On Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his Senate confirmation hearings:
Clarence Thomas is a remarkable man with a life story that you might even call heroic.
He was born in a little town in Georgia with the unusual name of Pin Point. He was the descendant of slaves. His father was a farm worker, and his mother was a maid and housekeeper, and the family lived in the kind of poverty that would grind the ambition out of most people. He was seven years old before he lived in a house with indoor plumbing.
Thomas was the only African American student in his high school. He was also an honor student. He studied English literature at the College of the Holy Cross and graduated cum laude. He went on to Yale Law School, graduating in 1974.
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When he did, finally, get a chance to answer the charges, Thomas drew a line in the sand. The charges were not true, and he would not endure the humiliation of answering them, point by point. He then went on to say, memorably, to the committee that
“This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”
The Judiciary Committee eventually voted seven to seven, and the nomination went to the floor for a vote. I spoke in favor of confirmation. Thomas was confirmed, but I don’t think anyone felt like celebrating. Least of all, Thomas himself. He later wrote in a memoir that “mere confirmation, even to the Supreme Court, seemed pitifully small compensation for what had been done to me.”
It isn’t a rare thing for a member of the Senate to cast a vote for or against the nomination of a Supreme Court justice. Serve long enough, and it will happen. Perhaps even several times. But I don’t believe that there had ever been a Supreme Court nomination that had to go through what that one did in the Senate. I hoped that there would never be another. But, alas, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings were just as awful. If not worse.
I saw Justice Thomas, from time to time, after his confirmation. Usually before or after Mass at St. Joseph’s Church near the Hart Senate Building. And then, one day, my colleague and friend Rick Santorum said he was meeting Thomas and Antonin Scalia for lunch and would I be interested in joining them?
The lunch was at a nondescript little place that would never have made one of those Washington Post articles about the chic places where the Washington elite meet. The food was Italian, and it was wonderful. But not as good as the conversation. Like his mentor, the late Antonin Scalia, Thomas is blessed with a wonderful sense of humor. He has a big, hearty laugh that it doesn’t take much to stimulate. I don’t remember what was said at that lunch that was so funny, just that there was a lot of laughter. I couldn’t help, also, thinking that I was in the presence of a good man who had overcome more than most of us could imagine and had not let it sour him on the world.
If my vote to confirm David Souter was the worst of my career in the Senate, then the one to confirm Clarence Thomas was one of which I am most proud.
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