As a lawyer (I may be retired but I have been keeping my right to practice current) I found this satiric piece to be something worth passing on, as it perfectly illustrates the corruption and hypocrisy of our current Supreme Court, in this case that of Clarence Thomas. Yes, the piece is satire, but the facts are true. It concerns the Thomas dissent in the recent case in which a bare majority of the Supreme Court said that the constitution says what it says: someone born in the United States is a citizen of the United States.
The piece is supposedly written by a former clerk of Thomas who quit after Thomas’s dissent. He just couldn’t figure out how Thomas’s dissent was in any way consistent with something Thomas had written a mere three years ago, in a case in which he had helped destroy affirmative action:
I looked at page six of Thomas’ Students for Fair Admissions concurrence. It said that Trumbull’s revision “evidenced an intent to broaden the provision, extending beyond recently freed blacks and incorporating a more general view of equality for all Americans.”
Those were his exact words in 2023. (I thought we weren’t supposed to call them “blacks” anymore but I wasn’t about to bring that up.)
But Thomas’ draft dissent in Trump v. Barbara said the citizenship guarantee “was enacted for freed slaves such as Dred Scott”—the enslaved Black man who sued for his freedom and whom the Supreme Court said could never be a citizen. It was enacted for people with “no other homeland,” according to the draft dissent, not for children born here to “birth tourists” and other parents Thomas deemed insufficiently rooted in the United States.
I tried to hold both sentences in my head at once. “Extending beyond recently freed blacks.” “Enacted for freed slaves such as Dred Scott.” I got a splitting headache.
The entire piece is well worth a read.
When I was young, we had a Supreme Court that actually issued decisions both consistent with the constitution and motivated by an underlying desire to make this a better country for all its citizens, not just the billionaires. At the time, I would have rejected any notion that we’d go back to the days of a Supreme Court much like that led by Roger Taney. I didn’t quite realize at the time that the court of the 50s and 60s, was an outlier.
I’ve often wondered about what is now known as the Gödel Loophole. Gödel, a German logician who, along with Einstein found refuge in both the United States and Princeton University, while waiting to become a citizen, told Einstein and others that there was a flaw in the constitution that “would permit the United States’ republican structure to be legally turned into a dictatorship”. His friends advised him to keep his mouth shut about it, so no one at the present time knows exactly what he perceived as a flaw, but lately I’ve wondered if it was the possibility of a corrupt Supreme Court doing what our current court is doing: legalizing presidential corruption and confirming dictatorial actions which anyone with the ability to read the constitution can see are unconstitutional.