When Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he found
with dismay that it was interpreting a very different Constitution
from the one the framers had written-the one that had established a
federal government manned by the people's own elected
representatives, charged with protecting citizens' inborn rights
while leaving them free to work out their individual happiness
themselves, in their families, communities, and states. He found
that his predecessors on the Court were complicit in the first step
of this transformation, when in the 1870s they defanged the Civil
War amendments intended to give full citizenship to his fellow
black Americans. In the next generation, Woodrow Wilson, dismissing
the framers and their work as obsolete, set out to replace laws
made by the people's representatives with rules made by highly
educated, modern, supposedly nonpartisan "experts," an idea
Franklin Roosevelt supersized in the New Deal agencies that he
acknowledged had no constitutional warrant. Then, under Chief
Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s, the Nine set about
realizing Wilson's dream of a Supreme Court sitting as a permanent
constitutional convention, conjuring up laws out of smoke and
mirrors and justifying them as expressions of the spirit of the
age. But Thomas, who joined the Court after eight years running one
of the myriad administrative agencies that the Great Society had
piled on top of FDR's batch, had deep misgivings about the new
governmental order. He shared the framers' vision of free,
self-governing citizens forging their own fate. And from his own
experience growing up in segregated Savannah, flirting with and
rejecting black radicalism at college, and running an agency that
supposedly advanced equality, he doubted that unelected experts and
justices really did understand the moral arc of the universe better
than the people themselves, or that the rules and rulings they
issued made lives better rather than worse. So in the hundreds of
opinions he has written in more than a quarter century on the
Court-the most important of them explained in these pages in clear,
non-lawyerly language-he has questioned the constitutional
underpinnings of the new order and tried to restore the limited,
self-governing original one, as more legitimate, more just, and
more free than the one that grew up in its stead. The Court now
seems set to move down the trail he blazed. A free, self-governing
nation needs independent-minded, self-reliant citizens, and
Thomas's biography, vividly recounted here, produced just the kind
of character that the founders assumed would always mark Americans.
America's future depends on the power of its culture and
institutions to form ever more citizens of this stamp.
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