Clarence Thomas is the most important legal thinker in America

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The oft-misunderstood Justice has single-handedly reshaped the way conservatives think about the law. God help us.

IAN MILLHISER JUL 3, 2018, 8:00 AM

Justice Clarence Thomas is the most important legal thinker of his generation, and the most significant judicial appointment of the last forty years.

No justice did more to reshape the way thousands of the nation’s top lawyers think about the law. No justice did more to shape a political movement’s sense of what it can achieve through litigation. If President George H.W. Bush had chosen someone other than Clarence Thomas to sit on the Supreme Court, the world might look vastly different today.

And American democracy would be much safer.

There is a commonly held view that Thomas is an intellectual lightweight. Radical and far-too-quiet on the bench. Idiosyncratic and lacking in influence. A fairly persistent take on Thomas’ career holds that he’s lived in the shadow of Justice Antonin Scalia, and his views were, at most, an exaggerated version of Scalia’s originalism.

This view of Thomas is wrong.

https://thinkprogress.org/clarence-thomas-most-important-legal-thinker-in-america-c12af3d08c98/

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As of this writing, fully 20 percent of the judges Donald Trump appointed to the federal appellate bench are former Thomas clerks. Thomas lost the war for the present, but he is the future of legal conservatism. And he may soon be America’s future.