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At least as an adult, to the other day's shameful demonstration of its absence in Maui when predictably he told a fire story yet again about himself, he has had little if any.
His pathetic search for authentic self-esteem has been ugly to watch and near fatal to bear.
But it explains why Joe Biden is Joe Biden.
4: Barry as Biden, a deranged incompetent, but dangerous criminal non-entity.
8: Barry as Michelle, still not proud of their country.
4: Barry as vice president?
24 years of the Obamas?
For almost twenty years (1948 – 1966) the country that brought us Pearl Harbor, the Rape of Nanking, medical experiments on POWs and sex slaves had brutal eugenics laws.
Recently, it was reported by The Japanese Times that thousands of nonconsenting men, women, and children were sterilized.
A new parliamentary report from Japan has revealed that approximately 25,000 people were sterilized under the country’s former eugenics laws, the majority of whom did not consent. Some of the victims were children.
“Approximately 65% of the people sterilized were forced to undergo the procedures. Children as young as nine years old were among the victims, and many of them believed they were being treated for a legitimate illness.”
“People with intellectual disabilities, mental illness, or hereditary disorders were among those forcibly sterilized, as the Japanese government wanted to prevent the births of so-called ‘inferior’ children. Japanese politicians also wanted to cut population rates due to food shortages after World War II. Though the law ended in 1966, eugenic propaganda continued to spread long after; The Japan Times cited a high school textbook from the 1970s which said the government was working on the ‘country’s eugenics to improve and enhance the genetic predisposition of the entire public.’”
The United States of America had its own eugenics laws.
As I wrote in The “Living Constitution and the Right to Die (Amazon and other
publishers:
"The callous remark of Justice O.W. Holmes, Jr.— “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”— was made in his less than three-page majority (8–1) opinion in the 1927 United States Supreme Court case of Carrie Buck v. Bell, Superintendent of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded."
Immediately below are the relevant parts of Holmes’s opinion for the Court. [The italics, ellipses, and bracketed words are mine.]
Mr. Justice HOLMES delivered the opinion of the Court.
[T]he superintendent of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded, was ordered to perform the operation of salpingectomy upon Carrie Buck … for the purpose of making her sterile. * * *
Carrie Buck is a feeble-minded white woman who was committed to the State Colony…. She is the daughter of a feeble-minded mother in the same institution, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble-minded child.
She was eighteen years old at the time of the trial of her case ….
An Act of Virginia … recites that the health of the patient and the welfare of society may be promoted in certain cases by the sterilization of mental defectives, under careful safeguard, etc.; that the sterilization may be effected in males by vasectomy and in females by salpingectomy, without serious pain or substantial danger to life; that the Commonwealth is supporting in various institutions many defective persons who if now discharged would become a menace but if incapable of procreating might be discharged with safety and become self-supporting with benefit to themselves and to society; and that experience has shown that heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, imbecility, etc.
The statute then enacts that whenever the superintendent of certain institutions including the abovenamed State Colony shall be of opinion that it is for the best interest of the patients and of society that an inmate under his care should be sexually sterilized, he may have the operation performed upon any patient afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity, imbecility, etc., on complying with the very careful provisions by which the act protects the patients from possible abuse. [My emphasis.]
[A]ny party may apply to the [Virginia] Supreme Court of Appeals, which, if it grants the appeal, is to hear the case upon the record of the trial in the Circuit Court and may enter such order as it thinks the Circuit Court should have entered. There can be no doubt that so far as procedure is concerned the rights of the patient are most carefully considered, and as every step in this case was taken in scrupulous compliance with the statute and after months of observation, there is no doubt that in that respect the plaintiff has had due process.
Please note the following sentence’s dichotomy between procedu[ral] and substantive law, which, as we shall see, play a crucial role in why Americans have no constitutional right to die.
The [plaintiff’s] attack is not upon the [statute’s] procedure but upon the substantive law. It seems to be contended that in no circumstances could such an order be justified. It certainly is contended that the order cannot be justified upon the existing grounds. The judgment [of the Virginia court] finds the facts that have been recited and that Carrie Buck “is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization . . . . * * * We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives [see In Memoriam and Selective Draft Law Cases, above. [Emphasis and bracketed words are mine.]
It would be strange if it [the public welfare] could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices … in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough. [Emphasis and bracketed words are mine.]
Thus does Holmes’s opinion reek of a defense of eugenics. It has been estimated that as many as 70,000 Americans, men and women alike, were sterilized until 1944, most of them because of the widespread belief that eugenics was a solution to reduce reproduction of certain “undesirables.”
Buck v. Bell has never been overruled by the Supreme Court of the United States.
For additional information about Carrie Buck and Buck v. Bell, see Jennifer Senior’s March 6, 2016, New York Times review, Imbeciles on the Supreme Court and Justice Not for All by Adam Cohen. The following quotations are from Ms. Senior’s review. [Bracketed words are mine].
Ms. Buck was neither epileptic nor feebleminded. As time would prove, she was of perfectly average intelligence. She was simply uneducated and luckless—a poor white girl from
Charlottesville who’d had a baby at 17, most likely because she’d been raped by the nephew of her foster mother. Rather than risking scandal, her guardians thought it best to get rid of her.
Nor was Ms. Buck part of three generations of so-called imbeciles.
Of all the tools to stem the tide of feeblemindedness, sterilization was by far the most efficient. During the Progressive Era, a number of states had enacted compulsory sterilization laws, including California and Connecticut. So bullish was Dr. Priddy to do the same for Virginia that he worked in concert with a methodical, meticulous local lawmaker, Aubrey Strode, to design a statute that would withstand the test of the highest court of the land. Ms. Buck was the test case.
We learn early on that Ms. Buck’s lawyer, Irving Whitehead, had close personal and professional ties to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded—the superintendent paid his legal fees—which meant he [the lawyer] made no efforts to mount a serious defense for his client.
Justice Holmes [was] himself an eager eugenicist, as were a few of his Supreme Court colleagues.
*
So too are many of today’s politicians, academics, teachers, physicians, writers, and others who yield coercive power.
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The
Coup We Never Knew
Did someone or something seize control of the United States?
By: Victor Davis Hanson
What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how
did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal
our immigration laws? Did Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign
nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they
pleased?
Since when did borrowed money not have to be paid back? Who insisted that the
more dollars the federal government printed, the more prosperity would follow?
When did America embrace zero interest? Why do we believe $30 trillion in debt
is no big deal?
When did clean-burning, cheap, and abundant natural gas become the equivalent
of dirty coal? How did prized natural gas that had granted America’s wishes of
energy self-sufficiency, reduced pollution, and inexpensive electricity become
almost overnight a pariah fuel whose extraction was a war against nature? Which
lawmakers, which laws, which votes of the people declared natural gas
development and pipelines near criminal?
Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices, to
picket and to intimidate their households in efforts to affect their rulings?
How then, and with impunity, did bullies surround the homes of Justices Brett
Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and
Clarence Thomas—furious over a court decision on abortion? How could these mobs
so easily throng our justices’ homes, with placards declaring “Off with their
d—s”?
Since when did Americans create a government Ministry of Truth? And on whose
orders did the FBI contract private news organizations to censor stories it did
not like and writers whom it feared?
How did we wake up one morning to new customs of impeaching a president over a
phone call? Of the speaker of the House tearing up the State of the Union
address on national television? Of barring congressional members from serving
on their assigned congressional committees?
When did we assume the FBI had the right to subvert the campaign of a candidate
it disliked? Was it suddenly legal for one presidential candidate to hire a
foreign ex-spy to subvert the campaign of her rival?
Was some state or federal law passed that allowed biological males to compete
in female sports? Did Congress enact such a law? Did the Supreme Court
guarantee that biological male students could shower in gym locker rooms with
biological women? Were women ever asked to redefine the very sports they had
championed?
When did the government pass a law depriving Americans of their freedom during
a pandemic? In America can health officials simply cancel rental contracts or
declare loan payments in suspension? How could it become illegal for
mom-and-pop stores to sell flowers or shoes during a quarantine but not so for
Walmart or Target?
Since when did the people decide that 70 percent of voters would not cast their
ballots on Election Day? Was this revolutionary change the subject of a
national debate, a heated congressional session, or the votes of dozens of
state legislatures? No, of course not.
What happened to Election Night returns? Did the fact that Americans created
more electronic ballots and computerized tallies make it take so much longer to
tabulate the votes?
When did the nation abruptly decide that theft is not a crime, assault not a
felony? How can thieves walk out with bags of stolen goods, without the wrath
of angry shoppers, much less fear of the law?
Was there ever a national debate about the terrified flight from Afghanistan?
Who planned it and why? And today, the current administration (Biden) is
blaming former President Trump for that disaster!
What happened to the once-trusted FBI? Why almost overnight did its directors
decide to mislead Congress, to deceive judges with concocted tales from fake
dossiers and with doctored writs? Did Congress pass a law that our federal
leaders in the FBI or CIA could lie under oath with impunity?
Who redefined our military and with whose consent? Who proclaimed that our
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could call his Chinese Communist
counterpart to warn him that America’s president was supposedly unstable? Was
it always true that retired generals routinely labeled their commander-in-chief
as a near Nazi, a Mussolini, an adherent of the tools of Auschwitz?
Were Americans ever asked whether their universities could discriminate against
their sons and daughters based on their race? How did it become physically
dangerous to speak the truth on a campus? Whose idea was it to reboot racial
segregation and bias as “theme houses,” “safe spaces,” and “diversity”? How did
that happen in America?
How did a virus cancel the Constitution? Did the lockdowns rob us of our
sanity? Or was it the woke hysteria that ignited our collective madness?
We are beginning to wake up from a nightmare of a country we no longer
recognize, and from a coup we neither knew about nor recognized.
Independence Day, one of the most important days in the history of the world, should be celebrated (and be referred to) accordingly.
We can hope that remembrance and understanding of this day signals the beginning of the American spirit's rebirth and its blessing of individual rights and limited government.
The SCOTUS recent 6-3 opinion in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College is approximately 231 pages long.
In it, appears a lengthy concurring opinion by Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. After he demolishes the dissents of Associate Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson, his concluding paragraphs are as follows:
The great failure of this country was slavery and its progeny. And, the tragic failure of this Court was its misinterpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments, as Justice Harlan predicted in Plessy [v. Ferguson]. We should not repeat this mistake merely because we think, as our predecessors thought, that the present arrangements are superior to the Constitution.
The Court's opinion rightly makes clear that Grutter [v. Bollinger] is, for all intents and purposes, overruled. And, it sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes.
Those policies fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our Nation's equality ideal. In short, they are plainly—and boldly—unconstitutional. See Brown II, 349 U.S. at 298, 75 S.Ct. 753 (noting that the Brown case one year earlier had “declare[d] the fundamental principle that racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional”).
While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.
(HMH emphasis.)
The information already unearthed by various committees of the United States House of Representatives concerning Hunter's and Joe's dealings with China are more than enough to take a treason prosecution to a federal jury.
See, "Aid and Comfort": Jane Fonda in North Vietnam," by Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer. (Amazon and elsewhere.)
Though the legal question of whether the plea immunized him on double jeopardy grounds from every conceivable charge that could have arisen from that episode was never litigated, it could have.
So, the question arises, whether Hunter Biden's misdemeanor plea(s) will immunize him from other potential tax charges related to his "business" deals.
It depends on the words of the plea deal.
I send these remarks every year close to Memorial Day because they are a useful reminder that the Day is not a “happy” one. As well meaning as some people are, associating the word “happy” with Memorial Day is not appropriate.
Memorial Day, the last Monday in May each year, is a federal holiday established to remember those who died while members of our country’s armed forces (unlike Veterans’ Day, which celebrates those who served).
With the Day’s genesis in Decoration Day – when volunteers laid flowers at graves of the fallen – Memorial Day is not a time for family barbecues, baseball games, or garage sales.
It’s a Day for all Americans – those who wore our Nation’s uniform and those who were not so privileged – to memorialize by thought and deed the heavy, irredeemable price deceased Americans have paid . . . and how much we owe them for what they lost in every war from the Revolution two-hundred-forty-seven years ago to our government’s shameful flight from Afghanistan two years ago.
Memorial Day is very different from America’s birthday. Independence Day (not the “4th of July”) should be celebrated with fireworks, patriotic songs, and loud band concerts.
But not Memorial Day, a time of remembrance too solemn an occasion to be “happy.”
Requiescat in pace.
]]>In culling some old files over the weekend, I came across the following. It is a fitting rebuke to the specious personal and professional attacks that are apparently growing in their malicious intensity.
MY GRANDFATHER'S SON
By Clarence Thomas
[Reviewed by Henry Mark Holzer]
(2007)
Upon entering the august chamber of the Supreme Court of the United States during oral argument, one immediately sees the nine justices, almost regal in their black robes in front of a huge velvet curtain.
Among his colleagues—Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justices Stevens, Kennedy, Scalia, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Alito—sits Associate Justice Clarence Thomas.
Chief Justice Roberts’s father was an executive with Bethlehem Steel. Justice John Paul Stevens’s father was a lawyer. Justice Antonin Scalia’s father was a professor of romance languages. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s father was a lawyer. Justice David Souter’s father was a banker. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s father was a businessman. Justice Stephen Breyer’s father was a lawyer. Justice Samuel Alito’s father was a high school teacher. Given their family circumstances and upbringing, it is not surprising that eventually they would be successful candidates for the Supreme Court of the United States.
In contrast, Justice Clarence Thomas was nine when he first met his father, whose “firm, shameless voice . . . carried no hint of remorse for his inexplicable absence from our lives.” In his recently published autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son, the author writes that “I saw him for the second time after I graduated from high school.”
Thomas’s mother had been born out of wedlock. She worked in a rural factory shucking oysters and picking crabs, and as a domestic servant.
I knew none of this, and little else, about Clarence Thomas’s personal life until reading his revealing, evocative autobiography. However, before that, albeit in another connection, I knew him quite well—even though we have never corresponded, spoken, or met.
I knew Justice Thomas through his opinions, written as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, which are the subject of my own book The Supreme Court Opinions of Clarence Thomas, 1991-2006.
My research for that book consisted solely of reading and analyzing some 350 of those opinions. The Supreme Court Opinions of Clarence Thomas is thus, in effect, a judicial biography.
But while reading Justice Thomas’s opinions on most of the important provisions of the Constitution (and many federal statutes) I couldn’t help wondering about the man, not the justice, who for now sixteen terms has been making statement such as:
Time and again I wondered what the formative influences were that shaped the man who sat with dignity and confidence among his judicial peers, judges of such different backgrounds and upbringings.
Neither I nor the rest of America—the legal profession and laymen alike—have to wonder any longer. In My Grandfather’s Son Clarence Thomas the man, not the justice, has candidly told us how he became who he is today.
Clarence Thomas’s life may have taken him to the heights of the Supreme Court of the United States, but it began inauspiciously.
He was born in 1948. His place of birth, Pinpoint, Georgia, “too small to be called a town,” was a twenty-five-acre peninsula, a tidal salt creek. The lives of the hundred-or-so inhabitants “were a daily struggle for the barest of essentials: food clothing, and shelter.” Medical care was sparse, if available at all. Thomas’s home was a “shanty,” lacking a bathroom or running water. There was but a single light bulb. Newspapers stuffed into cracks were supposed to keep out the winter cold.
Because Thomas “had no idea that any other life was possible,” his days in Pinpoint, though “uncomplicated and unforgiving,” were “idyllic.” From reading the author’s descriptions of life there—“skipping oyster shells on the water,” catching fish—one gets the sense of Huck Finn amidst Negro rural poverty. It is a testament to Thomas’s sense of balance that he can recall those days fondly, despite how objectively disadvantaged materially he was.
At the age of six Thomas and his brother moved to Savannah, into a single room occupied by his mother, a far cry from his home today in Northern Virginia. He characterizes where he lived, on the second floor of a tenement, as “the foulest kind of urban squalor.”
In the mid-Twentieth Century—not in Lincoln’s log cabin days—the future lawyer, federal administrative official, and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, today not a stranger to the finery of the White House, lived with running water on only the floor below, an outdoor toilet with a cracked and rusty bowl and a rotten wooden seat, and the stench of raw sewage emanating from a broken pipe.
The youth who would one day break bread with the President of the United States could not afford sugar for his breakfast cornflakes. While his mother and brother slept in the room’s only bed, Clarence Thomas, who would one day own a forty-foot motor home, slept in a chair that “was too small, even for a six-year-old.”
The only source of heat was a kerosene stove, but because on his mother’s paltry earnings they couldn’t afford to light it very often, and the child who today has more than satisfied all his material needs “was cold most of the time, cold and hungry.” Indeed, Thomas says that “[n]ever before had I known the nagging, chronic hunger that plagued me in Savannah.” In a sentence of touchingly evocative prose Thomas writes that it was “[h]unger without the prospect of eating and cold without the prospect of warmth—that’s how I remember the winter of 1955.”
The following summer the situation improved. Thomas’s mother found a two-bedroom apartment, which had a stove and refrigerator. “The outdoor toilet didn’t leak,” and Clarence had his own bed.
Although he doesn’t dwell on the impact his early childhood had on him, Thomas reveals and implies enough for the reader to form a pretty clear picture. The virtual non-existence of his father took a toll, “idyllic” or not his life in Pinpoint was a struggle for survival, mere existence in Savannah was “hell,” and there his mother “worked to stay alive and keep us alive, nothing more.”
This chapter of Clarence Thomas’s life changed later in the summer of 1955 when his mother unceremoniously announced he and his brother were going to live with their grandparents. Two grocery bags were all that was required to pack the children’s earthly belongings, and off they went.
Thomas surmises that the main reason for the move was because his mother “simply couldn’t take care of two energetic young boys while holding down on full-time job that paid only ten dollars a week”—especially since “she refused to go on welfare.” His absent father made no contribution to Clarence and his brother’s care.
It was that move, Thomas becoming his “grandfather’s son,” laid on top of the imprints from his earlier years in Pinpoint and Savannah, that influenced Clarence Thomas life materially, spiritually, psychologically, and in every other way.
From what the author writes about his grandfather, Myers Anderson, “an ill-educated, modestly successful black man in the Deep South,” it’s clear that Thomas could have written an entire loving book about him. “In every way that counts, I am my grandfather’s son. I even called him Daddy because that was what my mother called him. * * * He was dark, strong, proud, and determined to mold me in his image. * * * He was the one hero in my life. What I am is what he made me.”
This is truly so, and it is in the next section of My Grandfather’s Son—where writing about family history, his grandfather’s background, and the incredible material change in his and his brother’s circumstances—the author provides context for the story of his growing-up and describes the influence of Myers Anderson, “the greatest man I have ever known.”
This window into the youth Clarence Thomas who became the Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, provided by this part of My Grandfather’s Son, is utterly fascinating and candidly revealing. Regrettably, space considerations don’t allow me to here do more than merely touch on the most important facts.
While living with his grandfather and grandmother, Clarence Thomas actually had two lives.
One was in the city, where he attended a Catholic school run by Irish immigrant Sisters. His description of the institution uses words like “neat and clean,” where the students “were required to pick up trash, empty wastebaskets, sweep floors, and clear blackboards.” Classes were “orderly,” and corporal punishment was normal. The nuns treated all the students with respect. Importantly, “[t]he sisters also taught us that God made all men equal, that blacks were inherently equal to whites, and that segregation was morally wrong.” (My emphasis.)
Life in the city with his grandparents emphasized education (“I was never prouder than when I got my first library card”), discipline (“[W]e were never to ‘spute’ his word”), and hard work helping Daddy deliver fuel oil (“My fingers grew numb from the cold”).
Thomas’s other life with his grandparents was in the country, on an abandoned sixty-acre farm that had been in his grandfather’s family for generations. On Christmas Day, 1957 Daddy announced that they—he, Clarence, and his brother—were going to build a house there. According to the author, “[b]y springtime we’d finished building a simple four-room house, and we spent the summer building garages, a barn, and other facilities, putting up fences, and clearing the surrounding land with axes and bush hooks. Friends and family members had helped us lay the cinder blocks and put on the roof, but we did all the rest of the work ourselves, screening the porch and installing a secondhand tub, sink, and toilet . . . .”
Clarence Thomas was now all of ten-years-old.
After that, Thomas spent every summer there—“a place of torment, and salvation”—doing tasks that are difficult to imagine of a Supreme Court justice.
On task led to the next. Up before sunrise. Cutting trees, clearing land, laying fence, cutting grass, feeding animals, driving tractors, planting crops, spreading fertilizer, weeding fields, picking corn, cutting sugarcane, skinning animals, cleaning fish, throttling chickens, and, yes, slaughtering hogs (the details of which, as a vegan I could have done without). All without gloves (Daddy considered it a weakness), and under the brutal and unrelenting Georgia sun—plagued by hot air in which swirled hordes of grats, mosquitoes, and flies.
Was Daddy some kind of a Simon Legree?
Hardly.
On the morning the Thomas brothers moved into their grandfather’s house he informed them that “[t]he damn vacation is over”—which caused Clarence to think “of the filthy outdoor toilet behind [his mother’s] old tenement and [try] to figure out what vacation he [Daddy] was talking about.”
From now on there would be “manners and behavior” and “rules and regulations.” “Our first task,” Thomas writes, “was to get a good education so that we could hold down a ‘coat-and-tie job,’ and he wouldn’t listen to any excuses for failure. ‘Old Man Can’t is Dead—I helped bury him,’ he said time and again.” (My emphasis.)
Daddy, Thomas writes, “loomed over us like a dark behemoth, instilling fear and demanding absolute adherence to all his edicts, however arbitrary they might appear to be.” But all in aid of one relentless goal: instilling in his grandsons independence, discipline, knowledge, and self-esteem.
About the farm, the old man cannily explained years later “that he’d decided to build a house and cultivate the family land in order to keep [Clarence’s brother] and me off the streets of Savannah during the hot weather months when nobody bought fuel oil [and thus there was no work to keep the boys occupied and out of trouble].”
Clarence Thomas’s early years in Pinpoint, in Savannah, and on the farm, as revealed in My Grandfather’s Son are, as he acknowledges, what essentially formed him. The lessons and experiences of his childhood—the hurt of an absent father, the cost of a broken family, the desperation of rural poverty, the despair of urban squalor, the benefits of iron discipline, the self-esteem gained from hard work, the necessity of inculcated values, would be with him all the way to the Supreme Court.
In Catholic high school he studied hard, delivered fuel oil, and slept little. He experienced how “the peculiar institution of slavery had evolved into the peculiar institution of segregation,” and became aware of the civil rights movement that was beginning to swirl around him. Soon switching to a seminary where he was one of only two black students (and later the only one), he won a Latin prize, was instilled with academic discipline, and for a while suffered race-based insults and indignities.
Graduation summer found Thomas as a janitor, groundskeeper, and general handyman.
In the fall he began studies at a religious college, but doubts arose about his vocation partly because of the Catholic Church’s unacceptable position on racial discrimination. When Martin Luther King was shot and a fellow student said “I hope the son of a bitch dies,” “[h]is brutal words finished off my vocation—and my youthful innocence about race.”
Thomas left the college, and told Daddy. “I had broken my promise [not to quit], and my failure to live up to my word became a burden on my conscience that I have never escaped.”
Myers Anderson threw his grandson out of the house: “I want you to leave,” he said. “Today, this day.” Thomas writes: “I fumbled for something more to say. Would he help me with college? ‘I’m finished helping you,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to figure it out yourself. You’ll probably end up like your no-good daddy or those other no-good Pinpoint Negroes.’ The set of his jaw and the steel in his voice left no doubt that his word was final. My life and fate were in my hands.”
Broke, Thomas moved in with his mother, found a job as a proofreader in a paper bag factory, endured racial insults, and started down the road to racial radicalization.
He writes of how the assassination of Robert Kennedy somehow crystallized his fear of white America, making him remember the frustrations and humiliations Daddy had suffered. He writes of the “rage that threatened to burn through the masks of meekness and submission behind which we hid our true feelings. It was like a beast that lay in wait to devour us.” In one of the most open, and probably most difficult passages to have written, Thomas says that:
I lost my battle with the beast in the summer of 1968. It isn’t hard to see
why. My family, my faith, my vocation, the heroes who inspired me: all
had been taken from me. Once they had helped keep the beast at bay.
Now it slipped its leash and began to consume me from within. I began to fear
that I would never climb out from the crushing weight of segregation. No
matter how hard I worked or how smart I was, any white person could still
say to me, “Keep on trying, Clarence, one day you will be as good as us,’
knowing that he, not I, would be the judge of that. The more injustice I saw,
the angrier I became, and the angrier I became, the more injustice I saw, not
only at [the factory where he worked] but everywhere I worked.
Thomas saw Daddy as a victim of that injustice. His grandfather was religious, honest, patriotic, hard working. He had struggled to shelter his family, clothe them, and put food on the table. “Daddy didn’t complain,” Thomas writes, “but I couldn’t accept the way the white man had treated him. Somehow, some way, he and the others like him had to be avenged.”
Clarence Thomas had come a long way from playing barefoot in the bubble that was Pinpoint, to being a black college student determined to avenge the wrongs done to the Negro race in America.
The following fall he enrolled at Holy Cross College, obsessed over social problems, especially race, left the church, earned good grades, and began thinking about law school.
In passages about how some of his black classmates were over their heads academically at Holy Cross, we can see the genesis of his affirmative action jurisprudence, as applied in his Grutter dissent where he rails against do-gooders who use under qualified blacks as guinea pigs for liberal academic social experiments.
Affirmative action was not the only thing that Thomas began to notice about racial issues. He disagreed with a plan of black students to live separately. He wondered why the administration gave into the plan with such alacrity. He began, perhaps inchoately, to realize that there were race hustlers out there, playing their own game. He questioned racial entitlements. Although, in his words, “[t]he beast of rage kept gnawing at my soul . . . the more I saw of radicalism, the more I doubted it had any answers to offer me . . . . * * * As much as I hated the injustices perpetrated against blacks in America, I couldn’t bring myself to hate my country, then or later.”
Participation in a “demonstration” that ended in tear gas was a catharsis and Thomas’s radical days were about over.
In the rest of his time at Holy Cross Thomas studied voraciously, soaking up knowledge like the proverbial sponge, and through introspection and rigorous honesty let go of the rage.
His expanding intellect now stimulated by the works of Ayn Rand, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and others, Thomas was accepted to Harvard Law School. He declined, perhaps because it was too conservative (!) in favor of Yale, which was smaller and perhaps more liberal.
Despite considering himself far left of center and reluctantly voting for the “too conservative” George McGovern, some of classmate John Bolton’s (yes, that John Bolton) conservative arguments began to sink in.
Indeed, Thomas began to realize that he was being used by Yale: “. . . in the years following Dr. King’s assassination, affirmative action (though it wasn’t yet called that) had become a fact of life at American colleges and universities, and before long I realized that those blacks who benefited from it were being judged by a double standard. As much as it stung to be told that I’d done well in the seminary despite my race, it was far worse to feel that I was now at Yale because of it.”
In My Grandfather’s Son, Thomas writes of how in his last semester at Yale Law School he realized that no job offers were forthcoming: “Now I knew what a law degree from Yale was worth when it bore the taint of racial preference. I was humiliated . . . .” (My emphasis.) (Today, the Yale degree reposes in his basement, adorned with a 15-cent price sticker he removed from a cigar package.) Thomas says to this day that going to Yale was a “mistake.”
Eventually, Clarence Thomas was hired by then-Missouri Attorney General, later United States Senator, John Danforth. Although neither of them could have known it then, Clarence Thomas, the unstoppable son of his grandfather, was headed for the Supreme Court of the United States.
On the way there, the future justice’s life was full of highs and lows.
Highs included:
Lows included:
From the EEOC, Thomas became a judge on the D.C. Circuit. One day, about fifteen-months later, Thomas was secretly taken to the White House via a tunnel from the Treasury Department, and “escorted to a windowless office and left by myself for a few hours. * * * As I waited, I tried to think of a way to convince President Bush to choose someone else [to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court]. The obvious reasons were my relative youth and inexperience—I’d just turned forty-three . . . and had been on the Court of Appeals for only fifteen months—but I knew these were mere excuses. Neither then nor at any other time did it occur to me that I could not do the work of a Supreme Court justice. I’d spent my whole life coping with one challenge after another, and I knew I could handle this one as well, the same way I’d learned Latin, passed the Missouri bar exam, briefed and argued numerous cases, and straightened our EEOC. The problem was that I still didn’t know whether I wanted to spend the rest of my life as a judge, and I was sure that I didn’t want to run the confirmation gauntlet again.”
A few days later President Bush called: “Judge, we’re still thinking about this Supreme Court thing. Could you come up to Kennebunport tomorrow to have lunch with me and talk about it?” Thomas, apparently still ambivalent, went. That day, the President announced Clarence Thomas’s nomination.
As the President introduced me to America, I thought of my wife, my grandparents, and all the other people who had helped me along the way, especially the nuns of St. Benedict the Moor and St. Pius X. Then my thoughts drifted from those who had made this day possible to those who would now try to undo it. I recalled the ants I had watched as a child on the farm, building their hills one grain of sand at a time, only to have them senselessly destroyed in an instant by a passing foot. I’d pieced my life together the same way, slowly and agonizingly. Would it, too, be kicked callously into dust?
Most readers of this review know the answer to the question Clarence Thomas asked himself that sunny day in Maine, and I will not discuss it here except to make two points.
The first is that, as his book shows beyond doubt, the contemptible conduct of the interest groups, politicians, and individuals who sought to defeat then-Judge Thomas’s nomination exposed themselves as bigots, frauds, liars, and enemies of the democratic process.
Indeed, while their conduct was contemptible, they themselves were and remain, beneath contempt. That goes doubly for Anita Hill, a perjurious ingrate who willingly allowed herself to be used as the tool of corrupt forces, and who should have been disbarred for lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which constitutes unethical professional conduct. If for no other reason, and there are many others, My Grandfather’s Son needs to be read for the true story of Hill’s mendacious assault on a decent man who had more than once been her benefactor.
Second, as both his book and the public record make clear, during the Senate Hearings on his confirmation Clarence Thomas was knowledgeable, responsive, dignified, and especially brave. Brave, because at the end he told the Judiciary Committee, the Senate, the American public, and the world that, given what had been done to him,
The Supreme Court is not worth it. No job is worth it. I am not here for that. I am here for my name, my family, my life, and my integrity. I think something is dreadfully wrong with this country, when any person, any person in this free country would be subjected to this. * * * This is a circus. It is a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I am concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that, unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you, you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.
Before ending this review I want to mention a disclosure that Justice Thomas makes in his book, something that probably only a few people knew before My Grandfather’s Son was published—something that, hopefully, will lay to rest for all time vicious, indeed racist, allegations that have dogged Justice Thomas for years.
After I had been on the Court for about five years, I raised the topic of my nomination with Boyden Gray [counsel to the President] over lunch. He had always been candid with me, so I asked him a straight question, knowing that he would give me an equally straight answer: was I picked because I was black? Boyden replied that in fact my race had actually worked against me. The initial plan, he said, had been to have me replace Justice Brennan [who had retired before Justice Marshall retired] in order to avoid appointing me to what was widely perceived as the Court’s “black” seat, thus making the confirmation even more contentious. But Justice Brennan retired earlier than expected, and everyone in the White House agreed that I needed more time on the D.C. Circuit in order to pass muster as a Supreme Court nominee.
There is much more to say about My Grandfather’s Son. It is honest, touchingly introspective, and extremely self-revelatory. Much of Justice Thomas’s prose is poetic. His autobiography—warts and all—shows Clarence Thomas to be a fine human being, doting father, loving husband, patriotic American, and brave man. Indeed, when one finishes reading the justice’s autobiography, the reader feels like he is saying goodbye to a new friend, with whom he has traveled the long road from Pinpoint, Georgia, to the marble halls of the United States Supreme Court.
And at that Court, one wonders whether in his chambers Clarence Thomas sometimes turns to a proudly displayed bust of his grandfather and shares a thought with him—and then hears his grandfather reminding, yet again, that “Old Man Can’t is Dead—I helped bury him.”
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The Necessary and Proper Clause is not a warrant to Congress to enact any law that bears some conceivable connection to the exercise of an enumerated power. Nor is it, however, a command to Congress to enact only laws that are absolutely indispensable to the exercise of an enumerated power. (Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1, 57 (2005). Dissenting.
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Anyone who would like to remain on this list should re-register, or delete oneself.
Thank you.
HMH
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In my view, a use of force [by a prison guard] that causes only insignificant harm to a prisoner may be immoral , it may be tortuous [an actionable civil wrong], it may be criminal, and it may even be remediable under other provisions of the Federal Constitution, but it is not cruel and unusual punishment. In concluding to the contrary, the Court today goes far beyond our precedents. (Hudson v. McMillian, 503 U.S. 1, 18 (1992). Dissenting.