1." All at once the enemy plan became clear; what looked like stupidity was revealed as genius, ...
...Jeffrey Toobin’s gripping, must-read profile of Clarence and Virginia Thomas in the New Yorker gives readers new insight ...: Toobin argues that the only Black man in public life that liberals could safely mock and despise may be on the point of bringing the Blue Empire down.
2. In fact, Toobin suggests, Clarence Thomas may be ...able to overthrow the entire edifice of the modern progressive state.In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court. Since the arrival of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in 2005, and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., in 2006, the Court has moved to the right when it comes to the free-speech rights of corporations, the rights of gun owners, and, potentially, the powers of the federal government; in each of these areas, the majority has followed where Thomas has been leading for a decade or more. Rarely has a Supreme Court Justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication.
3. There are few articles of faith as firmly fixed in the liberal canon as the belief that Clarence Thomas is, to put it as bluntly as many liberals do, a dunce and a worm. ... Not only does the liberal mind perceive him as a disgusting lump of ungoverned sexual impulse; he is seen as an intellectual cipher. Thomas’ silence during oral argument before the Supreme Court is taken as obvious evidence that he has nothing to say and is perhaps a bit intimidated by the verbal fireworks exchanged by the high profile lawyers and his more, ahem, ‘qualified’ colleagues.
4. No, says Toobin: the intellectual influence runs the other way. Thomas is the consistently clear and purposeful theorist that history will remember as an intellectual pioneer; Scalia the less clear-minded colleague who is gradually following in Thomas’ tracks.
5. Until very recently the constitutional vision I was taught in my teens remained, as they say, hegemonic. The enlarged role of the commerce clause was uncontested and the two amendments dangled with the other dead constitutional provisions — letters of marque and reprisal, no bills of attainder, the prohibition on quartering — in constitutional limbo.
6. ...the New Deal constitution was not as permanent or unalterable as it looked. Intellectually its foundations were shaky, and after two decades of a Clarence Thomas-led assault, the constitutional doctrines that permitted the rise of the powerful federal government could be close to collapse.
7. The next topic for Constitutional revisionism is the expansive reading of the commerce clause that the New Deal judges used to justify the Roosevelt administration’s ambitious economic programs. The Obamacare health reform depends on that kind of reading of the commerce clause; the penumbras must stretch pretty far for the Constitution to give Congress the right to require all Americans to buy private health insurance. And if the commerce clause can be stretched this far, one must ask whether there is anything that the Constitution blocks Congress from doing.
8. Without some rule of interpretation that the average person can understand and accept as legitimate, the Court gradually loses legitimacy in the public eye. The originalist interpretation, whatever objections can be made to it intellectually and historically, is politically compelling. It resonates with the American propensity for commonsense reasoning. To say that the Founders meant what they meant and that the first job of a judge is to be faithful to their intent is something that strikes many Americans as sensible, practical and fair.
9. But there is another view of this amendment. The Constitution of the United States confers specific, “enumerated” powers on the Congress, and many of the things that Congress does today are not listed among those enumerated powers.
10. This is pretty much a Tea Party wish list, and it is why the Tea Party movement is so strongly identified with originalist interpretations of the Constitution. Unleashing the Tenth Amendment would move the constitutional status quo back towards the early 1930s when the “Nine Old Men” struck down one New Deal law after another. For Toobin and most New Yorker readers, it is hard to imagine an idea that more radically and totally runs against everything they believe."
Read more: New Blue Nightmare: Clarence Thomas and the Amendment of Doom | Via Meadia
...Jeffrey Toobin’s gripping, must-read profile of Clarence and Virginia Thomas in the New Yorker gives readers new insight ...: Toobin argues that the only Black man in public life that liberals could safely mock and despise may be on the point of bringing the Blue Empire down.
2. In fact, Toobin suggests, Clarence Thomas may be ...able to overthrow the entire edifice of the modern progressive state.In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court. Since the arrival of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in 2005, and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., in 2006, the Court has moved to the right when it comes to the free-speech rights of corporations, the rights of gun owners, and, potentially, the powers of the federal government; in each of these areas, the majority has followed where Thomas has been leading for a decade or more. Rarely has a Supreme Court Justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication.
3. There are few articles of faith as firmly fixed in the liberal canon as the belief that Clarence Thomas is, to put it as bluntly as many liberals do, a dunce and a worm. ... Not only does the liberal mind perceive him as a disgusting lump of ungoverned sexual impulse; he is seen as an intellectual cipher. Thomas’ silence during oral argument before the Supreme Court is taken as obvious evidence that he has nothing to say and is perhaps a bit intimidated by the verbal fireworks exchanged by the high profile lawyers and his more, ahem, ‘qualified’ colleagues.
4. No, says Toobin: the intellectual influence runs the other way. Thomas is the consistently clear and purposeful theorist that history will remember as an intellectual pioneer; Scalia the less clear-minded colleague who is gradually following in Thomas’ tracks.
5. Until very recently the constitutional vision I was taught in my teens remained, as they say, hegemonic. The enlarged role of the commerce clause was uncontested and the two amendments dangled with the other dead constitutional provisions — letters of marque and reprisal, no bills of attainder, the prohibition on quartering — in constitutional limbo.
6. ...the New Deal constitution was not as permanent or unalterable as it looked. Intellectually its foundations were shaky, and after two decades of a Clarence Thomas-led assault, the constitutional doctrines that permitted the rise of the powerful federal government could be close to collapse.
7. The next topic for Constitutional revisionism is the expansive reading of the commerce clause that the New Deal judges used to justify the Roosevelt administration’s ambitious economic programs. The Obamacare health reform depends on that kind of reading of the commerce clause; the penumbras must stretch pretty far for the Constitution to give Congress the right to require all Americans to buy private health insurance. And if the commerce clause can be stretched this far, one must ask whether there is anything that the Constitution blocks Congress from doing.
8. Without some rule of interpretation that the average person can understand and accept as legitimate, the Court gradually loses legitimacy in the public eye. The originalist interpretation, whatever objections can be made to it intellectually and historically, is politically compelling. It resonates with the American propensity for commonsense reasoning. To say that the Founders meant what they meant and that the first job of a judge is to be faithful to their intent is something that strikes many Americans as sensible, practical and fair.
9. But there is another view of this amendment. The Constitution of the United States confers specific, “enumerated” powers on the Congress, and many of the things that Congress does today are not listed among those enumerated powers.
10. This is pretty much a Tea Party wish list, and it is why the Tea Party movement is so strongly identified with originalist interpretations of the Constitution. Unleashing the Tenth Amendment would move the constitutional status quo back towards the early 1930s when the “Nine Old Men” struck down one New Deal law after another. For Toobin and most New Yorker readers, it is hard to imagine an idea that more radically and totally runs against everything they believe."
Read more: New Blue Nightmare: Clarence Thomas and the Amendment of Doom | Via Meadia
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