Clarence Thomas

The real problem with US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson attending the Grammys wasn’t that it revealed her true colors as a liberal, but that it showed the slow and steady erosion of the court’s institutional reserve.Senator Marsha Blackburn, the Tennessee Republican, demanded that Chief Justice John Roberts launch an investigation into Jackson alleging she breached ethics rules by appearing at the anti-ICE event.“Americans deserve a Supreme Court that is impartial and above political influence,” Blackburn gravely pronounced. “When a Justice participates in such a highly politicized event, it raises ethical questions. We need an investigation into Justice Jackson’s ability to remain impartial.

New York socialist Zohran Mamdani is hailed as the social media sensation of American politics. He knows how to talk directly to young people, we’re told. Yet an account called “Thomas Sowell Quotes” has almost twice as many followers on X as Mamdani. Sowell turned 95 this year. He is an unlikely influencer and yet hour-long interviews with him, published by Stanford’s Hoover Institution, have been watched millions of times. In his most popular video, Sowell argues for personal responsibility over dependence on the state and is meticulous in his use of empirical evidence. Black men who read newspapers and own library cards have had the same income as their white counterparts since 1969. Married black couples have the same poverty rate as white couples and have done for decades.

When a Supreme Court justice warns that the decisions of her colleagues pose an “existential threat to the rule of law,” it’s not just a legal disagreement – it’s a performance. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s recent dissents, particularly in Trump v. Casa, show a troubling shift in the role of a justice. Instead of offering careful counterpoints rooted in constitutional reasoning, she delivers ideological monologues that sound tailor-made for MSNBC clips and Essence Fest applause lines. This isn’t a critique of dissent itself. Dissent is vital to the integrity of the Court. The late Antonin Scalia built an entire legacy on it – scorching in tone, yes, but always grounded in jurisprudence.

It is not often that an American politician publishes a book of genuine interest. It is even less often, breaking through the veil of ghostwriters and marketers and political risk consultants, that such a book provides real insight into its author. Hillbilly Elegy is an obvious example: an unusually vulnerable self-portrait whose sales shot through the roof after J.D. Vance was tapped to be Donald Trump’s running mate this summer. Josh Hawley may never be vice president, but his ambitions and his politics are already apparent in the biography of Teddy Roosevelt he published a full sixteen years ago.

If you squint, I reckon you could see two bloody corpses that the Secret Service turned over on that roof in Butler, Pennsylvaia. It was not only twenty-year-old loser Thomas Matthew Crooks; hovering right next door is the mangled corpse of the bureaucratic monstrosity that the Biden administration has been wielding against Donald Trump. There it lies, broken and inert.  Crooks tried to murder Trump with a AR-15. He almost did so, too. Had Trump not turned his head at the last moment — ironically, it was to look at a chart mapping the tsunami of illegal immigration swamping the country — Crooks’s bullet would have pierced Trump’s brain instead of merely nicking the top of his right ear.

Donald Trump is making strides in all the right places, it seems. Polls indicate he’s making moves among black and Jewish voters in New York State as well as with female voters, while also gaining support in crucial battleground states.According to the New York Post:Surveys from Emerson College and the Hill show the 45th president edging out Biden in Arizona (47 percent — 43 percent), Georgia (45 — 41 percent), Michigan (46 — 45 percent), Nevada (46 — 43 percent), Pennsylvania (47 — 45 percent) and Wisconsin (47 — 44 percent).In all six states, Trump’s lead has either remained the same or grown from the outlet’s polls taken last month, before he was convicted by a Manhattan jury on thirty-four business fraud charges.

“Somebody in a position of authority needs to talk to her and make her stop,” complained a thirty-six-year-old man to a Fairfax County, Virginia, officer on the line, according to a recording reviewed by the New York Times. The alleged perp here? Martha-Ann Alito, wife of conservative Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito. Like Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Virginia, Martha-Ann is now all over the news, with progressive activists ready to use her to discredit her husband’s rulings. Earlier this month, the Times reported the Alito household had flown an upside-down Old Glory flag at their Virginia home. The US flag code states that the flag ought not to be inverted “except as a signal of dire distress in instance of extreme danger to life or property.

In the basement of a Washington, DC restaurant, 200 ticket-purchasing fans have gathered to witness the live recording of a multifaceted conversation about the villainy and corruption of the Supreme Court, and one justice in particular. It only seems appropriate to order the shrimp and grits: it costs $19.99 and comes with a white-wine tomato sauce. This may seem rather hifalutin, but it also comes in a glass mason jar that references tired hipster kitsch — perfectly suitable for a live podcast hosted by Slate.

Anyone looking for a villain in the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down decades of affirmative action precedent will find one in Clarence Thomas. Critics have long found Thomas’s politics vexing in light of his race, a frustration that has only grown more pronounced as the affirmative action decision drew near. To hear his detractors tell it, Thomas was himself the beneficiary of affirmative action policies, both as an undergraduate at the College of the Holy Cross and later at Yale Law School. That Thomas could have such an experience and still strike down race-based admissions policies seems to make him a hypocrite — and an ungrateful one at that.

Did Clarence Thomas do anything wrong in accepting gifts from a wealthy Republican? Or is he the victim of years of pent-up anger at the Supreme Court by Democrats? Yes. According to an investigation by ProPublica, for more than twenty years, Justice Thomas received lavish and expensive gifts, including trips on a private yacht and a private jet, from Harlan Crow, a Texas billionaire and real estate developer with a long record of support for Republican politicians. Under the ethics regulations that guide Supreme Court justices, it is not clear that Thomas had to report any of this.

The 2024 campaign has hardly started, but the air is already filled with noxious fumes, most of it from desperate cable TV hosts and anonymous social-media posters. Don Lemon’s sexist comments about Nikki Haley are the latest example, but the vitriol has spread much wider. It reveals a dank corner of American politics, filled with mud-slinging and name-calling, degrading our public square. Donald Trump specializes in these attacks.. He has already launched several, unsuccessfully, on the man he sees as his most formidable competitor. Calling Florida’s popular governor “Meatball Ron” and “DeSanctimonious” isn’t an argument. It’s an epithet. It has the intellectual heft of giving someone the middle finger.

The Supreme Court is poised to grant a victory to religious conservatives via the First Amendment in blocking recognition of an LGBT club at Yeshiva University. Yeshiva is a Jewish law school which objects to the club on religious grounds. This is important news for other religious schools across America facing similar legal challenges. Though the Court as an intermittent step referred the case back to the lower courts as Yeshiva University v. YU Pride Alliance, Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Comey Barrett made no bones in their dissent that they would stand with the First Amendment when the full case comes before the Supreme Court, as it is expected the lower courts will demand Yeshiva recognize and fund the club.

We don't really negotiate much in the US and so we're bad at it. The American style of negotiating is to demand everything and settle for nothing less. We ask for an outrageously large amount and "bargain down" after the other side offers an equally outrageous small amount. Starting anywhere near your actual number is considered a sign of weakness. We don't like gray areas and we don't like to feel like we've lost out on something. So being asked to support something that on its face seems reasonable, like allowing two people in love living together in a home they co-own to marry, means buying into a whole LGBTQIA2+ agenda that somehow includes forcing kids to listen to drag queens read stories aloud about sexually ambitious caterpillars and their same-sex tadpole pals.

The shockwaves of this past Supreme Court term continue to shake the political left. Roe v. Wade is gone. Gun rights were further secured. Religious liberty was vindicated. The reaction among progressives (beyond anger) has been to attack the Court as illegitimate. Of course, they do not mean the Court is inherently unconstitutional. Article III makes that plain to even the most evolving of living constitutionalists. Instead, they say that the Court has committed two sins this term: the justices have engaged in judicial activism and they've acted undemocratically. These accusations seem based in frustration more than perceptive analysis. First, let’s tackle the claim that the Court engaged in judicial activism. The essence of judicial activism is to “legislate from the bench.

Set aside your opinions about abortion for a moment. Throw down the fluttering placards about "THE PRO-LIFE GENERATION" and "KEEP ABORTION LEGAL"; avert your eyes from the demonstrators praying outside Planned Parenthood. And ask yourself this: was Roe v. Wade good law? Was it sound that a "right to privacy" was conjured out of pseudo-constitutional dust and then used to overturn abortion laws in all fifty states? My guess is that even left-wing law professors have their doubts. Now, the Supreme Court has finally gone and rectified this hideous blunder. Pro-lifers rejoice: the day we've hoped for has finally arrived. The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Center was handed down on a bright and sunny morning in Washington, DC.

In one of its most desperate moves yet, the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol is considering subpoenaing Ginni Thomas, wife of Clarence Thomas. The Committee wants to review a handful of texts Ginni sent about the Capitol riot, which they feel may influence her husband’s decisions from the bench. The connection is weak, along the lines of Trump being the one who actually slapped Chris Rock. But the need to come up with a new crisis to return attention to the events of January 6 post-Ukraine is real. The genesis of this "crisis" begins with the Hail Mary plans to use the January 6 Committee to rescue Democrats from near-certain midterm electoral defeat.

President Biden’s senile verbal blunders over the past few days have prompted renewed speculation over his mental competency. It's even been suggested that now is the time to consider invoking and activating the 25th Amendment. The Wall Street Journal recently printed a short sharp edit on the subject, noting that should the president go, he would be replaced by the vice-president, thus rescuing the government from the nursing home and delivering it into the hands of the idiotic. The Journal’s editors prefer the status quo. They are probably right to do so.