Clarence Thomas Is Better Than His Critics

Clarence Thomas is, by far, our most abused Supreme Court justice.

His confirmation hearings in 1991 were, as he memorably put it, a high-tech lynching. Once on the Court, he was allegedly incapable of thinking for himself and was Antonin Scalia’s “lawn jockey,” as Emerge magazine shamefully put it. He rarely participated in oral arguments, supposedly because, in the words of an attorney at the Georgetown Law Center, he “either does not care about the cases or can’t compete intellectually with his colleagues.”