Why Democrats Are After Clarence Thomas – He’s In The Way
The American man on the street (OK, person on the street) is undoubtedly mystified about the relentless attacks on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni.
Ever since he was nominated and for 30-years thereafter the Left has vilified Justice Thomas. That none of the claims or manufactured “scandals” have any basis in fact, law, or Supreme Court rule matters not one whit to Democrats.
Their goal is to destroy this good and Godly man and they don’t care what hypocrisy, sophistry or lies are required to accomplish their goal.
Our mystified man on the street might fairly wonder what motivates these attacks, and we have several answers to that question.
In the case of Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, we suspect that the same kind of insidious racism that prompted Whitehouse to join and maintain a membership in a “whites only” beach club is a motivator. Justice Thomas is one of the original “uppity” Black men who think for themselves and refuse to do what they are told by their self-appointed white betters like Sheldon Whitehouse.
Whitehouse can’t abide a black man who doesn’t know his place and Clarence Thomas is one of the original racial barrier-breakers, rising through poverty and segregated oppression to an Ivy League education, high rank in government service and a seat on the Supreme Court.
But there’s a broader and bigger agenda here than Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s personal racism, and that is the Left’s decades-long campaign to dismantle the Constitution and its carefully constructed system of three branches of government limited to protect the rights of the individual.
There’s no question that if Clarence Thomas had been a go-along-get-along adherent to Washington, DC’s “progressive” orthodoxy (like Republican-appointed former Justice David Souter) he would have been celebrated as the Supreme Court’s second Black Justice, or at least been left alone to live in peace and obscurity as was Souter.
However, Clarence Thomas took the harder road to follow the plain language of the Constitution as written to defend the rights of individual Americans.
And that meant knocking down some of the great Shibboleths of the Democratic Party and their allies in the Leftist media.
Gun control? Justice Thomas wrote that the definition of “bear naturally encompasses public carry. Most gun owners do not wear a holstered pistol at their hip in their bedroom or while sitting at the dinner table. Although individuals often ‘keep’ firearms in their home, at the ready for self-defense, most do not ‘bear’ them in the home beyond moments of actual confrontation.”
This is the first time the justices declared a right to carry a weapon outside the home and, significantly for future cases, transformed the legal framework that most lower courts had adopted when reviewing gun laws.
Whether gun restrictions can stand, Thomas wrote, must be measured by the nation’s history, not by a state’s assertion of urgent public safety interests. He said the Second Amendment “requires courts to assess whether modern firearms regulations are consistent with the Second Amendment’s text and historical understanding.”
Likewise on abortion, Justice Thomas wrote that in its rationale, the court’s majority found that a right to abortion was not a form of “liberty” protected by the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution — as the court had said in Roe.
The same rationale that the Supreme Court used to declare there was no federal constitutional right to abortion, he said, should also be used to overturn cases establishing federal constitutional rights to contraception, same-sex consensual relations and same-sex marriage – those are issues the Constitution leaves with the states and state legislatures, not federal judges, should decide those issues.
That the Constitution means what it says and that our federal system separating federal and state responsibilities is real is anathema to Democrats who wish to bend the Constitution to the political whims of the moment.
That’s why they have attacked Clarence Thomas and the Supreme Court in general – to undermine the Supreme Court as the supreme body in a separate branch of government – co-equal to the executive and legislative branches of the federal government.
If Democrats can make the courts mere pawns of the politics of the day, they will have accomplished their goal of changing the Constitution from the law that governs government and protects and guarantees the natural rights with which every human being is endowed by the Creator, to a document that grants rights which may be taken away upon the political whim of the party in power.
Donald Trump once famously said “they are not after me, they are after you, and I’m just in the way.” President Trump was right, but he was about 30-years late to the claim, because for the past 30-some years Democrats have been after our constitutional rights, and Clarence Thomas has taken the slings and arrows for being in the way.
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