In his weekly column at the Washington Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti takes note of Clarence Thomas’s 25 years on the Supreme Court. Taciturn on and off the bench, Thomas has in recent days spoken at the Heritage Foundation as well as to WEEKLY STANDARD editor Bill Kristol on Conversations. Continetti finds that in a dark time for American conservatism and constitutionalism, Thomas’s words and attitude stand out and matter. Here’s an excerpt:
He recently taught at the University of Georgia. The topic was legal precedent. “If you’re a doctor and someone comes in with a complicated health problem,” he tells Bill Kristol, “I think a doctor, they’d say, ‘Get a second opinion, let’s run a couple of tests to make sure. Let’s do this, let’s do that, I think this is the answer, but we should do some more tests to make sure.’ Why don’t we do that with the law? That’s basically the approach that we take with originalism.” The law, he says, is like a train. The initial case is the engine. But each additional ruling adds another car to the rig. A judge should not concern himself only with the most recent addition. “You have an obligation to take your time, walk through all the cars, see what’s up in the engine of the train, see who’s driving. It may be an orangutan, for all we know; it may be going over a cliff, for all we know; it may be running headlong into a station, for all we know. Then why are we adding another car?” The word obligation is prominent in his speech. He is a driven man whose origins, religion, principles commit him to say what he believes is right. “I think we are required to swim upstream no matter what,” he tells Kristol. “My grandfather was that sort of person, that no matter what others were doing or how bad it looked, we had things we were supposed to do.”… And here we are in 2016. The key thinkers of the postwar conservative intellectual movement—figures such as William F. Buckley Jr., Milton Friedman, Irving Kristol, Richard John Neuhaus, Robert Bork, James Q. Wilson, and Scalia—are gone. You can count the number of remaining conservative intellectuals on two hands. That’s if you feel generous. This is why Thomas matters. His dissents are lucid, well reasoned, pungently argued. His life testifies to the significance of family, literacy, religiosity, diligence, intelligence, and magnanimity. He has recommendations to offer: The U.S. Constitution: A Reader, Invisible Man, Native Son, “Victorian Virtues / Jewish Values” by Gertrude Himmelfarb, the works of Thomas Sowell, the autobiography ofFrederick Douglass, a visit to Gettysburg, a screening of John Adams (2008). He is brilliant, devout, patriotic, humble, large-hearted.
Read the whole thing here.
