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.”
I wonder how much these public statements cost whoever paid him to make them.
they aren’t paid per statement, they’re paid in batch. like, they’re given a … wtf do i know, some kind of compensation, then they make a whole lot of these statements, but it’s not like there’s a 1:1 mapping between reward and action. because if there was, somebody could point that out and say it’s bribery. like this, the reward is always “for something else”.