This blog has frequently looked at the the manner in which Justice Clarence Thomas (and Justice Scalia) disregards the canons of judicial conduct that applies to federal judges and the mandates to avoid circumstances that will raise questions as to a judge or justices impartiality. Between his wife's political activities, his "lapses in memory" about the six figure income his wife has generated, and his attendance at scurrilously partisan events, Thomas is a train wreck who, if he were a typical federal judge, would be removed from the bench. And that doesn't even get into Thomas' idiocy on the Supreme Court and his seeming intellectual obtuseness. A piece in Think Progress looks at the five worse justices in America's history and, not surprisingly, Thomas makes the list. Here are some highlights:
Today is the official release date for my book, Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comforted and Afflicting the Afflicted. As you might guess from the title, it is not particularly complimentary of the Supreme Court as an institution. As the book’s jacket explains, “the justices of the Supreme Court have shaped a nation where children toiled in coal mines, where Americans could be forced into camps because of their race, and where a woman could be sterilized against her will by state law. The Court was the midwife of Jim Crow, the right hand of union busters, and the dead hand of the Confederacy. Nor is the modern Court a vast improvement, with its incursions on voting rights and its willingness to place elections for sale.”
Even amidst this dark history, certain justices stand out as particularly mean-spirited, ideological or unconcerned about their duty to follow the text of the Constitution. Based on my review of over 150 years of Supreme Court history in Injustices, here are the five jurists who stand out as the worst justices in American history:
1) Justice Stephen Johnson Field. As a sitting justice in 1880, Justice Stephen Johnson Field launched a dark horse bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Claiming that “the chilling shadow of the empire” was descending upon the United States, Field fronted an anti-government campaign that would make all but the most strident modern day tea partiers blush. . . . . . Justice Field never became president, but he worked as a justice to implement the very same policies his campaign promised that he would support if elected to the White House. Field joined the Court’s pro-segregation decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, and he authored another opinion permitting former Confederate officials to practice law in federal court. . . . The cause of Field’s life, however, was neutering the government’s power to enact economic and business regulation.
2) Chief Justice Roger Taney. Taney authored what is widely viewed as the worst single decision in the Supreme Court’s history, the pro-slavery decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Though Taney was far more moderate on the issue of slavery at a young man — he once referred to slavery as a “blot on our national character” and he emancipated his own slaves — his views hardened in his old age. In 1857, the same year as Dred Scott, Taney labeled the abolitionist movement “northern aggression.” . . . . Dred Scott was an abominable decision, rooted in the notion that men and women of African descent “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order” who are “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
3) Justice James Clark McReynolds. McReynolds was, in Time magazine’s words, “a savagely sarcastic, incredibly reactionary Puritan anti-Semite.” McReynolds was lazy. He often would not even open the briefs lawyers filed to prepare him to hear a case until hours before the case was argued, and he frequently spent just a few hours crafting opinions that would govern all other courts in the country. McReynolds was nasty. He labeled President Franklin Roosevelt “that crippled son-of-a-bitch . . . in the White House,”. . . . . above all, Justice McReynolds was a bigot. He refused to speak to Justice Louis Brandeis for Brandeis’s first three years on the Court because Brandeis was Jewish, and he forbade contact between his staff and the Jewish Justices Brandeis and Benjamin Cardozo. . . . . McReynolds was, sadly, one of many justices who joined opinions striking down child labor laws or a minimum wage
4) Chief Justice Melville Fuller. As a delegate to Illinois’s constitutional convention in 1862, he voted to prohibit black men and women from settling in the state or casting a ballot in its elections. As a member of the state legislature, he labeled the Emancipation Proclamation “unconstitutional, contrary to the rules of civilized warfare,” and “calculated to bring shame, disgrace and eternal infamy” upon the nation. He also backed a constitutional amendment preventing congressional interference with slavery. . . . Chief Justice Fuller presided over the Court’s infamous decision in Lochner v. New York, which struck down a New York law prohibiting bakeries from overworking their workers. Lawyers and legal historians widely view this decision as symbolic of the entire era in the early twentieth century when Field’s values dominated the Supreme Court — indeed, this age is commonly referred to as the Lochner Era.
5) Justice Clarence Thomas. Justice Clarence Thomas is the only current member of the Supreme Court who has explicitly embraced the reasoning of Lochner Era decisions striking down nationwide child labor laws and making similar attacks on federal power. Indeed, under the logic Thomas first laid out in a concurring opinion in United States v. Lopez, the federal minimum wage, overtime rules, anti-discrimination protections for workers, and even the national ban on whites-only lunch counters are all unconstitutional.
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