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Justice Thomas Defends Campaign Finance Ruling
Justice Clarence Thomas on Tuesday forcefully defended the Supreme Court’s recent campaign finance decision, and in so doing addressed President Obama’s falsehoods about it during last week’s SOTU.
He spoke to a group of students at a law school in Florida and fielded several questions about the ruling and the controversy surrounding President Obama’s criticism of the decision, and Justice Alito’s reaction.
“I found it fascinating that the people who were editorializing against it were The New York Times Company and The Washington Post Company,” Justice Thomas said. “These are corporations.”
The part of the McCain-Feingold law struck down in Citizens United contained an exemption for news reports, commentaries and editorials. But Justice Thomas said that reflected a legislative choice rather than a constitutional principle.
He added that the history of Congressional regulation of corporate involvement in politics had a dark side, pointing to the Tillman Act, which banned corporate contributions to federal candidates in 1907.
“Go back and read why Tillman introduced that legislation,” Justice Thomas said, referring to Senator Benjamin Tillman. “Tillman was from South Carolina, and as I hear the story he was concerned that the corporations, Republican corporations, were favorable toward blacks and he felt that there was a need to regulate them.”
It is thus a mistake, the justice said, to applaud the regulation of corporate speech as “some sort of beatific action.”
Justice Thomas said the First Amendment’s protections applied regardless of how people chose to assemble to participate in the political process.
“If 10 of you got together and decided to speak, just as a group, you’d say you have First Amendment rights to speak and the First Amendment right of association,” he said. “If you all then formed a partnership to speak, you’d say we still have that First Amendment right to speak and of association.”
“But what if you put yourself in a corporate form?” Justice Thomas asked, suggesting that the answer must be the same.
Asked about his attitude toward the two decisions overruled in Citizens United, he said, “If it’s wrong, the ultimate precedent is the Constitution.”
Justice Thomas went on to say he no longer attends State Of The Union addresses, because they’ve become too partisan. He said there’s a lot you don’t hear on TV and it’s very difficult for a judge to sit there unable to respond and listen to catcalls, heckling, and under-the-breath comments.
Justice Thomas has more intellect and integrity in his finger than the vast majority of the a-holes on Capital Hill — the president included.
President Obama showed breathtaking ignorance of the Constitution when he criticized the campaign finance ruling during his SOTU. The fact that he taught constitutional law for 10 years makes it all the more troubling.
If anything it shows the sorry state of our law schools. The Constitution as it’s written is no longer taught. Instead, leftist professors indoctrinate students with left-wing legal theories and phony case law.
-Chris Jones
Clarence Thomas Was More Experienced Than Obama
One of the most revealing things said during Saturday night’s Saddleback forum, was when Barack Obama was asked which Supreme Court justices he would not have nominated.
Obama wasted no time in naming Clarence Thomas, because “I don’t think that he, I don’t think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation.”
It’s impressive that Barack Obama is able to keep a straight face while criticizing anyone for lack of experience, given the fact that he’s the most unqualified lightweight to run for President in our nation’s history.
Putting aside that irony, Obama is also just flat wrong about Thomas. As The Wall Street Journal points out, Clarence Thomas had far more experience than Obama does.
By the time he was nominated, Clarence Thomas had worked in the Missouri Attorney General’s office, served as an Assistant Secretary of Education, run the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and sat for a year on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation’s second most prominent court. Since his “elevation” to the High Court in 1991, he has also shown himself to be a principled and scholarly jurist.
The fact of the matter is that Clarence Thomas has proven to be one of the most respected members of the of the entire court.
Black people have always loathed Thomas because even though he’s the first African-American elected to the Supreme Court, he’s said publicly that he doesn’t think that means he owes anything to the black community.
In other words, just because he’s black doesn’t mean he’s going to pretend the constitution says something it does not just because a particular ruling would benefit the black community.
Barack Obama of course finds that offensive and would expect his supreme court nominees to legislate from the bench and inact socialist policies the founding fathers never intended.
