New Cruz Book Describes Justice Thomas’s Evolution From ‘Angry Leftwing Radical’ to ‘One of the Most Important Conservative’ Voices on the Bench

Justice Thomas’s evolution from an “angry leftwing liberal” to “one of the most important conservative leaders to have ever lived” is an “astonishing” story of an “American hero” who has been mistreated by detractors throughout his 35 years on the high court, Senator Ted Cruz said Sunday. Mr. Cruz describes his new book, “Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas” as the story of a man who was able to “purge his heart of anger and come to embrace the conservative principles that are today the bedrock of his jurisprudence.”In the book, Mr. Cruz describes how Justice Thomas was born to a poor family and raised by his grandfather in Georgia, where they experienced racism in the 1950s and 1960s. A young Justice Thomas had first considered entering the priesthood before becoming disillusioned by the church’s position on affirmative action. Instead, he attended Holy Cross University and Yale Law School. Despite the future justice graduating at the top of his class, Mr. Cruz, who sat with the justice for nine and a half hours of interviews that informed the book, recounts that Justice Thomas could not get a job in a law firm because every firm assumed that Yale accepted him and gave him high marks because of affirmative action, not his own merit. “They didn’t believe he had the learning,” Mr. Cruz explained on Sunday during an appearance on “Meet the Press.” “He’s experienced firsthand the negative consequences of discriminating based on race.”Mr. Cruz added that Justice Thomas still faces discrimination based on race — from the political left — because even though Justice Antonin Scalia was as conservative as Justice Thomas, Scalia did not face the same “scorn, the contempt, the derision.” Justice Scalia died in 2016“The left, I think, has a real bigotry. They look at Clarence Thomas and they say, ‘How dare a black man believe what he believes?’ And Clarence Thomas is someone who is not going to be told what to believe,” he said. That reaction was very close to one offered by Congressman James Clyburn on Sunday, who barely stopped shy of calling the justice a race traitor while declaring his support for expanding the high court to 13 members. Speaking after the Texas Republican, Mr. Clyburn said he is sorry that he supported the justice’s 1991 nomination to the court. “You know, I have made mistakes in my life, and that’s one that I made. And I will own up to that mistake,” the 17-term South Carolina Democrat said of his vote. Though the two men came up together professionally and personally, Justice-to-be Thomas was then chairman of the United States Equal Opportunity Commission when Mr. Clyburn ran the state agency in South Carolina. Mr. Clyburn said Mr. Thomas has ignored his own background and experiences on the bench. “I felt sure that he would be there upholding those precedents set down in 1954 in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. I thought that he would follow those court decisions that upheld the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act. I had no idea that Clarence Thomas would rebel the way he has against his own background and experiences,” he said. While offering his support for expanding the court to “a baker’s dozen,” Mr. Clyburn also accused the current court of taking the country backward and ruling in the vein of Chief Justice Roger Taney, who served on the court before and during the Civil War.Chief Justice Taney infamously wrote the majority opinion in the discredited 1957 Dred Scott v. Sandford ruling, which held that no freed slave could become an American citizen. The decision effectively struck down the Missouri Compromise, which sought to end expansion of slavery into new states and territories. The ruling was overturned with the passage of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, which respectively freed the slaves in 1864 and granted equal protection under the law in 1868.Mr. Clyburn said that he had hoped those amendments would be respected by the current court, but instead its rulings are akin to Chief Justice Taney’s beliefs that “no black man has any rights that the white man must respect.”“I had hoped that Clarence Thomas would follow the mordant underpinnings of that constitution of ours, but he has not done so. In fact, he’s decided to go all the way from an angry leftist to a very angry rightist,” Mr. Clyburn said.Mr. Cruz said that his book offers a description of many rulings by Justice Thomas, who ultimately was a deciding vote in declaring affirmative action unconstitutional. He said readers don’t have to be lawyers to understand his view. “Clarence Thomas believes, and I think he’s right in this, that the Constitution does not allow discriminating based on race, that it is pernicious,” Mr. Cruz said.

New Cruz Book Describes Justice Thomas’s Evolution From ‘Angry Leftwing Radical’ to ‘One of the Most Important Conservative’ Voices on the Bench

New Cruz Book Describes Justice Thomas’s Evolution From ‘Angry Leftwing Radical’ to ‘One of the Most Important Conservative’ Voices on the Bench

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