Clarence Thomas Is Building a Majority By Dissent

Clarence Thomas has been on the Supreme Court for a quarter-century. And Jeffrey Toobin has loathed him for nearly all twenty-five of those years. For more than two decades, the New Yorker author and CNN pundit has written of Thomas time and time again in only the most contemptuous terms.

In 1993, just three years into Justice Thomas’s tenure on the Court, Toobin wrote that "his jurisprudence seems guided to an unusual degree by raw anger." Thomas's "objective," Toobin asserted, may be to devote "every vote—even his every public utterance, written or spoken—[to] outrage the liberal establishment that so venerated [Thurgood] Marshall"; to "utilize the Supreme Court itself" to "strik[e] back at his liberal critics." And he accused the young justice of being effectively incompetent, calling him "more than usually dependent on his clerks."

Toobin even complained in 1993 that Thomas read the wrong newspapers: "He has, for the most part, stopped reading the Times and the Washington Post . . . '[but] is always very well informed about what's on the Wall Street Journal editorial page.'"

More recently, in a journalistic screed titled "Justice Thomas's Disgraceful Silence," Toobin lampooned Thomas as lethargic. "These days, Thomas only reclines; his leather chair is pitched so that he can stare at the ceiling, which he does at length. He strokes his chin. His eyelids look heavy. Every schoolteacher knows this look. It's called 'not paying attention.'" Toobin accused Justice Thomas of treating all of his colleagues and the lawyers appearing before him "with disrespect"—with a "petulance," a pattern of "ludicrous behavior," that "is demeaning the Court."

Those are just two examples. Toobin has poured bile on Justice Thomas over and over again, complaining that Thomas "seems to go out of his way to find reasons to disagree," or that he's simply "disgraceful," full of "contempt and hostility." In his book, The Nine, Toobin ridiculed Thomas as "embarrassingly silent," and chastised the Court's second African-American justice for hiring too many white clerks.