The worst part of living through the death of our democracy is seeing how banal and incremental it all is. It’s like being in a car that’s going over a cliff one awful inch at a time.
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We’re all so fortunate that Thomas is there to carry on the work of Scalia by channeling the original intent of the drafters of the Constitution as applied to modern day circumstances. Anyone since then is obviously a flawed vehicle jurist if they adopted an interpretation that does not accord with the founders’ ideas, as interpreted by Thomas et al.
The whole idea of original intent is absurd, especially when you consider that Scalia, its primary spokesman, was opposed to consulting legislative history to discern legislative intent. Any one who thinks original intent is a perfectly sound analytical framework needs to go back and read the Constitution. It’s a brilliant document because it does not try to anticipate every possible issue or setting; it is intended to breathe and adapt as the nation develops. Read the Federalist Papers to better understand how the document was created and intended.
If constitutions and laws were able to be precise and understandable to all in the exact same manner, we wouldn’t need lawyers and courts — although we would need a lot better class of legislators than we generally have now. In truth, that’s simply not possible, nor really desirable.
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I do not recall Senator Biden voting for Thomas and if not then that is “fake news” implying otherwise.
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Biden voted against Thomas in Committee and on the Senate floor
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On the other hand – Washington DC is full of thugs that might not like having existing laws overturned and that may take steps to preserve our system as is.
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I was referring to his treatment of Anita Hill during the hearings. Apologies if I was unclear.
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So Thomas is setting up the SCourt so all their upcoming denials of precedent decisions can be reversed at a latter date. Great strategy, Danforth House Negro.
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I didn’t realize that Biden was the deciding vote on the Thomas nomination. I’ll need to go back a read about that.
Oh wait! I just did. He voted NAY.
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oh for pity’s sake! have a fucking stroke you old piece of excrement.
“He’s saying fish or cut bait — now is the time — we have five, let’s move.”
Like any current Republican he’s saying: We’ve got the power now. Let’s use it no matter what the consequences to the country, democracy, the Constitution, the judiciary. or anything else. Total and permanent top 1% Republican rule, with no rights for anyone else.
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It seems Ginni and Clarence Thomas are in a race to “out weird” one another. It might be a saving grace with the speculation that John Roberts wants to avoid the court becoming overly politicized and respecting of stare decisis as much as possible.
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This really isn’t different than what Thomas has always said, and Thomas has always said it because he wants to overturn essentially all of the legal opinions of the past century that gave us things like unionization, end of segregation, equality, stuff like that. He now has a cohort around him of four judges who will vote with him, at least some of the time, on this extreme agenda, and a fifth (Roberts) who wants to go along with a lot of it but not appear to be ripping apart the judicial system and replacing it with a system that is subservient to right wing conservative thought. This is aimed at Roberts, to get him to jump in the train and move towards a system of absolute power so that conservatives rule and we go back to the excesses of the Gilded Age.
It really is the last hurrah of the old order, young people are not going to allow this to stand…they are voting, hard, for more freedom and equality, and for economic limits on the greedy upper class. The question is if they really are able to block out this movement, or if they will crash into the upcoming change in the nation…that change will happen no matter what conservatives want, the amount of pain really depends on how hard they try to block it.
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He’s one justice. Not a very good one, but one of nine.
I maintain that Roberts still cares about his legacy and isn’t going to allow the SCOTUS to be the root cause of the destruction of the Republic.
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This Oreo cookie is at least a decade past his expiration date. Hopefully he will be resealed in a bag soon.
And his whore of a wife is the Madame DeFarge of the whole operation. (Paging Miss Pross!)
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“I agree that the historical record does not bear out my initial skepticism of the dual-sovereignty doctrine,” he wrote.
In other word, constitutional ‘‘originalism’’ is the theory whereby conservative justices can amend and reverse their own original arguments so as to ensure the right’s desired judicial outcome…
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I wonder if he’s going after voting rights… and equal representation… he is one of the most bitter assholes to hold such a position of influence.
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Thomas may be signalling his willingness, even eagerness, to overturn precedent, but the court has been gleefully overturning precedent for some years now. It might mean specifically that Roe is in jeopardy, but everything was already on the chopping block, I think. Think Hobby Lobby and otherwise treating corporations as if they were natural persons, rather than state-chartered entities which is what they actually are.
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Movement conservatism is the single greatest threat to democracy. Conservatives detest freedom, detest transparency, loathe egalitarianism, and they long to make the USA a theocracy. Seriously, people, the US has somehow survived as a fairly robust republic for about 240 years, but that’s no guarantee it will last. It’s entirely possible that the US will erupt into armed civil war when conservatives attempt to essentially deny millions their rights, hopes, dreams, opportunities and freedoms. As much as I abhor the NRA, it’s times like these that we all might be glad that the population has access to arms in the fight for our very freedom and liberty. This news is frightening.
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Is there anything more Republican than openly and hypocritically promoting the elimination of all progress to return society to where it stood 220 years ago?
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Thomas argued that the court “should restore” its view of the legal
concept “through adherence to the correct, original meaning of the laws
> we are charged with applying.”
If this is true, then must we not interpret the Second Amendment strictly in terms of what “arms” originally meant in 1787? To wit, that “arms” must strictly refer only to flint lock and/or cap and ball firearms as well as knives, bayonets, hatchets, pitchforks, etc. Clearly the “originalist” language authored by the founders could most certainly not have meant repeating firearms, semi-automatics, machine guns or the like since no one at that time had any knowledge of such tools of death.
Justice Thomas, is this what you truly meant? . . . . . I thought not.
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