The sage who really ought to be Chief Justice of the United States is looking more and more like Clarence Thomas. That’s our thought as the Supreme Court concludes its term with what we reckon to be the year’s most important case. That’s the one on Congress’s subpoenas for President Trump’s tax records. Justice Thomas filed a brilliant dissent that, we predict, will come to be seen as more important than the majority opinion.

It wasn’t that the majority opinion was so all-fired bad. All nine of the justices could see that the House was way out of line in issuing multiple, wide-ranging subpoenas for the tax and other financial records of the president and his family. Yet instead of just halting the abuse, Chief Justice Roberts proceeded to devise a four-part test for the lower courts considering such subpoenas. The Roberts route guarantees yet more litigation.

Justice Thomas, by contrast, hauled off and filed a blunt dissent. “I would hold that Congress has no power to issue a legislative subpoena for private, nonofficial documents — whether they belong to the President or not,” Justice Thomas wrote. “Congress may be able to obtain these documents as part of an investigation of the President, but to do so, it must proceed under the impeachment power.”

In his dissent, Justice Thomas goes all the way back to the distinction between an all-powerful parliament, which America rejected, and the American concept of a Congress that is, in the main, limited to carefully enumerated powers. He cites one of the powers that parliaments used but that we pointedly denied to our Congress — the power to pass bills of attainder, meaning legislation designed to punish named individuals.

“Congress’ legislative powers,” Justice Thomas concludes, “do not authorize it to engage in a nationwide inquisition with whatever resources it chooses to appropriate for itself.” That inquisition has been, in our view, the biggest abuse of government power during Mr. Trump’s first three years in office. And Justice Thomas confronts it unambiguously, the way, in our view, a Chief Justice of the United States ought to.

Justice Thomas — and even, despite its wishy-washiness, the court majority — vindicates the one appeals judge who, as the case was working its way to the Supreme Court, warned that Congress, in its subpoenas of Mr. Trump, was flirting with the power of attainder. We wrote about that judge, Neomi Rao, who rides circuit in the Columbia District. Our editorial was headlined “A Star Is Born in the Battle Over Trump’s Tax Returns.”

Judge Rao, as far as we can tell, was the first appellate judge to warn that Congress was trying to go after President Trump personally. And to do so under the legislative, rather than the impeachment, power. In the related Deutsche Bank case in the Second Circuit, Judge Debra Livingston also raised a red flag against Congress, whose legislative subpoenas for the President’s records she found “deeply troubling.”

Which brings us back to our reverie about Clarence Thomas as Chief Justice of the United States. Mazars, as the case is known, is but the latest where Justice Thomas seems to have the clearest head and stoutest backbone on the court. Justice Thomas is the type to worry less about how the legitimacy of the court is perceived and more about retrieving the lost Constitution to end, rather than prolong, the cases and controversies roiling our land.

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Image: Photo of Justice Thomas from the Supreme Court, via Wikipedia.