The Black Man Democrats Love to Lynch -- Electronically

Largely the product of nine and a half hours of one-on-one interview sessions between Justice Thomas and Senator Ted Cruz, Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas is designed to provide insight into the personal and Constitutional bases for Thomas’s Supreme Court opinions.  Those opinions, alongside observations about internal dynamics of the Court, are the focus of the last half of the book, topics with which Cruz has direct experience as a clerk to former Chief Justice William Rehnquist and as a litigator before a Court that included Justice Thomas.  Cruz also provides commentary on Court cases throughout the book, generally linking Thomas’s life experience to later judicial opinions.      

Thomas’s childhood days with his mother are covered briefly, conditions of extreme deprivation made worse by the absence of a father from the family.  Anyone seeking more information about those or later years should consult Thomas’s autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son.  At age seven Clarence is sent to be raised by his grandfather, Myers Anderson, whose work ethic and self-reliance in appalling circumstances helped mold Thomas’s character.

Accordingly, Thomas’s law office is filled with various colloquial sayings uttered by Myers, for whom education was all important and for which he made sacrifices to send Clarence to Catholic school and later to seminary.  Thomas’s work mastering Latin and overcoming his Geechee dialect clearly dispels, alongside subsequent academic achievements, any idea that he lacked the intellectual qualifications to be on the Supreme Court – a canard Democrats should be loath to resurrect after the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson.  

Beyond intellectual accomplishments, Thomas’s school days were marred by various racist incidents. Even students preparing for the priesthood weren’t immune from attitudes prevalent in the 1960s.  Words and actions like celebrating the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. caused Thomas to abandon his priestly calling.  Unfortunately his failure to follow through on a task based on a level of prejudice that paled when compared to the virulent racism Myers Anderson faced his whole life caused a rupture in Thomas’s close relationship with his grandfather.

After transferring to Holy Cross, Thomas joined the Black Student Union where resentment and left-wing politics led him to Harvard Square on April 16, 1970.  There a riot caused considerable damage and brought out the National Guard.  This marked the high water mark of the hatred Thomas felt toward whites.  Following this event he returned to Holy Cross’s chapel and prayed that God might “purge [his] heart of anger.”  That request was answered over time as Thomas immersed himself in the writing of authors like Ralph Ellison who wrote, “And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.”  It was a sentiment that aptly foreshadowed the judicial practice of “the Great Dissenter.”

During his years at Yale Law School Thomas experienced firsthand the double-edged sword of affirmative action.  Many unqualified black students were admitted who would soon drop out, but qualified students like Thomas were viewed with suspicion as possible affirmative action admissions. The latter pill became more bitter when private law firms discounted his law degree.   At Yale Thomas also saw the “god of theory” being implemented on blacks by liberals far removed from the consequences of their experiment s -- the Boston busing fiasco being a prime example.  What he did not see at New Haven was any serious attention given to the Constitution or to writings of the Founding Fathers.  It was his own study of those documents years later that fostered his appreciation of a Constitution that set forth a limited and strictly interpretive role for the Supreme Court      

Missouri Attorney General and later Senator John Danforth played a key role in Thomas’s career, giving him his first post-Yale government job in Missouri and later facilitating his appointment to jobs in the Reagan Administration, first as assistant secretary for civil rights in the Education Department and later as head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.   Significantly, alone among Thomas’s political employees at the Education Department, Anita Hill insisted on following her boss to the EEOC.  

Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing headlined by Hill’s harassment charges is covered in about fifteen pages.  Those charges, initially meant to be anonymous, were likely leaked by the sleazy and duplicitous Senate Judiciary Chairman, Joe Biden.  The book’s insider presentation of those events will be “news” for anyone under forty who gathers political impressions from the media ether.  Even I, an adult viewer of the hearings on television in the fall of 1991, wasn’t aware that Juan Williams, Washington Post’s reliably Democrat journalist, was a friend and defender of Thomas’s character during that “high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.”   

Thomas’s dissents in his early days on the Court have become the basis for majority opinions in more recent years.  Many of those dissents protested the legal doctrine of substantive due process, a theory that puts supposed rights, like abortion and privacy, beyond the Constitutional framework of “due process,” thus taking them out of the legislative sphere altogether.  The “going further” phrase in Cruz’s title comes from Justice Thomas’s legal opinion that the Court should “go further” in undoing other substantive due process rulings that stand, like Roe v. Wade, not on Constitutional grounds but rather on the musings of justices about “the mystery of human life” (Anthony Kennedy) or “penumbras, formed by emanations” (William O. Douglas).   

Though this volume contains many biographical details relevant to Thomas’s judicial career, it isn’t a biography.  However, events related to his  character and judicial philosophy are nicely illuminated, as is the atmosphere within the Court, which is less cordial nowadays than it was during the time of Ginsberg, Scalia, and O’Conner.  Thomas, however, continues to maintain familial closeness and respect for those working around him, including janitorial staff.  Cruz’s book also provides surprising glimpses into the manufacturing of Supreme Court opinions (sometimes like sausage) alongside its insights into the justice “who is on track to become the longest-serving Supreme Court justice in American History.”

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.