The nine Justices rarely explain their rulings outside of their written opinions, but Justice
Clarence Thomas had agreed to the session months earlier, certainly not anticipating it would come on the heels of a ruling that rocked the nation.
In 1984 she wrote Clinton a congratulatory letter, appending a handwritten note, "I admire you very much" Our friends tell us this is just like what Anita Hill did following
Clarence Thomas' advances.
("A bit nutty and a bit slutty" was his description of Hill, who went public in 1991 with claims that then-Supreme Court nominee
Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her years earlier.)
Clarence Thomas, the court's only African American justice, joined the majority of justices critical of federal affirmative action programs.
In 1991, Lane, who is white, pulled together a front group of African Americans to support the nomination of
Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.
More recently, after the Supreme Court ruling upholding affirmative action, New Fork Times columnist Maureen Dowd said this about
Clarence Thomas' dissenting opinion: "The dissent is a clinical study of a man who has been driven barking mad by the beneficial treatment he has received." Thomas, of course, has been the target of exceptionally nasty rhetoric from his critics; in 1994, on the PBS show To the Contrary, Julianne Malveaux remarked, "I hope that his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease."
The arguments of Souter, Stevens, Breyer, and Ginsburg can easily be marshaled to head off those of Antonin Scalia,
Clarence Thomas, and Anthony Kennedy, as well as the George Wills of this world, who want no limits at all on the amount of money people may contribute.
Back during the
Clarence Thomas debacle, women used the catchphrase: "They just don't get it." Well, in this case, nobody gets it.
In fact, the presence of these members has largely isolated the three die-hard conservatives--Chief Justice Rehnquist,
Clarence Thomas, and Scalia.
But he has been replaced as the only African-American on the court by
Clarence Thomas. Thomas, who is one of the nation's most prominent black beneficiaries of affirmative action, is a sworn ideological enemy of the policy.
The thought of more justices like Antonin Scalia and
Clarence Thomas, the high court's most dogged opponents of separation of church and state, made some positively giddy.
Bush has made it clear that his favorite justices are
Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia--probably the worst pair ever to have served on the Court in modern times.