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==New Book October 2007==
==New Book October 2007==
Justice Thomas' new book (My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir), just published October 1, 2007, is Justice Thomas' story in his own words about how the US media pilloried him during his nomination hearings for Justice to the US Supreme Court. Justice Thomas was interviewed by 60 minutes, Sept.30, 2007, and discussed this book and his early beginnings.
Justice Thomas' new book (My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir), just published October 1, 2007, is Justice Thomas' story in his own words about how the US media pilloried him during his nomination hearings for Justice to the US Supreme Court. Justice Thomas was interviewed by 60 minutes, Sept.30, 2007, and discussed this book and his early beginnings. In additon, a 90 minute interview aired on the Rush Limbaugh Show radio broadcast on October 1, 1997.


[http://www.amazon.com/My-Grandfathers-Son-Clarence-Thomas/dp/0060565551/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-1544700-0032916?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1191229313&sr=1-1 New book link]
[http://www.amazon.com/My-Grandfathers-Son-Clarence-Thomas/dp/0060565551/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-1544700-0032916?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1191229313&sr=1-1 New book link]

Revision as of 17:16, 1 October 2007

Clarence Thomas
Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court
Incumbent
Assumed office
October 18 1991
Nominated byGeorge H. W. Bush
Preceded byThurgood Marshall
Personal details
Spouse(s)Kate Ambush Thomas (div.)
Virginia Lamp Thomas
Alma materCollege of the Holy Cross
Yale University

Clarence Thomas (born June 23, 1948) is an American jurist and has been an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States since 1991. He is the second African American to serve on the nation's highest court, after Justice Thurgood Marshall. Thomas's career in the Supreme Court has seen him take a conservative approach to cases while adhering to the postulates of originalism.

Personal life

Clarence Thomas was born in Pin Point, Georgia, a small community outside Savannah. His father abandoned his family when he was only two years old,[1] leaving his mother Leola Anderson to take care of the family. At age seven they went to live with his mother's father, Myers Anderson, in Savannah. He had a fuel oil business that also sold ice; Thomas often helped him make deliveries.

His grandfather believed in hard work and self-reliance and would counsel him to "never let the sun catch you in bed in the morning." In 1975, when Thomas read Race and Economics by economist Thomas Sowell, he found an intellectual foundation for this philosophy.[1] The book criticized social reforms by government and instead argued for individual action to overcome circumstances and adversity. He was also influenced by Ayn Rand's bestselling book The Fountainhead, and would later require his staffers to watch the 1949 film version. The plot describes an architect's struggle to maintain his integrity against the forces of conformity, something Thomas could relate to his own career in the U.S. government.[1]

Raised Roman Catholic (he later attended an Episcopal church with his wife, but returned to the Catholic Church in the late 1990s), Thomas considered entering the priesthood, attending St. John Vianney's Minor Seminary on the Isle of Hope near Savannah and, briefly, Conception Seminary College, a Catholic seminary in Missouri. Thomas told interviewers that he left the seminary (and the call for priesthood) after overhearing a student say "Good, I hope the SOB dies" when he heard that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot.

In 1968 Clarence Thomas responded to a minority recruitment program and enrolled in the College of the Holy Cross, a Catholic school in Worcester, Massachusetts. There he helped found the Black Student Union and graduated in 1971 with an A.B., cum laude in English. He then attended Yale Law School from which he received a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in 1974.

Thomas has one child, Jamal Adeen, from his first marriage. This marriage, to Kate Ambush, lasted from 1971 until their 1984 divorce. Thomas married Ginni Lamp in 1987. After Thomas' nephew, Mark Elliot Martin, was convicted of pointing a pistol at another person in 1997, Martin gave permission for Thomas to take custody of Martin's son, who was six years old at the time.[2]

Since joining the Supreme Court, Thomas requested an annulment of his first marriage from the Catholic Church, which was granted by the Tribunal of the Catholic Diocese of Arlington. He was reconciled to the Catholic Church in the mid-1990s and remains a practicing Catholic.

In 1994, Thomas performed, at his home, the wedding ceremony for radio host Rush Limbaugh's third marriage, to Marta Fitzgerald.[3]

As his wife grew up in Nebraska and attended college there, Thomas is an avid Nebraska Cornhuskers fan who attends Husker football games, and in 2007 met with the 2006 National Championship Husker Volleyball team, telling them he bled Husker red.[4][5]

Early career

Official Equal Employment Opportunity Commission portrait of Thomas

From 1974 to 1977, Thomas was an Assistant Attorney General of Missouri under then State Attorney General John Danforth. When Danforth was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976, Thomas left to become an attorney with Monsanto in St. Louis, Missouri. He returned to work for Danforth from 1979 to 1981 as a Legislative Assistant. Both men shared a common bond in that both had studied to be ordained (although Thomas was Catholic and Danforth was ordained Episcopalian). Danforth was to be instrumental in championing Thomas for the Supreme Court.

In 1981, he began his rise through the Reagan administration. From 1981 to 1982, he served as Assistant Secretary of Education for the Office of Civil Rights in the US Department of Education ("ED"), and as Chairman of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ("EEOC") from 1982 to 1990.

In 1990, President George H.W. Bush appointed Thomas to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Supreme Court appointment

On July 8, 1991 President George H.W. Bush nominated Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall who had recently announced his retirement.[6] Marshall had been the only black justice on the court. The selection of Thomas preserved the existing racial balance of the court, it was seen as likely to move the ideological balance to the right.

While most recent Supreme Court nominees have been deemed "well-qualified" by the American Bar Association (ABA), the rating for Judge Thomas was split between "qualified" and "not qualified." The ABA, however, has no official standing in the nomination or confirmation process.

Organizations including the NAACP, the Urban League and the National Organization for Women opposed the appointment based on Thomas's criticism of affirmative action and suspicions that Thomas might not be a supporter of the Supreme Court judgment in Roe v. Wade. Under questioning during confirmation hearings, Thomas repeatedly asserted that he had not formulated a position on the Roe decision.[7]

Some of the public statements of Thomas' opponents foreshadowed the confirmation fight that would occur. One such statement came from activist Florence Kennedy at a July 1991 conference of the National Organization for Women in New York City. Making reference to the failure of Robert Bork's nomination, she said of Thomas, "We're going to 'bork' him."[8]

The term has since become a part of the American political lexicon. Liberals have generally used the term to mean defeating conservative nominees for allegedly being "out of the judicial mainstream"; conservatives, conversely, use it to describe what they consider unscrupulous tactics to derail the nominations of nominees unacceptable to left-leaning interest groups.

Anita Hill controversy

Toward the end of the confirmation hearings NPR's Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg reported that a former colleague of Thomas, University of Oklahoma law school professor Anita Hill, had accused him of sexually harassing her when the two had worked together at the DOE and EEOC based on a leaked Judiciary committee FBI report[9]. However, seemingly contradictory statements by Anita Hill, the fact that she had followed him from the DOE to the EEOC after the alleged harassment had begun; assertions that she had, in fact, accused a man other than Thomas of the alleged harassment; additional testimony for Thomas by former female associates; all of these weakened the credibility of Hill's allegations. In the end, the Committee did not find sufficient evidence to corroborate Anita Hill's claim.

Hill's supporters later insisted that relevant testimony from Angela Wright, a PR director for the EEOC and a witness to the alleged offensive conduct, was suppressed, even though the Democrats controlled the Senate. Democrats were reluctant to call Angela Wright as a witness after Thomas testified that he had fired her for calling another employee a 'faggot.' [10]

Of the Committee's investigation of Hill's accusations, Thomas said:

...as far as I'm concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the US Senate rather than hung from a tree.[11]

The hearings were notable for their sexually explicit content, particularly Senator Orrin Hatch's (R-UT) questions "[D]id you ever say in words or substance something like there is a pubic hair in my Coke?" and "Did you ever use the term Long Dong Silver in conversation with Professor Hill?" (Thomas firmly denied having said either.)

The Committee sent the nomination to the full Senate without a recommendation either way. Thomas was confirmed by the Senate with a 52-48 vote on October 15, 1991, the narrowest margin for approval in more than a century[12]. The final floor vote was not along strictly party lines: 41 Republicans and 11 Democrats voted to confirm while 46 Democrats and 2 Republicans (Jim Jeffords (R-VT) and Bob Packwood[13] (R-OR)) voted to reject the nomination.

On October 23, 1991 Thomas took his seat as the 106th Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

Judicial philosophy

Clarence Thomas being sworn in by Byron White, as wife Virginia Lamp Thomas looks on.

Clarence Thomas is a conservative who admits to having some "libertarian leanings."[14] Thomas is often described as an originalist. Although he has been often compared with Antonin Scalia, he is less devoted to precedent than Scalia, who told Thomas' biographer that Thomas "doesn't believe in stare decisis, period. If a constitutional line of authority is wrong, he would say let's get it right."[15] In Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow and Cutter v. Wilkinson, Thomas argued that the Establishment Clause was not incorporated to states by the Fourteenth Amendment, directly challenging the precedent Everson v. Board of Education. He has advocated the reversal of Roe v. Wade, joining the dissenting opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and writing the concurrence in Gonzales v. Carhart. Justice Thomas' judicial philosophy is most similar to Justice Scalia's. He voted with Scalia 91% of the time during the court's '06-'07 session. [16] He voted with Justice John Paul Stevens the least, only 36% of the time. [17]

Commerce Clause and States' Rights

Thomas consistently supports a strict interpretation of the Constitution's interstate commerce clause and supports limits on the power of federal government in favor of states' rights. In both United States v. Lopez and United States v. Morrison Thomas wrote a separate concurring opinion arguing for the original meaning of the commerce clause and criticizing the substantial effects formula. He wrote a sharply worded dissent in Gonzales v. Raich, a decision that permitted federal government to arrest, prosecute, and imprison patients who were using medical marijuana. However, he previously authored United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative, an earlier case that also permitted the federal government to raid medical marijuana dispensaries (the Oakland case dealt with the issue of medical necessity rather than federalism). In his Gonzales v. Carhart concurrence, he intimated that the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act might have been beyond Congress' authority to enact under the commerce clause.

LGBT issues

Capital punishment

Similarly to Justice Scalia, Thomas takes a narrow view of the substantive limitations imposed by the Constitution on the use of capital punishment; he was among the dissenters in both Atkins v. Virginia and Roper v. Simmons, which held that the Constitution prohibited the application of the death penalty to certain classes of persons. In Kansas v. Marsh, his opinion for the court indicated a belief that the Constitution affords states broad procedural latitude in imposing the death penalty provided they remain within the limits of Furman v. Georgia and Gregg v. Georgia (the 1976 case in which the court had reversed its 1972 ban on death sentences as long as states followed certain procedural guidelines).

Fourth Amendment

In the cases regarding the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, Thomas often favors law enforcement over defendants, although not always—he was in the majority in Kyllo v. United States and wrote separately in Indianapolis v. Edmond the opinion that the Constitution shouldn't allow random stops of drivers. His opinion for the court in Board of Education v. Earls upheld drug testing for students involved in extracurricular activities, and wrote again for the court in Samson v. California, permitting random searches on parolees. He dissented in the case Georgia v. Randolph, which prohibited warrantless searches that one resident approves and the other opposes, arguing that the case was controlled by the court's decision in Coolidge v. New Hampshire.

Free speech

Among Supreme Court Justices, Thomas is typically the second most likely to uphold free speech claims.[18] He has voted in favor of First Amendment claims in cases involving a wide variety of issues, including pornography, campaign contributions, political leafletting, religious speech, and commercial speech. On occasion, however, he disagrees with free speech claimants. For example, he dissented in Virginia v. Black, a case that struck down a Virginia statute that banned cross-burning, and authored ACLU v. Ashcroft, upholding the Child Online Protection Act. In addition, Thomas does not believe that students possess any right to free speech in public schools, a view he expressed in his concurrence in Morse v. Frederick. In that case, he argued that the precedent of Tinker v. Des Moines should be overruled.

Executive power

Thomas has a favorable view toward the power of the executive branch. He was the only justice that entirely sided with the Bush administration in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. He also dissented in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a case involving Guantanamo detainees.

Approach to oral arguments

Thomas is well-known for listening rather than actively asking questions during oral arguments of the Court. He has offered several reasons for this, the most strongly supported of which is that he developed a habit of listening as a young man. Thomas comes from the Gullah/Geechee cultural region of coastal Georgia and is a member of this distinct African American ethnic group; he grew up speaking the Gullah language, which is a hybrid of English and various West African languages. Later in life, Thomas began to acquire an enthusiasm for his heritage, writing about it in the December 14 2000 issue of The New York Times:

"When I was 16, I was sitting as the only black kid in my class, and I had grown up speaking a kind of a dialect. It's called Geechee. Some people call it Gullah now, and people praise it now. But they used to make fun of us back then. It's not standard English. When I transferred to an all-white school at your age, I was self-conscious, like we all are... So I...just started developing the habit of listening."[19]

Thomas has stated that he wishes to write a book about the culture.[20]

Another theory, asserted by one set of Thomas biographers, is that Justice Thomas believes oral arguments are mostly unnecessary, and that the back-and-forth in oral arguments is often disrespectful to the attorneys trying to present their cases. The same biographers also theorize Thomas is uncomfortable in the rapid pacing of oral argument discussions, the supposition being he prefers a more cerebral, quieter environment in which to carefully contemplate matters of constitutional law.[21]

Though Thomas is silent during most arguments before the Supreme Court, he has spoken a few times each term.[22] During the oral argument for NASA v. FLRA, 527 U.S. 229 (1999), Thomas engaged in a seven-minute-long question and answer exchange with one advocate[23]—it is unheard of in recent years for this to happen without interruption by another justice.[citation needed] In Apprendi v. New Jersey (2000), Thomas raised an issue which would become important in the opinions ("the distinction . . . between an element of the offense and an enhancement factor"). In Capitol Square Review Board v. Pinette[24] (1995), Virginia v. Black (2003), and Georgia v. Randolph (2006), Thomas presaged his eventual dissent with comments at oral argument.

New Book October 2007

Justice Thomas' new book (My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir), just published October 1, 2007, is Justice Thomas' story in his own words about how the US media pilloried him during his nomination hearings for Justice to the US Supreme Court. Justice Thomas was interviewed by 60 minutes, Sept.30, 2007, and discussed this book and his early beginnings. In additon, a 90 minute interview aired on the Rush Limbaugh Show radio broadcast on October 1, 1997.

New book link

References

  1. ^ a b c Merida K, Fletcher M, "Supreme Discomfort", Washington Post Magazine, August 4, 2002. Accessed May 7, 2007.
  2. ^ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/21/AR2007042101475.html
  3. ^ NYT Chronicle Article, 5/30/94
  4. ^ http://www.columbustelegram.com/articles/2007/06/19/sports/sports1nuvolleyball.txt
  5. ^ Rush Limbaugh, Rush Recounts His Trip to Lincoln, www.rushlimbaugh.com, September 17, 2007.
  6. ^ http://uspolitics.about.com/od/usgovernment/a/supreme_court_3.htm
  7. ^ It is routine for nominees, at all levels of the Federal judiciary, to refuse to discuss cases during their confirmation hearings that might come before them if they are confirmed. Clinton appointed Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Steven Breyer both refused to discuss Roe before the Judiciary Committee, even though Ginsburg has worked for years for the ALCU defending it. Despite this nearly universal refusal of nominees to discuss hot button issues such as Roe, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee nearly always try to draw the nominee's view out during confirmation hearings.
  8. ^ http://opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=85000412
  9. ^ http://people.virginia.edu/~ybf2u/Thomas-Hill/1011a02.html
  10. ^ http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www?specfile=/lv6/workspace/yitna/yitna.o2w&act=text&offset=4974269&textreg=1
  11. ^ http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new-yitna?id=UsaThom&images=images/modeng&data=/lv6/workspace/yitna&tag=public&part=24
  12. ^ Hall, Kermit (ed), The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States, page 871, Oxford Press, 1992
  13. ^ Packwood himself would later be forced to resign from the Senate in the face accusations of sexual harassment, abuse and assault by numerous former staffers and lobbyists.
  14. ^ Kauffman B., "Clarence Thomas", Reason Magazine, November 1987, Accessed May 7, 2007.
  15. ^ "A Big Question About Clarence Thomas", The Washington Post, October 14, 2004. Accessed May 7, 2007.
  16. ^ [1]
  17. ^ [2]
  18. ^ How the Justices Voted in Free Speech Cases, 1994-2002 Eugene Volokh
  19. ^ http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Linguistics/GullahGeechee.html
  20. ^ http://news.geomag.com/news/2001/06/0607_wiregullah.html
  21. ^ http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/archives/2007/05/ask_the_author_21.html
  22. ^ http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50D14F63C590C748DDDAB0994DA404482
  23. ^ http://www.oyez.org/cases/1990-1999/1998/1998_98_369/argument/
  24. ^ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/94-780.ZS.html 515 U.S. 753

Sources

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Preceded by Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
1990-1991 		Succeeded by
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as of 2007 		Succeeded by

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