Miami — Supreme Court judge Clarence Thomas He urged Americans to celebrate the 250th anniversary of independence not with fireworks or platitudes, but by standing up for their deeply held beliefs, with the comfort of knowing that the United States Constitution protects freedom of expression and serves as a common bedrock in a deeply divided society.
“We can disagree about all kinds of things, but we have to have something in common or we won’t have a country,” Thomas said at a judicial conference near Miami. “These documents, our founding documents, our founding history, whether we think they’re perfect or they shouldn’t be modified, or we may disagree about how far they go, but we can say that this is something we all cherish.”
Thomas’s comments came in response to an interview with one of his former Supreme Court staffers, Casden Mitchell, who was nominated by President Donald Trump this month to serve on the federal court in Dallas.
Thomas – who recently became The second longest serving justice On the history of the Supreme Court – looking back at his upbringing in the segregated South and his more than three decades on the Supreme Court.
But he gave no indication that he, at 77, is looking to retire anytime soon and give President Trump the opportunity to consolidate his influence on the Supreme Court and nominate his fourth justice, the most of any president in nearly a century.
“Justice Marshall said you take a job for life, and you do it for life,” he said, referring to Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court justice, whom Thomas replaced on the high court.
But he said his long tenure has given him a unique perspective on the cynicism that pervades much of society and contributes to Americans’ distrust of government.
He cited the example set by his grandfather, the son of a freed slave with barely any formal education, in describing his judicial philosophy in a limited form of government.
“One of the obstacles this society faces compared to many other societies where the government distributes rights is that we were taught from the cradle that we were equal in the eyes of God, and that was a given,” Thomas said. “If you look at Frederick Douglass, or Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln, they all speak in terms of these transcendent rights that are beyond the power of man to take them away even though man has the power to violate them.”