An important new book by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Going Further, calls attention anew to the life and career of the single greatest living American, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. For many years after Thomas arrived on the court in the early 1990s, his conservative, originalist views were relegated to dissenting opinions. Three and a half decades later and now the second-longest-serving justice in the court’s history, Thomas now regularly finds himself in the majority.
Clarence Thomas, in short, has won the long game. Thirty-five years ago, mainstream legal training and judicial practice suggested the proper way to interpret a legal document is to probe for nebulous concepts such as legislative history and legislative intent. It’s now hard to believe, but the commonsense notion that one should begin the interpretive exercise with a document’s text and plain meaning was pretty much unheard of.
Thomas, along with his then-colleagues Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William Rehnquist, galvanized an intellectual revolution in American legal and judicial practice. Today, law schools instruct students to begin the interpretive exercise with the text. In fact, this is hardly controversial.
As the liberal Justice Elena Kagan put it in a 2015 Harvard Law School lecture, “we’re all textualists now.” A big part of the reason for this success is simple: sheer persuasiveness. The straightforward nature of the originalist and textualist position quickly found mass appeal, putting defenders of legislative history or “living constitutionalism” on their back feet. They haven’t been able to keep up.
In the area of legal interpretation, liberals have lost the public argument—badly. In recent years, we’ve seen this manifest in conservative victories at the high court on religious liberty, abortion, gun rights, affirmative action, and the administrative state. There is an underappreciated additional ingredient in Clarence Thomas’s winning formula: his kindness, affability, and genuine human decency.
Thomas’s life story is the stuff of legends. He grew up in the most abject poverty imaginable in Jim Crow-era rural Georgia. English was not even his first language.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
