Justice Thomas Declares Progressivism Incompatible With the Principles of 1776 — Could It Be His Farewell to Supreme Court?

Justice Clarence Thomas’s declaration that “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government” amounts to a cri de coeur for the high court’s senior justice ahead of America’s semiquincentennial — and an extraordinary glimpse into his worldview. This J’accuse moment for Justice Thomas comes as President Trump told Fox News on Wednesday that he is prepared to nominate new justices to the court in the event of any vacancies. He said the number of spots to fill could be “could be two, could be three, could be one.” Retirement speculation ahead of November’s midterm elections has fixated on the high court’s two conservative stalwarts, Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito. They are the oldest members of the Nine. Mr. Trump mused that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s failure to retire when President Obama was in the White House “really hurt herself within the Democrat Party.” The president concluded that Justice Alito “is one of the great justices of all time” but that “It’d be nice to say, now I have somebody for 40 years.” Mr. Trump appointed three justices during his first term. Justice Thomas’s remarks were made on Wednesday at the University of Texas at Austin Law School and were televised on CSPAN. Justice Thomas decried the “cynicism, rejection, hostility and animus” that many Americans feel toward their country. “Intellectuals,” Justice Thomas argues, have ensured that the values of 1776 have “fallen out of favor” among Americans. The justice contends that progressivism “holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from the government. It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a Constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.” Justice Thomas argues that “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao all were intertwined with the rise of progressivism.”The justice laments that “progressivism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life. It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever.” It is rare for sitting justices — or retired ones, for that matter — to speak so expansively about their judicial philosophies outside of the four corners of opinions and dissents. The justice traces the incompatibility between progressivism and this nation’s founding principles to the reality that “Progressivism was not native to America. President Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it from Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, whose state-centric society they admired.” Bismarck is credited with forging a unified Germany in 1871 by centralizing authority in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. Wilson, Justice Thomas relates, called Bismarck’s approach “a foreign science, speaking very little of the language of English or American principle,” which “offers none but what are to our minds alien ideas.” Wilson, the justice explains, imported a Bismarckian affinity for the state Über alles to “undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident.”Justice Thomas reckons that the “century of progressivism did not go well” and that “you will not be surprised to learn that the progressives had a great deal of contempt for us, the American people.” He laments that “it was a terrible mistake to adopt Progressivism’s rejection of the Declaration’s vision of universal, inalienable natural rights.”Justice Thomas ascribes America’s superiority to Europe — and he cites no less an authority than Alexis de Tocqueville for this proposition — “to its conscious decision to reject central planning and administrative rule root and branch. Progressivism, in other words, is retrogressive.” He quotes President Coolidge, who said at America’s sesquicentennial that “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final.”Justice Thomas’s comments came as the Supreme Court released a statement on behalf of Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She expressed regret for comments she made earlier this month about Justice Brett Kavanaugh, where she ascribed a difference of judicial opinion in respect of his being “a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”Justice Sotomayor’s statement declared that “at a recent appearance at the University of Kansas School of Law, I referred to a disagreement with one of my colleagues in a prior case, but I made remarks that were inappropriate. I regret my hurtful comments. I have apologized to my colleague.”

Justice Thomas Declares Progressivism Incompatible With the Principles of 1776 — Could It Be His Farewell to Supreme Court?

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