Clarence Thomas On SCOTUS Leak: ‘Losing Trust Changes The Institution Fundamentally’
Trust in American institutions tragically remains at an all-time low, even in the United States Supreme Court. Justice Clarence Thomas spoke out about the leaked SCOTUS draft opinion on abortion this past Friday, explaining that such a release brings into question how long America’s institutions can bear to last “at the rate we’re undermining them.”
Thomas was speaking about the topic at a conference for black conservatives in Dallas, telling the audience “I do think that what happened at the court is tremendously bad.”
“I wonder how long we’re going to have these institutions at the rate we’re undermining them, and then I wonder when they’re gone or destabilized what we will have as a country. And I don’t think the prospects are good if we continue to lose them,” he continued.
The draft opinion Thomas was referring to was written by Justice Samuel Alito and explicitly overturns the infamous cases of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Chief Justice John Roberts confirmed the document’s authenticity and also directed the Marshal of the Court to investigate where the leak may have originated.
Numerous actors on the left wing celebrated the leak, including former Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon who called the leaker “brave” before suggesting that members of the court ought to reconsider their planned decisions on the ruling. Many conservatives have grown upset at such statements, accusing the left of intentionally engaging in a form of ‘intimidation’ or ‘mob justice.’
Is a brave clerk taking this unpredecented step of leaking a draft opinion to warn the country what's coming in a last-ditch Hail Mary attempt to see if the public response might cause the Court to reconsider?
— Brian Fallon (@brianefallon) May 3, 2022
“When you lose that trust, especially in the institution that I’m in, it changes the institution fundamentally. You begin to look over your shoulder,” Thomas said of the unprecedented breach. “It’s kind of like infidelity in that you can explain it, but you can’t undo it.”
“If someone said that one line of one opinion would be leaked by anyone, you would say that, ‘Oh, That’s impossible. No one would ever do that,’” the George H.W. Bush appointee, who has been a justice on the court since 1991, said. “That was verboten. It was beyond anyone’s understanding, or at least anyone’s imagination.”
Thomas elaborated further, noting that the climate of the court has potentially forever shifted from its more civil and amicable past.
“This is not the court of that era,” said Thomas. “I sat with (famously liberal justice) Ruth Ginsburg for almost 30 years and she was actually an easy colleague to deal with. … We may have been a dysfunctional family, but we were a family.”
The famous judge also discussed the recent online doxxing of the justices’ homes by leftist organizations. Leftist mobs shortly followed up by protesting directly outside of their family residences — at least one justice had to be moved to an undisclosed location out of concerns for his safety. He also noted that such mob behavior only comes from people on the left.
“You would never visit Supreme Court justices’ houses when things didn’t go our way,” Thomas said to the group of conservatives he was addressing. “We didn’t throw temper tantrums… It is incumbent on us to always act appropriately and not to repay tit for tat.”
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