The Justice’s PeopleREVIEW: ‘The People’s Justice: Clarence Thomas and the Constitutional Stories that Define Him’ by Amul Thapar
Adam J. White
August 6, 2023From the start, critics of the Supreme Court have denounced it as the political tool of powerful elites. Especially its elite critics.
When the Senate Judiciary Committee convened in 1991 for hearings on Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination, for example, Democratic senator Ted Kennedy complained that the Court was taking an elitist turn. "Many of us are concerned about the direction the Supreme Court has taken in recent years," he said. "It has increasingly abandoned its role as the guardian of the powerless in our society."
Days later, another witness took the point further, attacking not just the Court but also the nominee. According to Professor Charles Lawrence, Thomas had striven "to serve those who are most powerful in this society, and he has served them well." The Stanford law professor argued that the Court needed a "voice for those who too often go unheard"—not, he insisted, Clarence Thomas.
But Thomas was uniquely well suited to hear the powerless. Born dirt poor in Pin Point, Georgia, and raised by a grandfather who taught him how to carry a hard life’s heavy burdens, Thomas later studied at Yale Law and served in high levels of government. He knew both power and poverty.
After Sen. Kennedy, Prof. Lawrence, and others failed to thwart his path to the Court, Chief Justice William Rehnquist gave Thomas the judicial oath: to "administer justice without respect to person, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich." As Thomas later recalled in his memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, the words left him "struggling to control my surging emotions … thinking as I did so of how Daddy and Aunt Tina had raised me to fulfill it."
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