Reid's Right

Sen. Reid has expressed the view that Justice Thomas is not up to his job. Naturally, Thomas has supporters and they take exception. Unfortunately, Reid is right. Thomas is not up o his job. The standard here is not whether Clarence Thomas gets himself arrested or indicted. It is not whether he publishes majority opinions from time to time. W.O. Douglas did that, and he still did a poor job as justice. The standard is not whether Thomas is a great writer – there aren’t any of those on the Supreme Court, and it is far from clear that good writing is any real help to the job once one manages to write moderately clearly. Given the number of helpers the justices have, it would take real dedication to produce genuinely bad writing. The standard is an intellectual standard, and Thomas does not meet it. Every term Thomas offers up views that are ridiculous, ridiculous in the highly technical sense of have no grounding in history (legal or social), little connection to established law, and animated by foolish policy preferences, ill-disguised. A guy who thinks that recipients of parking tickets are entitled to more due process protection than those held in prison without term is not a good justice. It is rather unlikely he ever will be.