Justice Clarence Thomas is finding increasingly creative ways to justify reshaping long-standing laws.
During a rare appearance at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, the George H.W. Bush–appointed justice said the Supreme Court should take a more critical approach to settled precedent, arguing that decided cases are not “the gospel,” ABC News reported.
Thomas, 77, compared his Supreme Court colleagues to passengers on a train, and said: ”We never go to the front to see who’s driving the train, where is it going. And you could go up there in the engine room, find it’s an orangutan driving the train, but you want to follow that just because it’s a train.”
He reasoned that some precedents were simply “something somebody dreamt up and others went along with.”
“One of the good ones.”
If everything falls to pure fascism, I hope I at least get to see the leopards eat Clarence’s face.
I will hope, but it seems a little unlikely. Somehow, the most craven ones seem to escape justice most of the time. It’s the true believers who rush out to the front, people like Stephen Miller or Alina Habba, who tend to start to catch some strays as the shit hits the fan. The dude who’s sitting in the back quietly doing 100 times more damage seems to eventually get away on a boat to the Seychelles or something. He might get impeached in 5 years, or he might live out his days secure in the knowledge that he can drive his fucking RV around and do whatever he wants.