It’s the rare person who is truly content to be an outsider, ostracized by the in-crowd. In The Inner Ring, C. S. Lewis observes that “one of the most dominant elements” of the human experience is what he calls “the lure of the caucus” — and the accompanying “terror of being left outside.” He calls the desire to belong “one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action.” And he warns that “the passion for the Inner Ring is most skilful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”
Judges are, first and foremost, human beings — susceptible to the same temptations and psychoses that consume others. And perhaps more so. The Constitution entrusts federal judges with life tenure — a privilege that our Founders gave no one else (they didn’t envision our modern bureaucracy). So federal judges are freer than most to be true to their nature — whatever that may be. It turns out that this is a big problem for the judiciary. And Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) has just written a remarkable book, Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas, that assesses this problem perfectly.
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