In the 32 years since #Justice#ClarenceThomas came through the fire of his confirmation hearings and onto the #SCOTUS, he has assembled an army of influential acolytes unlike any other — a network of like-minded former #clerks who have not only rallied to his defense but carried his idiosyncratic brand of #conservative#legal thinking out into the nation’s #law schools, top law firms, the #judiciary & the highest reaches of #government.
…The #court’s senior #justice, he had spent years on the losing side of cases, writing minority opinions grounded in his strict #originalist interpretations of the #Constitution. Now that fmr President #Trump had given the court a #conservative supermajority, Justice #ClarenceThomas was a guiding voice for a new #judicial mainstream.
He was playing a long game, & his fmr #clerks were among its most important players.
The Thomases did not respond to requests for comment, but in a 2008 interview, the #justice said, “I tell my #law clerks that we’re not writing current events — we’re writing for a much longer period,” adding that his opinions were based on “principles that are locked down & that will be here when the tides turn” in 50 yrs.
nearly ¾ of them appointed by #Trump to #federal#courts, where they have ruled on issues like #VotingRights & access to the #abortion pill. Roughly 10 more served in Trump’s admin; nearly a dozen made his #SCOTUS short lists. Fmr #ClarenceThomas clerks have argued, & won, several of the most momentous #SupremeCourt cases of recent yrs.
#SCOTUS clerks are… the sort of ambitious #lawyers likely to wield significant #influence in their post-clerk lives. What makes #Justice#ClarenceThomas’s #clerks so remarkable… is their success as loyal standard-bearers of his singular #ideology. …an examination of what the justice & his wife call #ThomasClerkWorld, based on interviews w/people in & around it & a review of private emails & the Thomases’ public stmnts, shows how meticulously the couple have cultivated the network over decades.
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