Editorial board member and reliable ultra-liberal [1]Adam Cohen attacked Justice Clarence Thomas in a signed editorial for the Sunday Week in Review, "The Next [2] Big Thing in Law? The Harsh Jurisprudence of Justice Thomas [2]," making the old liberal play ofequating Thomas's bench rectitude as ignorance.
"In the last 100 Supreme Court arguments, Clarence Thomas has not uttered a word. Court watchers have suggested a variety of explanations. Among the least flattering: he is afraid that if he speaks he will reveal his ignorance about the case; he is so ideologically driven that he invariably comes with his mind made up; or he has contempt for the process.
"In their provocative new book, 'Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas,' two Washington Post journalists, Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher, ponder Justice Thomas's extraordinary silence, and many other puzzles. They offer a wealth of insight, but they have no answer to the central enigma he poses: why the justice who has faced the greatest hardships regularly rules for the powerful over the weak, and has a legal philosophy notable for its indifference to suffering.
"It is a particularly timely question. For 15 years, Justice Thomas was a marginal figure, rarely assigned to write major opinions because his views were so far right that he would have had trouble attracting five votes. But Justice Thomas is a lot less marginal with the recent changes in the court - particularly the replacement of Sandra Day O'Connor, a moderate conservative, with Samuel Alito, a more extreme one. He appears poised in the next few weeks to achieve his longstanding goal: dismantling the integrationist vision of his predecessor Thurgood Marshall."
Near the end Cohen condemnedBush'sSupreme Court Justices, John Roberts and Samuel Alito:"With its new members, the court is also likely to make prisons less civilized, and workplaces, elections and criminal trials less fair."