Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution Quotes

“So that’s why he came to Memphis—“to assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I’m black. I come to state that I’m a man, free to think for myself and do as I please.… I will not be consigned the unquestioned opinions of others.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“Even fervent abolitionists, viewing blacks as equal in rights but inferior socially and culturally, didn’t relish having freedmen come north to live beside them but wanted them to stay down south.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“For the “dirty little secret of freedom” is that, in many respects, “you’re on your own. You’re crossing the prairie of life at your own risk,” just like the American pioneers.6 No wonder Thomas loves to quote the charge of Thomas à Kempis—as much Stoic as Christian—“to ensure that in every place, action, and outward occupation you remain inwardly free and your own master. Control circumstances, and do not allow them to control you. Only so can you be a master and ruler of your actions, not their servant or slave; a free man.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“Poet Walt Whitman, a Civil War hospital volunteer who later interviewed pardon-seeking Confederates, remarked that “in any other country on the globe, the whole batch of Confederate leaders would have had their heads cut off.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“In his stint in the criminal appeals division, the young lawyer lost his last radical illusion about race. Jailed blacks were not political prisoners, suffering oppression by “the man,” he found. A black man who made a black woman submit to rape and sodomy by holding a blade to her little boy’s throat was just a thug. “This case, I later learned, was far from unusual: it turned out that blacks were responsible for almost 80 percent of violent crimes committed against blacks, and killed over 90 percent of black murder victims,” he writes.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“So too the race-conscious remedies that the Court has sanctioned or imposed have increased social tensions and distorted key civic institutions. Those liberties that the framers thought so absolute that they enshrined them in the Bill of Rights—freedom of speech, especially political speech, and the protection of private property—became negotiable, with the connivance of a Court established above all to protect those constitutional liberties that it would be tyranny to abridge.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“Our local communities, once vibrantly self-governing, have lost vital autonomy, as the Court has hemmed in their ability to police themselves and regulate their schools, all in the name of atoning for America’s original sin of slavery but in fact harming black Americans more than helping them.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“The founders worried constantly about how their envisioned republic might get hijacked, especially by ambitious officials who would transform it into an elective despotism. This is what they meant.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“Though citizens are safe from the government in their homes, the homes themselves are not.” By essentially abolishing the public use clause, the Court has subordinated individual rights to the arbitrary will of the government, Thomas remonstrated. “I do not believe that this Court can eliminate liberties expressly enumerated in the Constitution.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“The constitutional machinery of limited and enumerated powers, separation of powers, and checks and balances all aimed to prevent such an “improper or wicked project,” and America’s vast size, even in 1787, ensured that a multitude of factions—special interests—would bar any single one from tyrannizing over the others.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“Here it’s worth stepping back from Thomas and the Court to survey all this from the perspective of the framers, particularly that of Constitution architect James Madison and his argument in favor of adopting the new governmental framework in Federalist 10. We have designed a government that will protect our natural rights to life, liberty, and property, Madison says. But since men, though equal in rights, have different talents and ambitions, the Constitution’s protection of their freedom to employ those talents as they see fit will result in quite different—that is, unequal—outcomes. Some will be rich; some poor. That is not a flaw but a sign that the liberty we value is alive and well.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“McConnell was the case that declared constitutional the next clamp-down on campaign finance, the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act, which barred political parties from taking soft money and blocked union and corporate political ad spending shortly before an election. At the time, it was hard not to think that the law grew, at least in part, out of an embarrassed Senator John McCain’s wish to transfer the blame to “the system” for his having unwittingly helped a constituent and contributor who turned out to be a $3 billion savings-and-loan fraudster.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“Imagine: they celebrated the Declaration of Independence! But for decades, groups like Tillman’s “raped, murdered, lynched, and robbed as a means of intimidating, and instilling pervasive fear in, those whom they despised.… Between 1882 and 1968, there were at least 3,446 reported lynching of blacks in the South.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“Typical was (later governor and U.S. senator) Pitchfork Ben Tillman’s cold-blooded massacre in South Carolina of “a troop of black militiamen for no other reason than that they had dared to conduct a celebratory Fourth of July parade through their mostly black town,” Thomas writes.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“The combination in the same hands of the power to make the laws and the power to carry them out is the essence of arbitrary rule by decree, the founders believed, guided by such writers as the Baron de Montesquieu, John Locke, and William Blackstone. For them, the separation of powers was key to the protection of liberty from such tyranny, Thomas writes. The Constitution vested all legislative power in Congress, all executive power in the president, and all judicial power in the Supreme Court and inferior courts, because the framers did not want to have those powers delegated to other hands, lest it bring about the “gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department,” as Madison put it in Federalist 51.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“The end result may be trains that run on time (although I doubt it), but the cost is to our Constitution and the individual liberty it protects.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“The Court has “overseen and sanctioned the growth of an administrative system that concentrates the power to make laws and the power to enforce them in the hands of a vast and unaccountable administrative apparatus that finds no comfortable home in our constitutional structure,”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“But after a frustrated Franklin Roosevelt threatened to enlarge the high bench and pack it with his partisans, Justice Owen Roberts, in the infamous switch in time that saved nine, stopped finding New Deal legislation unconstitutional, so that 5–4 decisions against FDR became majority decisions allowing his schemes.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“Busing, affirmative action, and abortion are but the three most glaring areas in which the justices have made law from the bench, with no constitutional license to do so.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“As the founders often cautioned, a self-governing republic doesn’t have a governing class. Part of America’s current predicament is that it now has a permanent, unelected one, unanswerable to the people. Absolutism—soft perhaps, but absolutism nonetheless—has replaced a democratic republic.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“What would George Washington—whom the Senate declared didn’t need its approval to dismiss Senate-confirmed executive-branch officers, since he alone was responsible to the voters for their actions—have to say about the civil service rules and union protections that make the whippersnappers so difficult, and often impossible, to fire? Even Franklin Roosevelt thought bureaucrat unions an absurdity.41”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“Little wonder that one congressman warned that “government by committees, boards, bureaus, and commissions will, if unchecked and uncontrolled, destroy the republican conception of government”—or that a senator deemed one of the agencies a “star chamber,” the arbitrary, juryless court of Stuart despotism, where due process (as first laid out in Magna Carta over 800 years ago and reiterated in the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment) had no place.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“This sets the wheels of government moving in reverse gear; the servant becomes the master, and the right to earn a living becomes subject to the servant’s whim and caprice as he professes to apply some vague and variable statutory standard.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“Worst of all, the regulatory agencies may presume anyone they charge to be guilty unless he proves his innocence, and he has but limited standing and scope to appeal the agency’s decision to a real court, effectively “making the commission’s decisions on fact final and conclusive,” the ABA objected.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“And if Congress can’t delegate the legislative power that the Constitution gives it, it certainly cannot delegate power that the Constitution doesn’t give it, such as the power to hand out selective exemptions from its laws, as agencies do when they grant waivers.35”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“As the American Revolution’s tutelary philosopher, John Locke, had pronounced, the legislative branch has the authority “only to make laws, and not to make legislators”—but that’s just what Congress has done in creating administrative-agency rule makers.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“The Constitution lodges all legislative power in Congress, which therefore cannot delegate its lawmaking function elsewhere. So it’s forbidden for Congress to pass a law creating an independent or executive-branch agency that writes rules legally binding on citizens—for example, to set up an agency charged with making a clean environment and then to let it make rules with the force of law to accomplish that end as it sees fit.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“It’s hard to count the ways in which the administrative or regulatory state overturns, abolishes, and usurps the Constitution.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“THE NEW DEAL didn’t transform the Constitution only by institutionalizing nine unelected judges with lifetime tenure as a permanent constitutional convention, turning Woodrow Wilson’s theory into hard reality. It also allowed Congress to create, at the president’s request and with the blessing of the Court, an unprecedented regulatory state, made up of a constellation of administrative agencies—from the Federal Housing Administration and the Federal Communications Commission to the National Labor Relations Board and the Securities and Exchange Commission—that make rules, enforce them, and adjudicate transgressions of them.”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

“The practice of creating independent regulatory commissions, who perform administrative work in addition to judicial work,” Roosevelt himself admitted, “threatens to develop a ‘fourth branch’ of Government for which there is no sanction in the Constitution.”33”
― Myron Magnet, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution