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Justice Thomas & Democratic Double Standards

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Earlier this week, Michael Barone was one of a number of right-of-center political pundits to comment on “Jeffrey Toobin’s lengthy article on Supreme Court jurisprudence”, focusing on Justice Clarence Thomas and the judicial challenge to Obamacare.

It is possible, Barone writes

. . . to read Toobin’s article as a partisan hit job, echoing the demands of 74 Democratic House members that Justice Thomas recuse himself from sitting on a case challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare because of his wife’s involvement in the Tea Party movement.

Never mind that this is a standard neither Toobin nor the Democrats apply to other public officials with spouses active in public affairs — and that they’re not asking Justice Elena Kagan to recuse herself because of her work in the Justice Department on the issue.

Nor did they ask for their colleague Barney Frank to recuse himself from the House Financial Services Committee (under its current or previous names) despite the fact that the Massachusetts Democrat helped his spouse secure a job at  Fannie Mae, a Government Sponsored Enterprise this committee oversees.

Barone also points out that “despite his obvious distaste for Thomas’ views, [Toobin] takes [the justice] seriously as a judicial thinker and pathfinder”:

In addition, as Toobin accurately reports, Thomas is the strongest originalist on the court, the justice who most consistently seeks to apply the provisions of the Constitution as they were originally understood. . . .

Toobin’s article represents the end of the fashionable left’s attempt to portray Thomas as an intellectual lightweight.

Read the whole thing.  One wonders if some on the left failed to discern the intellectual caliber of the jurist’s mind because of the color of his skin.

Comments

  1. Kagan should have to recuse herself from any decision on Obamacare.

    The Thomas brouhaha is a daring combo move to protect Obamacare from the SCOTUS defeat it deserves (and might still get). The combo is: Red Herring, Hail Mary, delegitimize and demonize.

    First they are trying to distract from the fact that Kagan really ought to recuse herself – that’s the Red Herring. Second, who knows, maybe it will work and they will actually get Thomas to take himself out – that’s the Hail Mary. Third, if Thomas doesn’t and if SCOTUS rules against Obamacare like it should, the Left will have pre-de-legitimized (so to speak) the SCOTUS decision, or so they hope. Finally, it fits with their general long-term strategy and goal of demonizing Thomas.

  2. The MSM is setting up to demonize Thomas specifically because they know Kagan is compromised; for their twisted veiw of balance, they are going after Thomas. They know ObamaCare will be overturned in the Supreme Court & they are trying to stop it by attacking Thomas.

  4. The left didn’t fail to discern Thomas’ intellect. What terrified them – and sent them into their nearly unprecidented vilification of him – was the thought of a conservative black on the Court. Escapees from the liberal/progressive plantation have to be hunted down and punished as an example to others.

  5. You got your field slave,

    and you got your house slave,

    and then you got your hardcore management slave.

    You got your plantation Democrat black sycophant,

    You got your intellectual Marxist Democrat plantation black sycophant,

    And you got your Congressional Black Caucus Democrat plantation psycho.