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Justice Clarence Thomas’ moment may finally have arrived

PostPosted: Sun May 05, 2019 9:15 pm
by jdege
https://www.apnews.com/fbb07af9d5254aecbbab9422faf405ba
Justice Clarence Thomas’ moment may finally have arrived
Thomas, for the first time, is on a court where there are at least four votes for some “pretty radical” decisions, said political science professor Corey Robin, the author of a Thomas book due out in September. Robin says the question will be whether the court’s more conservative justices — Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito — can get Chief Justice John Roberts, a more moderate conservative, to go along.

[...]

Elizabeth Wydra, president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center, acknowledged that Thomas’ views may now have more sway, something she described as “terrifying to many progressives.”

Still, Thomas’ views can be so far from his fellow justices that neither Roberts nor Chief Justice William Rehnquist before him have assigned Thomas big, landmark opinions on the belief that he won’t be able to keep together the votes of his colleagues, said Ralph Rossum, the author of a book on Thomas. Instead, Thomas often writes separately, speaking only for himself. Some critics dismiss those solo opinions as uninfluential, but Rossum disagrees.

“He stakes out a position more forthrightly or vigorously than other justices are willing to go, but they’re kind of sucked along in his wake,” Rossum said, adding that, like a magnet, “Thomas drags the court in his direction. They may not go as far as he goes, but they go further than they would have otherwise.”

Some of the areas of law where, over time, Thomas has pulled the court closer to his positions include voting rights, campaign finance, and the Second Amendment, Robin and Rossum said.

If it were up to Thomas alone, the high court would be willing to make sweeping moves. While the court is typically cautious about overturning its past decisions, Thomas, who as an originalist believes in reading the Constitution as those who wrote it meant, feels less bound by precedent than other justices.

Re: Justice Clarence Thomas’ moment may finally have arrived

PostPosted: Mon May 06, 2019 4:57 am
by Ghost
Thomas, who as an originalist believes in reading the Constitution as those who wrote it meant


What a concept

Re: Justice Clarence Thomas’ moment may finally have arrived

PostPosted: Mon May 06, 2019 2:18 pm
by hammAR
Especially for a Judge........................ :o

Re: Justice Clarence Thomas’ moment may finally have arrived

PostPosted: Mon May 06, 2019 2:50 pm
by jdege
Ghost wrote:
Thomas, who as an originalist believes in reading the Constitution as those who wrote it meant

What a concept

Does that mean we may see the restoration of Privileges and Immunities?

Re: Justice Clarence Thomas’ moment may finally have arrived

PostPosted: Mon May 06, 2019 3:57 pm
by yukonjasper
What is your interpretation of the advantages of that being revalidated?

Re: Justice Clarence Thomas’ moment may finally have arrived

PostPosted: Mon May 06, 2019 5:15 pm
by jdege
yukonjasper wrote:What is your interpretation of the advantages of that being revalidated?

What I want is for all actions of government at every level to be subject to a strict scrutiny standard of review.

https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Blackman_Shapiro_14at150_DRAFT.pdf

"No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” These 21 simple words were designed to revolutionize the relationship between states and individuals. States could no longer enact laws that violate certain rights--and Congress gained new enumerated power to ensure their protection. At least that was the plan.

Five short years after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court eviscerated the Privileges or Immunities Clause. The Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) held that the provision protects only a fairly narrow subset of federal rights. Two years later, in United States v. Cruikshank, the Court rejected the argument that the right to keep and bear arms, expressly recognized in the Second Amendment, was one of the privileges or immunities of citizenship. With this one-two punch, the cornerstone of the Fourteenth Amendment was forgotten. The Supreme Court would not revisit these decisions until McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010). There, only Justice Clarence Thomas was willing to restore the Privilege or Immunities Clause’s original meaning.


It was the Slaughterhouse Cases that established the "Rational Basis" test.

And it needs to die.

(And everyone here is familiar with Cruikshank)

Re: Justice Clarence Thomas’ moment may finally have arrived

PostPosted: Mon May 06, 2019 6:16 pm
by Ghost
jdege wrote:
And it needs to die.


Agree