Supreme Discomfort

“Justice Clarence Thomas is the Supreme Court’s most reclusive member [and] a prime candidate for a careful, fair-minded biography. In delivering it, Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher have done some quiet justice of their own.”—Washington Post There is no more powerful, detested, misunderstood African American in our public life than Clarence Thomas. Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas is a haunting portrait of an isolated and complex man, savagely reviled by much of the black community, not entirely comfortable in white society, internally wounded by his passage from a broken family and rural poverty in Georgia, to elite educational institutions, to the pinnacle of judicial power. His staunchly conservative positions on crime, abortion, and, especially, affirmative action have exposed him to charges of heartlessness and hypocrisy, in that he is himself the product of a broken home who manifestly benefited from racially conscious admissions policies. Supreme Discomfort is a superbly researched and reported work that features testimony from friends and foes alike who have never spoken in public about Thomas before—including a candid conversation with his fellow justice and ideological ally, Antonin Scalia. It offers a long-overdue window into a man who straddles two different worlds and is uneasy in both—and whose divided personality and conservative political philosophy will deeply influence American life for years to come.

Provocative, inspiring, and unflinchingly honest, My Grandfather's Son is the story of one of America's most remarkable and controversial leaders, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, told in his own words. Thomas speaks out, revealing the pieces of his life he holds dear, detailing the suffering and injustices he has overcome, including the polarizing Senate hearing involving a former aide, Anita Hill, and the depression and despair it created in his own life and the lives of those closest to him. In this candid and deeply moving memoir, a quintessential American tale of hardship and grit, Clarence Thomas recounts his astonishing journey for the first time.

Now a New York Times Best Seller and a National Book Award finalist. Charged with racial, sexual, and political overtones, the confirmation of Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court justice was one of the most divisive spectacles the country has ever seen. Anita Hill’s accusation of sexual harassment by Thomas, and the attacks on her that were part of his high-placed supporters’ rebuttal, both shocked the nation and split it into two camps. One believed Hill was lying, the other believed that the man who ultimately took his place on the Supreme Court had committed perjury. In this brilliant, often shocking book, Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, two of the nation’s top investigative journalists examine all aspects of this controversial case. They interview witnesses that the Judiciary Committee chose not to call, and present documents never before made public. They detail the personal and professional pasts of both Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill and lay bare a campaign of lobbying, public relations, and character assassination fueled by conservative power at its most desperate. A gripping high-stakes drama, Strange Justice is not only a definitive account of the Clarence Thomas nomination hearings, but is also a classic casebook of how the Washington game is played by those for whom winning is everything.

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas is a groundbreaking revisionist take on the Supreme Court justice everyone knows about but no one knows. Most people can tell you two things about Clarence Thomas: Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, and he almost never speaks from the bench. Here are some things they don’t know: Thomas is a black nationalist. In college he memorized the speeches of Malcolm X. He believes white people are incurably racist. In the first examination of its kind, Corey Robin – one of the foremost analysts of the right – delves deeply into both Thomas’s biography and his jurisprudence, masterfully reading his Supreme Court opinions against the backdrop of his autobiographical and political writings and speeches. The hidden source of Thomas’s conservative views, Robin shows, is a profound skepticism that racism can be overcome. Thomas is convinced that any government action on behalf of African-Americans will be tainted by racism; the most African-Americans can hope for is that white people will get out of their way. There’s a reason, Robin concludes, why liberals often complain that Thomas doesn’t speak but seldom pay attention when he does. Were they to listen, they’d hear a racial pessimism that often sounds similar to their own. Cutting across the ideological spectrum, this unacknowledged consensus about the impossibility of progress is key to understanding today’s political stalemate.

When Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he found with dismay that it was interpreting a very different Constitution from the one the framers had written—the one that had established a federal government manned by the people’s own elected representatives, charged with protecting citizens’ inborn rights while leaving them free to work out their individual happiness themselves, in their families, communities, and states. He found that his predecessors on the Court were complicit in the first step of this transformation, when in the 1870s they defanged the Civil War amendments intended to give full citizenship to his fellow black Americans. In the next generation, Woodrow Wilson, dismissing the framers and their work as obsolete, set out to replace laws made by the people’s representatives with rules made by highly educated, modern, supposedly nonpartisan “experts,” an idea Franklin Roosevelt supersized in the New Deal agencies that he acknowledged had no constitutional warrant. Then, under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s, the Nine set about realizing Wilson’s dream of a Supreme Court sitting as a permanent constitutional convention, conjuring up laws out of smoke and mirrors and justifying them as expressions of the spirit of the age. But Thomas, who joined the Court after eight years running one of the myriad administrative agencies that the Great Society had piled on top of FDR’s batch, had deep misgivings about the new governmental order. He shared the framers’ vision of free, self-governing citizens forging their own fate. And from his own experience growing up in segregated Savannah, flirting with and rejecting black radicalism at college, and running an agency that supposedly advanced equality, he doubted that unelected experts and justices really did understand the moral arc of the universe better than the people themselves, or that the rules and rulings they issued made lives better rather than worse. So in the hundreds of opinions he has written in more than a quarter century on the Court—the most important of them explained in these pages in clear, non-lawyerly language—he has questioned the constitutional underpinnings of the new order and tried to restore the limited, self-governing original one, as more legitimate, more just, and more free than the one that grew up in its stead. The Court now seems set to move down the trail he blazed. A free, self-governing nation needs independent-minded, self-reliant citizens, and Thomas’s biography, vividly recounted here, produced just the kind of character that the founders assumed would always mark Americans. America’s future depends on the power of its culture and institutions to form ever more citizens of this stamp.

Justices and Journalists examines whether justices are becoming more publicity-conscious and why that might be happening. The book discusses the motives of justices 'going public' and details their recent increased number of television and print interviews and amount of press coverage of their speeches. The book describes the interactions justices have with the journalists who cover them. These interactions typically are not discussed publicly by justices or journalists. The book explains why justices care about press and public relations, how they employ external strategies to affect press portrayals of themselves and their institution, and how and why journalists participate in that interaction. Drawing on the papers of Supreme Court justices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book examines these interactions over the history of the Court. It includes a content analysis of print and broadcast media coverage of Supreme Court justices covering a 40-year period from 1968 to 2007.

This book shadows the usage of 'Uncle Tom' to understand how social norms associated with the phrase were constructed and enforced.

WHEN LABELS FAIL: A PARADOXICAL VIEW OF THE SUPREME COURT As in recent actions of the Supreme Court concerning same sex marriage and the Affordable Care Act, don ́t be surprised when pundits and ideologues fail at predictions regarding pending decisions of the Court. This book explains why so many get it wrong so often. At root cause are erroneous preconceptions about the Court. "I ́m not big on labels" replied retiring Associate Justice John Paul Stevens during an interview concerning changing blocs on the Supreme Court. “I don’t use labels to describe what I do” is how Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor responded during her confirmation hearing when a senator sought to categorize her judicial philosophy. Simplistic labels for the justices have repeatedly misled Presidents, Senators, lawyers, and pundits with regard to the performance of justices on the Supreme Court. Despite best efforts to predict behavior of nominees for the Court, the justices defied political categorization, such as: • The Virginia lawyer who lost his states’ rights case before the Supreme Court, but went on to support Federalist Party causes as Chief Justice. • The ex-Federalist Party politician and Secretary of the Treasury who as Chief Justice strongly supported states’ rights. • The esteemed Massachusetts justice who outraged the progressive president who nominated him to the Court by voting to strike down key anti-trust legislation. • The co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union who shocked former colleagues by consistently voting to curtail civil liberties and civil rights in cases before the Court. • The staunch New Deal supporter who over his long tenure on the Court came to favor individual rights and liberties over governmental power. • The former Ku Klux Klan member who helped forge a unanimous Court ruling in the seminal decision against racial segregation. • Appointed by a liberal Democratic president, the justice who steadfastly supported law and order, the right to life, and other conservative causes. • An originalist whose conservative methodology frequently leads to liberal results. This book explores the origin of the separation of powers doctrine, how the Constitution created a judiciary designed to stand apart from the “political” branches of government, and how justices have asserted independence as a third branch of government from John Jay to John Roberts. For more information, go to: www.courtpolitics.weebly.com