On Tuesday I interviewed Senator Ted Cruz on his new book, Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas. The full transcript and video of that interview follows:
Carrie Severino: Thank you so much for being here. This is a great book, and I really enjoyed getting a chance to read it and relive the story. The year I clerked on the Court was the year that My Grandfather’s Son, Justice Thomas’s own autobiography, came out, which obviously does a great job of telling that story. But you really took it further, as the name says, in a lot of ways. I couldn’t believe that there were stories that I had never heard before, and that you managed to get him, even though he’s often very reticent to talk about himself, to sit down for hours. What was it that inspired you to write this story? And what was it that you felt like this is the time that people need to hear about Justice Thomas?
Senator Ted Cruz: Well, I think Clarence Thomas is an extraordinary American hero. His life journey is unique on the Supreme Court. His legacy as a justice is unique on the Court. He is right now today the second longest serving justice in American history. In less than two years, Clarence Thomas will be the longest serving justice in the history of our country, and he’s had massive impacts on the Constitution and defending the Bill of Rights and on how judges think about the Constitution.
And so many people right now don’t know his personal story. You and I do, and his autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son, is a wonderful book. I highly recommend it to everyone. But Justice Thomas came from abject poverty in Georgia. He was born in Pin Point, Georgia. Grew up there. Grew up with a single mom where they lived in a tenement. They didn’t have indoor plumbing. They had an outhouse, and they used a chamber pot. Justice Thomas tells a story when he was a little boy of carrying the chamber pot down the stairs, where he trips and falls, and the chamber pot falls on top of him, and he’s drenched in stale urine. Now that is not a typical origin story for a Supreme Court justice. That’s not the world most justices come from.
He was born in 1948, just after World War II. He was born before Brown v. Board of Education. He grew up in segregated Georgia as a little boy. He saw Brown being decided. He saw racism firsthand, and he was raised by his grandparents when his mom could no longer care for him. His grandfather and his grandmother took over raising him. The reason his autobiography is entitled My Grandfather’s Son is because his grandfather, Myers Anderson, raised him, and he was a strong man. He loved Clarence Thomas, but he raised him with strict discipline. They worked, and Myers Anderson taught him commonsense self-reliance that became really the foundation of his entire life journey.
Initially, Clarence Thomas wanted to be a priest. We almost didn’t have Justice Thomas. We almost had Father Thomas, and he went to seminary, both seminary in high school and seminary in college. But he ultimately got disillusioned with the church, and he got disillusioned with the church because he felt the church was not doing nearly enough to stand up against racial discrimination and not doing nearly enough to fight for civil rights, and so he dropped out of seminary. And, dropping out of seminary caused a massive rupture with his grandfather, who didn’t want him to quit at anything, and quitting was a cardinal sin to his grandfather. Instead, Clarence Thomas went to Holy Cross and then Yale Law School. And when he was in school, he was a young left-wing radical. He would wear camo pants and army boots, and he had a poster of Malcolm X on the wall. And he was an angry young man, who among other things participated in a riot in Harvard Square where there was violence, where he could very well have found himself arrested and found his academic career ended.
With this book, what I try to do in this book is two things: tell his story so that today’s audience, so that today’s young people can know who this extraordinary leader is and how he came from such challenging circumstances to the absolute pinnacle of American law. But secondly, Justice Thomas’s autobiography ends when he gets confirmed to the Supreme Court. Now, Justice Thomas has been on the Court for over 30 years, and so in this book, I try to explain his jurisprudence in a way that is real, in a way that is accessible. You don’t have to be a lawyer to appreciate this book. You don’t have to be a constitutional law expert. This is written so a smart high school kid could read it and understand it. And I try to do very much what Justice Thomas does in his opinions, which is make it readable and understandable and make it make sense.
Severino: Yeah, that was one of the things I really love, because you’re right. We don’t hear about his jurisprudence from his own mouth, and now we have some of that perspective, but also, your ability to break that down and convey it for the average person. One of the cool angles that you brought to that, as someone who had clerked for Chief Justice Rehnquist, were a lot of stories about the chief justice and his relationship with Thomas. You know, him jokingly putting him on technology or security committees, and then some really touching moments where he gave him a poem to encourage him during a tough time that Thomas was having. Talk a little bit about the relationship between those two really great jurists.
Cruz: Well, Chief Justice Rehnquist was an extraordinary man, an extraordinary Chief Justice, one of the three greatest chief justices ever to serve on the Court, and he was really a friend and a mentor to Clarence Thomas. When I clerked for Chief Justice Rehnquist, he was at the tail end of his career, and he was, he was extraordinary. Thomas came on the Court as a young man, 42 years old when he was nominated, and many of the justices he was serving with were old enough to be his parents.
And Rehnquist was brilliant. He was conservative. He was very down to earth, and he took a real liking to this young firebrand justice. You know, William Rehnquist, when he was first put on the Court by Richard Nixon in 1972, Rehnquist earned a nickname of the “Lone Ranger” because he dissented alone over and over and over again. He was a conservative on a very liberal Court, and he was perfectly fine with an 8–1 dissent, laying out this doesn’t make any sense.
When George Herbert Walker Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, I think the chief saw some of that same groundedness, knowing what he believed, and the chief spent a lot of time encouraging Justice Thomas. Now it’s interesting, Justice Thomas, 30-plus years on the Court, you know he’s the senior justice now. But Rehnquist played a real role, just encouraging him, bucking him up, and he also relied on him a great deal.
You know, one story you know well that every employee of the Court, every janitor, every electrician, every person that works in the lunchroom, they all adore Justice Thomas. He knows their names. He knows their kids’ names. He is someone who—he has this laugh, this deep, deep belly laugh. It’s almost like Santa Claus. It’s “ho, ho, ho, ho” and it’s who he is. Many of the justices like to go to Europe. They go to Vienna. They go teach . . . they go to opera. One story that I recount in the book is Justice Scalia and Justice Ginsburg both loved the opera, and Scalia kept inviting Thomas to go to the opera, and Thomas said, “I don’t want to go.”
And Scalia said, “Well, why not? Don’t you like opera?”
And Thomas said, “Nino, I like opera just fine. I don’t like the people who like opera.”
Severino: Present company excluded, right?
Cruz: And as you know, Justice Thomas’s ideal vacation, which he takes every summer, is he has a big RV, a big motor coach, and he just drives across the country. And he’ll park in Walmart parking lots or Buc-ee’s parking lots, and pull out a long lawn chair, and he and Ginni will just sit there and hang out with regular folks. And that is who he is, and so what I wanted this book to do was connect the personal journey, and in particular the wisdom from his grandfather. One of the things his grandfather used to say to him is, “Boy, if it don’t make no damn sense, it don’t make no damn sense.” I think there is a commonsense wisdom that flows through Clarence Thomas’s jurisprudence. He doesn’t use highfalutin prose. He’s not composing something for the ages. He’s composing something for the American people that they can read and say, “This is what my Constitution is about. This is what my country’s about.”
Severino: You talk about his relationship with Justice Scalia, and that was one of the other interesting things that you brought out. We think of them, for so long, they were the two conservatives on the Court for 10 years, where they might join each other, but they were really in the minority. And of course, now Justice Thomas is leading a conservative originalist Court, which is amazing. But he and Scalia weren’t always on exactly the same page. You talk about how Scalia sometimes would criticize him for “tilting at windmills” with a Don Quixote reference there. And Justice Thomas said, “Well, you know, windmills are dangerous.” Maybe partly joking, but you know, I think sometimes he had this vision. Talk a little bit about how even within those two men who worked together so much, and maybe now on the Court as well, there wasn’t just one view of how we look—at how originalists look at the Constitution, because I think that that probably is true on the Court today as well.
Cruz: Well, look in your and my lifetimes, there have been four extraordinary giants who served on the Court: Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Sam Alito, and William Rehnquist. And I think those four stand head and shoulders above every other justice who served in terms of fidelity to law, in terms of principle, in terms of courage, in terms of legacy. Justice Scalia was brilliant. He radiated brilliance, but he also, as you pointed out, if precedent was settled law and he didn’t think it was terribly important, even if he thought the precedent was wrong, Justice Scalia was content often to leave precedent in place.
Part of the reason I titled the book Going Further is there has never been a justice on the Court who is more willing to go further, to go back to the original Constitution, to go back to the original understanding of the Constitution, and if a precedent is wrong, overrule it.
So I did nine and a half hours of one-on-one interviews with Justice Thomas as part of writing this book, and he very generously just sat with me in his chambers and answered questions, and I tried to get him to reflect on his jurisprudence and the legacy of it. And he’s very resistant to anything that would be self-aggrandizing or to analyzing it. You know what he says is that when he’s writing an opinion, he thinks of it like building a house. That you start with a firm foundation, and the foundation needs to be strong and it needs to be level, and then you build the walls and the walls need to be straight and the corners need to be square. And he’s very methodical about it. If a particular provision of the Constitution’s at issue, he goes and looks and all right, what do the words say? What do they mean? What did the Americans who adopted the Constitution or who adopted this amendment, what did they understand those words to mean? Every year, he does deeply historical opinions that are incredible works of scholarship, going back and analyzing.
But for example, let’s take a case: Kelo v. City of New London, Connecticut. So Kelo was a case, as you know, where the City of New London, Connecticut, condemned the home of an elderly woman, Susette Kelo. And they condemned it not to build a road or a street or a school, but they condemned it in order to build a parking lot for Pfizer, the giant pharmaceutical company that wanted to open an office next to there. And the case turned on whether government could condemn property for private use, not for public use. The Fifth Amendment takings clause allows the taking of private property, but only for public use. And those are the words in the Constitution are “public use.” Over the decades, the Court had interpreted public use to be public purpose. Now, purpose is a very different thing, and so Justice Thomas, in his dissent, went back and said, “Look, use means something.” It means you can permissibly condemn someone’s home or their property if you’re building a street. If you’re building a street that’s public use. The public is going down it. The government builds it. That’s public use. If you’re building a school, if you’re building a courthouse, that’s public use. Public purpose is a much more amorphous standard. It’s whatever some politician thinks might be useful.
And in this case, there was nothing wrong with Ms. Kelo’s home. She was living in it. It was not blighted. It was not a risk to anyone. They just wanted to give it to someone bigger and richer and more powerful than she was. And Sandra Day O’Connor also dissented in that opinion, and she wrote in her dissent, it was 5–4 that Kelo lost, and they upheld the taking. John Paul Stevens wrote the majority opinion, and Sandra Day O’Connor said in their dissent, under the Court’s reasoning, government could condemn every Motel Six in order to build a Ritz Carlton. Now what is interesting is in that particular case, Justice Thomas’s view did not prevail. He was on the losing side of a 5–4. But I think that’s a case where he won by losing because the reasoning in his dissent was so powerful that state legislatures across the country, including in my home state of Texas, have adopted that, have required now that takings must be for public use. And the American sentiment, I think, is overwhelmingly with Justice Thomas.
I also believe, if the right vehicle presents itself, I think this Court would overturn the Kelo decision. I think the Kelo majority was wrong. And actually something I talk about in the book also, is part of my responsibility as a senator is that I interview prospective judges, people that want to be judges in Texas or on the Supreme Court. And one question that I often ask of a prospective judge: Is there a decision of the Supreme Court that you think was wrongly decided? And so it’s just kind of an open-ended, what do you think? And it gives you some window in terms of how someone thinks. And what I talk about in the book is, look, there are some who will say Roe v. Wade, which has obviously now been overturned in Dobbs. But after that, the single most frequent answer I get for someone that wants to be a judge in Texas is the Kelo decision being wrongly decided. And it’s interesting just how ubiquitous people have understood that.
You know, I relay the story, Carrie, that when Kelo came down, I was the Solicitor General of Texas at the time, and I was at a conference of state SGs. So we were all there together, and the other SGs were celebrating. They’re like, “This is great. This is a victory for government power.”
And I looked at them, and I said, “Well, look. Just because you can wear a jackboot, doesn’t mean you should. Just because the Court is saying the government can steal your house, none of us should celebrate that.” And I think Justice Thomas powerfully articulated that.
Severino: Yeah, and if you’re right, and the Court does take it up and overturn it, that would join a panoply of decisions that Thomas was really prescient in, where he might have a lone dissent or a concurrence, and then eventually the Court comes around. So, I hope Kelo is the next one on that list. We’ll see.
You alluded to your role as a senator in the judicial nominations process, and you talked a little bit in the book about how you remembered sitting in Senator Mitch McConnell’s office as the Kavanaugh confirmation was going on, and how you really saw a throughline from Justice Thomas’s own confirmation and the way he was so shamefully treated. And frankly, you know, President Biden, who we just think of as kind of a doting old grandfather at this point, doesn’t know where he is. But you don’t realize how really devious—and the way his behavior was during that process. So that’s an amazing story to hear. How is walking through that and then living through the Kavanaugh confirmation, how do these frame the way you look at judicial nominations now?
Cruz: Well, Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearing really changed how judicial confirmations proceeded, and it was the second. The Bork hearing had happened before that, and the Bork hearing was so ugly that it actually invented a new verb: to “bork” someone, to unfairly persecute and smear them, which now, sadly, that did happen to Robert Bork. And then the next big battle was Clarence Thomas. And it was Joe Biden who was the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he was outright dishonest with Clarence Thomas. And Justice Thomas shares a number of—like he would tell him one thing and then proceed to just blindside him at the hearing and be dishonest. And if you look at what happened . . . so the Clarence Thomas hearings were over, and then they leaked the allegations from Anita Hill, the allegations of sexual harassment. And they were lurid, and it was leaked to the press after the hearing was done. And what ended up happening is they reconvened and they allowed Anita Hill to testify and they allowed Clarence Thomas to testify.
And the playbook of having allegations, waiting till the hearing is over, leaking it to the press, using it to smear the nominee, that is exactly word for word the playbook that the Democrats followed with Brett Kavanaugh down to a T. And so the meeting that you reference, that I talk about, is all the Senate Republicans when Brett Kavanaugh was up when Dr. Blasey Ford’s allegations had been leaked. And mind you, the Senate Democrats had those allegations for weeks beforehand and did nothing with them. We sat there and talked about what to do, and some of my colleagues were saying, “Well, let’s not do anything. Let’s just vote. Let’s go forward. Let’s ignore these allegations.”
And what I said to my colleagues, I said, “Listen, that’s not going to work. That is going to be untenable.” And I said, “The clearest analogy is the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing, which is the American people looked Anita Hill in the eyes, and they looked Clarence Thomas in the eyes, and the polling at the time shows two-thirds of the American people believed Clarence Thomas and disbelieved the allegations that Anita Hill presented.” That’s why Clarence Thomas got confirmed—because the American people made a judgment, that guy’s telling the truth.
And I said, listen, if Brett Kavanaugh’s going to get confirmed, and Brett’s a friend of mine, I want him to be confirmed. He’s got to do the same thing. The American people have to hear Dr. Blasey Ford’s accusations, and then they need to hear his response and make a judgment. And I got to say, a lot of times Republicans have a really bad habit of agonizing and not doing anything and twitching in the wind and getting pounded and pounded and pounded for weeks and then ultimately doing what they should have done anyway. Thankfully, we didn’t do that. We just went ahead with scheduling the hearing and just like with Clarence Thomas, more Americans believed Brett Kavanaugh. That was a big, big part of the reason why he got confirmed as well.
Severino: Yeah, well, thank you for your leadership on that, and thank you for helping bring Justice Thomas’s own story more to light here. Just to conclude, is there any one story that you want to make sure people hear that really shows the real man behind the caricature that most people are familiar with? You know him so well.
Cruz: So one of my favorite stories that he told me is when he was on the Court, one of the people he served with was Stephen Breyer. Stephen Breyer, quite liberal, but a delightful man, brilliant and charming, and delightful. And Justice Breyer has a vacation home down in Nevis, the Caribbean island. And he had been down there, and a guy with a machete had come up to him at his home and robbed him. And so Justice Breyer was back at the Court, he was talking to several other justices, and he was telling them that story. And Justice Thomas walks in, and Breyer goes, “Clarence, what would you do?” He said, “Clarence, what would you do if you were sitting on your porch playing bridge with your wife, and a man with a machete came up to rob you?”
And Thomas pauses for a second and says, “Well, I don’t play bridge.”
And Breyer, kind of frustrated, tries again and says, “Okay, Clarence, let’s say you were on your porch playing poker, and the man with the machete came up. What would you do then?”
And again, Thomas goes, “I don’t play poker.”
And so Breyer sighs, and he goes, “All right, Clarence, what would you be doing on your porch?”
And Thomas said, “I’d be cleaning my guns, and I’d ask the guy, does he want that machete with ketchup or without?”
You know that captures who he is, and also, look, Clarence Thomas is not someone who will go out of his way to pick a fight, but if you come after him, he will defend himself, and he will defend the Constitution. And so he is cleaning his guns on the porch of the Court, defending the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and it is a legacy of courage, of principle that is just extraordinary.
One final story I’ll tell. So, Thomas and Alito were classmates at Yale Law School, but they didn’t know each other. And when Alito gets confirmed to the Court, Justice Thomas said, “Sam, how come we weren’t friends in law school?”
And Alito looks at him and goes, “Clarence, you were scary.”
And Thomas tells this story and lets out this big belly laugh. I mean, just doubled over at the idea that he was scary. But then he said, “Well, I don’t know if I was scary, but I didn’t suffer fools lightly.” And he is extraordinary in that regard.
I will say I wrote this book because I think in this time of division and anger, young people need role models. They need heroes. They need people to emulate, and I think it would be very difficult to do better than to read and learn Justice Thomas’s path. I would just encourage folks go buy the book, buy it for your kids or your grandkids, buy it for your relatives because the reason I wrote this book is it was a labor of love. His story needs to be known, and it needs to be told because he really is an American hero.
Severino: That’s wonderful. Well, thank you so much, and thanks for your time. I think that’s a great conclusion to this wonderful opportunity to talk about Justice Thomas’s legacy. Thank you.
Cruz: Thank you, Carrie.
