When the hearings investigating the whole Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas controversy was going on, I remember thinking that this guy would be bad news, if he actually got onto the Supreme Court. Of course, that was the infamous incident when a woman accusing a man was put through hell for bringing up the charges, and had her name dragged through the mud.
Thomas himself, of course, became a Supreme Court justice.
Since then, he has indeed proven to be bad news.
Quite consistently, Thomas has gone against the grain of democratic tendencies. He enthusiastically supports more big money and special interests in our elections. He clearly is an opponent of a woman's right to choose. He opposed gay marriage, and favored keeping the door open to discriminate against homosexuals. Those are some of the bigger profile cases that he has been on the wrong side of, but there are more.
Erwin Chemerinsky, a writer for the Los Angeles Times, recently wrote an alarming piece trying to warn everyone that Thomas has recently written some very disturbing opinions that might prove dangerous to some freedoms that many Americans currently take for granted. He writes:
Twice in the last two weeks, Justice Clarence Thomas has written alarming opinions that call into question fundamental constitutional protections. In one, he disputed the right to counsel for those accused of crimes; in the other he called for revisiting fundamental press freedoms established more than 50 years ago.
You kind of had a sense that Thomas was going to be bad news. We kind of suspected that back then, right? But now, as the country goes crazy with Trump, Thomas is stepping up to more aggressively and effectively attack rights that, frankly, are not even really controversial. I mean, the right to legal counsel for people accused of crimes should be a no-brainer, right? And press freedom is just something that has been a long tradition dating back to the earliest days of the republic.
So why is he attacking them now? Hell, why is he attacking them at all?
Again, this guy has been bad news ever since he basically got away scot-free with bad behavior in the early nineties. There was a backlash, as the "Year of Women" came in 1992, much like there was another backlash following another Supreme Court nomination controversy, this time involving another bad news Supreme Court Justice, Brett Kavanaugh. For the first time since 1992, we saw another "Year of the Woman" in 2018, and it was supposed to have been largely fueled by outrage over the Kavanaugh hearings.
Here we are, with two guys on the Supreme Court who are simply bad news. Thomas has been bad news for some time, and it is almost assured that Kavanaugh will back up his decisions and opinions, including the two latest outrages attacking freedom of the press and the right to counsel, as American rights and liberties continue to deteriorate under the era of Trump. And we Americans have no one to blame collectively but ourselves, for having been too spoiled and too indifferent to have thwarted this decadent momentum when we had the chance. It would have been problematic at any point, but the downward slide has picked up momentum with every bad move, with every horrendous decision at the election booth, and with each new low that the country willingly subjected itself to. We now have FOX News dominating the airwaves, and Donald Trump dominating headlines and nightly news soundbites. Maybe things cannot get much worse. Then again, that same thought occurred to me over a decade ago, and those days almost seem sweet and innocent by way of comparison to the ridiculous farce that we are exposed to on an everyday basis nowadays.
Again, this guy has been bad news ever since he basically got away scot-free with bad behavior in the early nineties. There was a backlash, as the "Year of Women" came in 1992, much like there was another backlash following another Supreme Court nomination controversy, this time involving another bad news Supreme Court Justice, Brett Kavanaugh. For the first time since 1992, we saw another "Year of the Woman" in 2018, and it was supposed to have been largely fueled by outrage over the Kavanaugh hearings.
Here we are, with two guys on the Supreme Court who are simply bad news. Thomas has been bad news for some time, and it is almost assured that Kavanaugh will back up his decisions and opinions, including the two latest outrages attacking freedom of the press and the right to counsel, as American rights and liberties continue to deteriorate under the era of Trump. And we Americans have no one to blame collectively but ourselves, for having been too spoiled and too indifferent to have thwarted this decadent momentum when we had the chance. It would have been problematic at any point, but the downward slide has picked up momentum with every bad move, with every horrendous decision at the election booth, and with each new low that the country willingly subjected itself to. We now have FOX News dominating the airwaves, and Donald Trump dominating headlines and nightly news soundbites. Maybe things cannot get much worse. Then again, that same thought occurred to me over a decade ago, and those days almost seem sweet and innocent by way of comparison to the ridiculous farce that we are exposed to on an everyday basis nowadays.
Two recent opinions by Justice Clarence Thomas should alarm us all By ERWIN CHEMERINSKY MAR 05, 2019:
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