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Clarence Thomas has spent his skilled life attempting to return American regulation to the Declaration of Independence’s founding promise that people needs to be judged as individuals somewhat than as members of racial, gender, or ethnic groups. Plainly his friends on the excessive courtroom have been listening.
Thomas’ perception in particular person rights precedes his time on the courtroom. For instance, in a 1985 regulation evaluation article, Thomas mentioned his day by day obligations of implementing the nation’s civil rights legal guidelines as chairman of the EEOC. He wrote: “I intend to take EEO enforcement again to the place it began by defending the rights of people who’re harm by discriminatory practices. … Those that insist on arguing that the precept of equal alternative, the cornerstone of civil rights, means preferences for sure teams have relinquished their roles as ethical and moral leaders on this space.”
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Justice Thomas has reiterated that American regulation protects particular person somewhat than teams rights all through his three-and-a-half many years on the nation’s highest courtroom. In 1995’s Missouri v. Jenkins, as an illustration, Thomas turned the primary Supreme Court docket justice to straight criticize Brown v. Board of Schooling (1954). Though he known as state-mandated segregation “despicable,” he stated that the Court docket was flawed in 1954 to depend on disputable social science proof to declare segregation unconstitutional somewhat than invoking the “constitutional precept” that “the federal government should deal with residents as people, and never as members of racial, ethnic or spiritual teams.”
An in depth good friend of Supreme Court docket Justice Clarence Thomas believes it’s absurd that Democrats and media members are attempting to stress him to recuse himself from deciding whether or not former President Trump needs to be faraway from Colorado’s main poll. (Drew Angerer/Getty Pictures)
Justice Thomas has made comparable pronouncements in lots of different judicial opinions. His concurring opinion in 2007’s Mother and father Concerned in Neighborhood Faculties v. Seattle Faculty District No. 1 is maybe the strongest articulation of his conception of equality: “The dissent makes an attempt to marginalize the notion of a colorblind Structure by consigning it to me and Members of at the moment’s plurality. … However I’m fairly comfy within the firm I maintain. My view of the Structure is Justice Harlan’s view in Plessy: ‘Our Structure is color-blind, and neither is aware of nor tolerates courses amongst residents.’”
Extra not too long ago, Justice Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion within the Supreme Court docket’s 2023 selections holding that faculties and universities can’t take into account race in admissions selections that “Whereas I’m painfully conscious of the social and financial ravages which have befallen my race and all that suffer discrimination, I maintain out enduring hope that this nation will reside as much as its rules so clearly enunciated within the Declaration of Independence and the Structure of the USA: that each one males are created equal, are equal residents, and have to be handled equally earlier than the regulation.”
Affiliate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson authored the opinion in Ames v. Ohio Division of Youth Providers. (AP Photograph/J. Scott Applewhite, File )
Final week’s Supreme Court docket resolution in Ames v. Ohio Division of Youth Providers alerts that proponents of range, fairness, and inclusion packages ought to cease pretending that they’re complying with the regulation. In spite of everything, probably the most liberal members of the Court docket, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote in an opinion for a unanimous Court docket that the “background circumstances” rule imposed by a number of decrease courts of enchantment requiring members of a majority group to fulfill a heightened evidentiary customary to prevail on a Title VII discrimination declare is inconsistent with the textual content of Title VII and the Supreme Court docket’s anti-discrimination precedents.
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Justice Jackson’s opinion for the Court docket reversing the decrease courts may as effectively have been penned by Justice Thomas himself. Justice Jackson quoted the textual content of Title VII that makes it unlawful to take an antagonistic employment motion in opposition to “any particular person.” She additional quoted a 2020 Supreme Court docket resolution, Bostock v. Clayton County, that held that the “regulation’s deal with people somewhat than teams [is] something however tutorial.” She added: “By establishing the identical protections for each ‘particular person’—with out regard to that particular person’s membership in a minority or majority group—Congress left no room for courts to impose particular necessities on majority-group plaintiffs alone.”
Justice Thomas joined Justice Jackson’s opinion for the Court docket “in full.” However he additionally issued a concurring opinion during which he instructed that the “background circumstances” rule shouldn’t be solely inconsistent with the statutory textual content of Title VII however is “plainly at odds with the Structure’s assure of equal safety.” Most essential for current functions, Thomas made clear that if proponents of DEI are hoping that the Ames resolution has nothing to do with their DEI packages, they’re sorely mistaken. “American employers have lengthy been ‘obsessed’ with ‘range, fairness, and inclusion’ initiatives and affirmative motion plans,” he wrote. “Initiatives of this type have typically led to overt discrimination in opposition to these perceived to be within the majority.”
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When Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016, Court docket watchers overtly speculated about who would exchange him because the mental chief of the conservative authorized motion. Clarence Thomas has unquestionably stuffed that position. In spite of everything, in Ames even Justice Thomas’s liberal colleagues on the nation’s highest courtroom conceded that American regulation protects particular person somewhat than group rights.
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