Justice Clarence Thomas is really wound up about how the Supreme Court has completely dismantled reproductive rights, the right to privacy, the right to birth control and a lot more. Like, he’s mad that people are really freaking out about what he and the other Christofascists on the Supreme Court have already done. Roe v. Wade will not be formally overturned for another month and a half or so, which has given Thomas and the other right-wing justices ample time and space to whine and stomp their feet and pretend like they’re the victims. Thomas made some new comments at a Texas conference set up with the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute and the Hoover Institution, meaning he collected a nice paycheck to fly to Texas for a day and tell a bunch of fascists what they want to hear. The “conversation” was conducted by John Yoo, the dude who wrote all of the torture memos during the Bush administration (Yoo clerked for Thomas). Previously, Thomas complained that the authority of the Supreme Court is “undermined” when Americans refuse to “live with outcomes we don’t agree with,” much like his wife attempted to violently overturn a lawful election when she didn’t agree with the outcome. Some highlights from Thomas’s Friday conversation:
The leak of the Alito draft: The leak of a draft opinion has done irreparable damage to the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas said at a conference in Dallas on Friday night, adding that it had destroyed trust among its members. “What happened at the court is tremendously bad,” Justice Thomas said. “I wonder how long we’re going to have these institutions at the rate we’re undermining them.”
The trust is gone: The leak of the opinion…“like kind of an infidelity,” Justice Thomas said. “Look where we are, where that trust or that belief is gone forever. And 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.”
He threw shade at Chief Justice Roberts: He drew a contrast with the court that sat for 11 years without a change in personnel before the arrival of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in 2005. “This is not the court of that era,” Justice Thomas said, adding: “We actually trusted each other. We may have been a dysfunctional family, but we were a family.”
His thoughts on the peaceful protests outside justices’ houses: “You would never visit Supreme Court justices’ houses when things didn’t go our way. We didn’t throw temper tantrums. It is incumbent on us to always act appropriately, and not to repay tit for tat.”
What?? He added that conservatives had “never trashed a Supreme Court nominee.” He acknowledged that Merrick B. Garland, President Barack Obama’s third Supreme Court nominee, “did not get a hearing, but he was not trashed. You will not see the utter destruction of a single nominee. You will also not see people going to other people’s houses, attacking them at dinner at a restaurant, throwing things on them.” He said Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh had been subjected to particular abuse, but he referred only glancingly to his own brutal confirmation hearings, during which he angrily denied accusations of sexual harassment.
[From The New York Times]
True story, as soon as Christina Blasey Ford’s name came out in reporting, conservative nutjobs doxxed her, harassed her, threatened her and forced her to move several times. True story, peaceful protests outside a justice’s home is nothing compared to the conservative nutjobs screaming and throwing sh-t at every woman and girl entering a Planned Parenthood. Not to mention all of the bombings of abortion clinics, targeted harassment of doctors and healthcare providers, the fact that Dr. George Tiller was murdered in church, and the simple fact that women are going to die soon after Roe is overturned.
The fact that Thomas, Roberts and the Senate Republicans are still so focused on “the leak” is so strange to me. I know they’re running a play and I know they have something set up for this, but it also feels like… not many people are taking the bait? Or maybe I’m just in my own echo chamber. It’s just so bizarre and unsettling to know that Roe is being overturned and the people who did that are assuming the cloak of victimhood because of “the leak” and because of “protests.”
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Instar, Avalon Red.
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