The Most Hilarious Clarence Thomas Opinionating Yet
If you haven't had a chance to read Clarence Thomas' dissent in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, which was decided in late June, you have denied yourself good times! Our Special Correspondent for Supreme Court LOLs breaks it down for us, and it's GREAT STUFF.
thomas’ core argument is that the court’s holding assumes that first amendment protections apply to speech directed at minors, which thomas thinks is WRONG WRONG WRONG…. he explains his theories of constitutional interpretation, which he supports by citing his own opinion in a previous case, an opinion that not a single other justice joined! in case that citation was insufficient, he then… cites another opinion of his that no other justice joined!…. this is a BOLD move.
but all of this is just a warmup. we are still getting to the fabulous part. this is the part when thomas starts talking about what thomas jefferson believed about raising his children. and thomas is talking about this because, in his mind, we have to use exactly the interpretation of constitutional language that the founders did—which means we have to imagine exactly what they would have thought, looking at the historic record to guide us. and so thomas, with scrupulous attention to every detail of jefferson’s parenting practices, totally fails to mention any of jefferson’s children except the white ones he had with his wife.
from supremecourt.gov:
Has a Justice ever been impeached?
The only Justice to be impeached was Associate Justice Samuel Chase in 1805. The House of Representatives passed Articles of Impeachment against him; however, he was acquitted by the Senate.
@barnhouse After reading this, I'm not sure that impeaching this lunatic would be enough. What would stop him from biting people?
Dimwitted dogmatist is dimwitted, dogmatic.
Thomas has been a national embarrassment since his confirmation hearings.
I wrote all my constitutional law papers without capital letters
I'd love to see what he could do with this.
@stuffisthings Or this.
When eighteenth-century American men described "with a swelling of the heart" their friendships with other men, addressing them as "lovely boy" and "dearly beloved," celebrating the "ardent affection" that knit their hearts in "indissoluble bonds of fraternal love," their families, neighbors, and acquaintances would have been neither surprised nor disturbed.
Jefferson didn't even participate in the constitutional convention, so his opinion relative to framing the constitution is tangential at best. Sounds like the kind of ridiculous connection Michelle Bachmann would make.
LOLOLOLOLOL
Justice Thomas refuses to accede in the defacto transferal of legislative power from the legislature into the judiciary by endorsing a phoney 20th century pseudo philosophy which grants justices the nebulous power to reinterpret law in view of societies evolving standards. A power which justices use to radically alter the law without without ever demonstrating that societies standards have actually evolved on the matter in question or that their reinterpretation of the relevant law in fact represents anybody's standards but their own. Hilarious.
The Thomas dissent is nothing to laugh at. It is something to study as an example of real jurisprudence honestly applied. It is leagues above the kind of shit the rest of the court pumps out.