March 14, 2022
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is warning about the future of the nation’s highest court.
During an address in Utah sponsored by the Orrin G. Hatch Foundation, Thomas warned about the leftist cultural onslaught and warned that future generations will pay the price if the Supreme Court is overcome.
“My fear isn’t for me. But it is for your kids and your grandkids and the next generation. What are we going to leave them? Are we leaving them a mess or are we leaving them a country? Are we leaving them chaos or are we going to leave them a court?” he said.
Thomas tore into liberals pushing the idea of rigging the court’s structure to produce specific political outcomes, arguing it’s damaging even if it never gets beyond the talking stage.
“You can cavalierly talk about packing or stacking the court. You can cavalierly talk about doing this or doing that. At some point, the institution is going to be compromised,” he said.
A court that is structured to be a rubber stamp is “no court at all. That’s no rule of law at all. That’s just willfulness. I don’t see how that is conducive to having a free and civil society.”
“You can’t keep taking chips out of your institutions and not expect it to, at some point, be compromised. At some point, it can’t keep withstanding the efforts to undermine,” Thomas said.
“Let’s be honest,” he said about the effort to pack the court to make it permanently lean to the left. “This is really about the results they want. They haven’t been able to make the institutions do what they want, to give them what they want.”
“By doing this, you continue to chip away at the respect of the institutions that the next generation is going to need if they’re going to have civil society,” Thomas said.
“I’m afraid, particularly in this world of cancel culture attack, I don’t know where you’re going to learn to engage as we did when I grew up,” he said.
“If you don’t learn at that level in high school, in grammar school, in your neighborhood, or in civic organizations, then how do you have it when you’re making decisions in government, in the legislature, or in the courts?” he said.
Thomas noted that colleges have evolved into places stocked with “people who actually seem quite full of themselves. Now it’s sort of this animus develops if you disagree.”
“If you can’t do it on a university campus, where do you learn civility? Where do you learn to disagree without being disagreeable?” he said, according to the Deseret News.
“That’s really interesting. I didn’t know that there were these particular ideas that were off-limits — you get like white-only water fountains, now you get white-only ideas. The more things change the more they remain the same,” he said.
SOURCE: Conservative Brief