the Constitution’s framers, would have winced.”
Will continues:
The court has now established the unitary executive
theory, which holds that all executive power is vested in the
president, who may remove any principal federal officer exercising executive
power. The theory presupposes, however, a clear, easy demarcation between
executive and legislative activities. The unitary executive theory says
what the Constitution nowhere says: that any governmental activity with an
executive aspect must be controlled by the president. Furthermore, [Justice
Elena] Kagan [in her dissent] correctly insists that much of what the
independent agencies do – making, within parameters set by Congress, rules that
have the force of law – is mischaracterized as executive. Congress delegated
this obviously legislative function on the assumption – true for decades, until
Monday – that the agencies would not be under presidential domination.
History will note Thomas and other “conservative” justices issued
their Trump v. Slaughter ruling during an administration without equal
in corruption, maliciousness and incompetence.
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, mindless pursuits of happiness. For many Americans in the Age of Trump, the 250th 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 himself 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, all while TV spectators who were subscribed to Paramount Plus, consulting their cellphones at home during commercial breaks championing our military might, learned the 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. What’s more, the president promised online the day after the UFC fights that, on the fast-approaching Fourth of July, after entertainers had 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 his alleged triumphs, not those marking
250 years of American history. He compared his 2024 reelection and subsequent
administration to the American Revolution, even as he rigged the approaching midterm
elections to benefit himself. “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 intended to replicate a spectacular
modern-day world’s fair that proved anything but spectacular. “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 dangerous 2024 Trump v. United States presidential
immunity ruling – is a man who has shown contempt at almost every turn for the 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 250th anniversary, it was clear that the president with whom Thomas
is forever linked has little understanding of it, notwithstanding 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 whom
he 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 marks, reflected the unity of various British colonies
in their resolve to separate from King George’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 cites 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 of 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 undemocratic 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 reasonably 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 jurists.
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 a perch on the high court alongside
Thomas 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
and their wonder at conversations about Trump’s rhetoric and deeds in the
Thomas household. 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.
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 old-fashioned conservatism by this point 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 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 returning such people to their homelands
would endanger them. In his concurrence, Justice Thomas – who with his five
fellow justices days later in Trump v. Slaughter would defy federal
statute – by contrast ruled in Mullin v. Doe that federal statute “makes
Congress’ intent to preclude judicial review clear," thus neutering lower
court decisions to safeguard such individuals as the Haitian refugees who famously
assimilated into otherwise conservative white society in Springfield, Ohio, and
gained a reputation for industriousness in the industrial jobs they undertook.
This included a spirited defense of the Haitians by state Republican leadership
including Gov. Mike DeWine after Trump and Vance maliciously and falsely
attacked Springfield’s hard-working Haitians on the 2024 campaign trail, no
doubt to arouse racism. To legitimate questions about the veracity of claims
against the Haitians, Vance – then a U.S. senator from Ohio – disgracefully
explained to reporters on Sept. 14, 2024: “The American media totally ignored
this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes [accusing
Haitians of eating Springfield cats and dogs]. If I have to create stories so
that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the
American people, then that's what I'm going to do."
Justice Elena Kagan made clear in her June 25 Mullin v. Doe
dissent that racism motivated Trump-Vance administration efforts to deport
Haitians; she ridiculed 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," she notes. "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. In a subsequent interview, African-American actor and comedian D.L.
Hughley said of Justice Thomas: “He’s literally a DEI hire. There’s nothing you
could ask him to do that would hurt black or brown people he wouldn’t do. I
think Clarence Thomas, if he gets up in the middle of the night and sees a black
man in the mirror, he’ll call the police.”
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 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 a 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.
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 for 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.
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 in
his speech 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 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 more
imaginative New Deal programs as varied as the Works Progress Administration,
the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Recovery Act and Social Security
Administration, 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 other progressives throughout the 20th
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 in 1913. “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.”
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 250th 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?
