A very good post by a liberal former Supreme Court clerk and current appellate lawyer; here are a few excerpts (go to the whole post for the full story):
Dems need to clean up their act on Clarence Thomas . . .
Unfortunately, there is an ugly undercurrent in the debate over Justice Thomas, fueled by the ill-advised comment by Senate minority leader-elect Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that Thomas is an “embarrassment to the Supreme Court” and that his opinions are “poorly written” (see our earlier post here for more on Reid). Frankly, I don’t see what Reid is talking about — Thomas’s opinions seem to me no better or worse written than anyone else’s on the Court, and calling him an “embarrassment” without further explanation is just, well, embarrassing. A group of conservative African-Americans has called upon Reid to apologize for his “racially-insensitive” remarks, and the conservative commentariat has been having a field day proffering Reid’s comments as evidence of pervasive “liberal racism.” . . .
[L]et’s be clear: Thomas is a smart, creative thinker — he is not a “Scalia clone” — and he has staked out reasonably clear and consistent positions on many important legal issues. Democrats, particularly those in the Senate, need to get that through their sometimes frustratingly thick skulls and deal with it.
Make no mistake: I am no fan of Justice Thomas’s jurisprudence, and the only reason I’d want to see him as Chief is because I think he’d be less effective (for reasons already stated) than some of the other candidates out there. . . . But to demean him with terms like “an embarrassment to the Supreme Court” (especially while simultaneously praising Scalia as a “smart guy” who might make a good Chief) plays right into the hands of those who think that all Democrats are hypocrites. Democrats should know better. It is neither morally acceptable nor smart politics to treat Justice Thomas with anything other than the respect that any other serious contender for Chief Justice would receive.
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