Is Clarence Thomas dead weight?

Now THAT'S more like it!

 

Pushing Thomas for the SC was a regrettable closing act for John Danforth, who otherwise was one of the few Republicans I respect.

 

It's the reason why I don't respect Pastor John.
And Guy, NONE of these folks is an elegant writer, Clarence least of all, and his ideas are antebellum at best. That, and the pathologies with which he approaches every day life, make him not very distinguished, IMO. At least Scalia can occasionally be funny.

 

Have no desire to be held prisoner by the Frogman's peculiar sense of reality.

 

Look, there's no accounting for taste, but I haven't heard anyone yet (honestly) say "I've read numerous opinions of his, and he's not too bright."

 

William O. Douglas asked questions, Louis Brandeis asked questions, Oliver Wendall Holmes asked questions, as did Hugo Black, Benjamin Cardoza and Felix Frankfurter.
Clarence Thomas is a dimwit, a doorknob, one of the worst government employees in history. A simple minded tool.

And I sincerely doubt he's written many complete opinions, his law clerks do most of the heavy lifting, and he's usually dissenting, or agreeing with the right wing majority. I don't believe he's written a significant majority opinion.

 

I'm just trying to figure out the criteria used earlier to back up the claim that those four are "great" justices. Based on what?

 

You can differ with their conclusions, but still be impressed by their persuasive writing style, ability to construct legal arguments using precedent, facts, logic and inferences. You can be impressed by a Justices ability to make an argument or a rationale by using the least possible assumptions and by citing and substantiating each point made.

By that standard Clarence Thomas is about as successful a Supreme Court Justice as Barney Fife was a big city homicide detective.

 

They're the four house darlings of the board's non-journalist righties . . . you
remember, the darlings of the clownshow administration we'll be rid of, shortly.

 

I think that most of the time that people call you out for racism, it's oversensitivity. Here, I think there is no chance you would have said that if he were white, and that's disgraceful. You also insulate yourself against being proven wrong by attributing any quality work that he's done (not that you've bothered to check it out) to clerks, when every justice in history leaned heavily on clerks.

 

Clarence Thomas is on the Supreme Court for two reasons -- 1) at the time that he was nominated, he basically had taken no Bork-like positions in either judicial opinions or law review articles which would be controversial. This is mostly because he was a blank slate having written almost nothing in his career and having only been an appellate judge for about a year; and 2) he was a black Republican. It is hard to believe that someone with his painfully thin resume was nominated to the court.

It is not essential that a justice ask any question, but it is downright strange that he refuses to do so. The court hears only about 80 or so cases a year and he has four clerks to help prepare him.

 

True. two questions:

- Does he have an unusual amount of clerks?

- In his written opinions (setting aside what you agree or disagree with), does he come off as less qualified than anyone else? Do they stand out negatively in a way that Harriet Miers certainly would have?