Justice Thomas Issues a Grave Warning About the Future of SCOTUS: 'The Institution Is Going to Be Compromised'
As the American leftist cultural onslaught seeks to incinerate what cannot be drowned under a wave of woke ideology, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said future generations will pay the price if the Supreme Court is overcome.
Thomas spoke Friday during a Utah address sponsored by the Orrin G. Hatch Foundation, according to the Deseret News.
“My fear isn’t for me. But it is for your kids and your grandkids and the next generation. What are we going to leave them? Are we leaving them a mess or are we leaving them a country? Are we leaving them chaos or are we going to leave them a court?” he said at the Salt Lake City event.
Thomas said political rhetoric about rigging the court’s structure to produce specific political outcomes is damaging even if it never gets past the talking stage. In response to agitation on the left wing of his Democratic Party, President Joe Biden created a commission to study changing the court, though the commission offered no recommendations in its final report in December, according to The Associated Press.
“You can cavalierly talk about packing or stacking the court. You can cavalierly talk about doing this or doing that. At some point, the institution is going to be compromised,” he said, according to NPR.
A court that is structured to be a rubber stamp is “no court at all. That’s no rule of law at all. That’s just willfulness,” he said, according to the Deseret News. “I don’t see how that is conducive to having a free and civil society.”
“You can’t keep taking chips out of your institutions and not expect it to, at some point, be compromised. At some point, it can’t keep withstanding the efforts to undermine,” Thomas said, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.
“Let’s be honest,” he said about the effort to pack the court to make it permanently lean to the left. “This is really about the results they want. They haven’t been able to make the institutions do what they want, to give them what they want.”
Thomas said the Supreme Court is just one American institution facing a crisis of survival.
“By doing this, you continue to chip away at the respect of the institutions that the next generation is going to need if they’re going to have civil society,” Thomas said, according to NPR.
Thomas said that debate and disagreement, upon which democracy are based, are now considered wrong.
“I’m afraid, particularly in this world of cancel culture attack, I don’t know where you’re going to learn to engage as we did when I grew up,” he said.
“If you don’t learn at that level in high school, in grammar school, in your neighborhood, or in civic organizations, then how do you have it when you’re making decisions in government, in the legislature, or in the courts?” he said, according to NPR.
In a speech in Utah, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas slammed ‘cancel culture,’ the media and proposals to add justices to the high court, suggesting that doing so could chip away at the institution’s credibility.https://t.co/nsOxJDdLGi
— Sam Metz (@metzsam) March 12, 2022
Thomas noted that colleges have evolved into places stocked with “people who actually seem quite full of themselves. Now it’s sort of this animus develops if you disagree.”
“If you can’t do it on a university campus, where do you learn civility? Where do you learn to disagree without being disagreeable?” he said, according to the Deseret News.
Thomas said he recently discussed with one of his clerks the perception that Thomas has “conservative white ideas.”
“That’s really interesting. I didn’t know that there were these particular ideas that were off-limits — you get like white-only water fountains, now you get white-only ideas. The more things change the more they remain the same,” he said.
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