Justice Thomas has used this "hideous place" to amass the power he now exploits

Thomas's attack on Washington comes as he will, yet again, issue rulings that set the national rules for the legal questions before the justices.

Anyone who lives in Washington, D.C., and says they hate it here have almost always, with rare exceptions, never made the actual Washington their home. They have limited themselves to the halls of power, they have spent their years focused on obtaining power, and they only view their experience here through the prism of power.

It is in this context that one must regard Justice Clarence Thomas’s latest attack on the city that has provided him with a federal government job since the late 1970s.

“I think what you are going to find and especially in Washington, people pride themselves on being awful. It is a hideous place as far as I’m concerned,” Thomas told the audience at the Eleventh Circuit Judicial Conference, per the Associated Press, on Friday.

It is, however, a “hideous place” that Thomas has nonetheless used to obtain increasing positions of power over the decades. Ever since he reached his perch on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991, he has used that position to provide others within positions of power with access to the Supreme Court’s building; to establish and build relationships with the rich and powerful; and, finally, to create his own network of power among his former clerks.

In fact, it was one of those former clerks, U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle who was asking Thomas questions on Friday. Mizelle, who was Donald Trump’s youngest judicial appointee, was only 33 years old when she took the bench.

Earlier this year, Mizelle applied Thomas’s history-dependent Second Amendment jurisprudence to toss out a charge of possessing a firearm in a federal building because, Mizelle found, the United States “fail[ed] to meet its burden of pointing to a historical tradition of firearms regulation justifying [the defendant’s] indictment.”

In her January opinion tossing out the charge against Emmanuel Ayala, Mizelle cited Thomas’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen and wrote that “the Supreme Court has been clear: the government must point to historical principles that would permit it to prohibit firearms possession in post offices.”

The federal government has appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals to the Eleventh Circuit.

The chief judge of the Eleventh Circuit currently is Judge William Pryor. Although not a former Thomas clerk, several of his clerks have gone on to clerk for Thomas.

One of his current clerks, Crystal Clanton, has been the subject of significant controversy due to long-running allegations first reported by Jane Mayer in 2017 that she sent racist texts while working at Turning Point USA. (Although she left Turning Point USA, she soon thereafter started appearing with Thomas’s wife, the far-right activist Ginni Thomas, at events.)

Clanton will be clerking for Justice Thomas in the fall — a development that led Mayer to follow up on her earlier reporting.

In short, Thomas, Pryor, Mizelle, and Clanton all seem to be doing well.

And yet, it is — and remains — Thomas and his wife who insist that they are the aggrieved ones.

“We’re in a world and we — certainly my wife and I the last two or three years it’s been — just the nastiness and the lies, it’s just incredible,” Thomas told the audience on Friday — apparently referencing the “nastiness” that he has faced for his “friendships” with rich men in the years after he joined (and, per one report, threatened to quit) the court and that his wife has faced for texting Trump’s then-chief of staff with election-denying fanfic after the 2020 election.

As the AP detailed it:

[Thomas] did not discuss the content of the criticisms directly, but said that “reckless” people in Washington will “bomb your reputation.”

“They don’t bomb you necessarily, but they bomb your reputation or your good name or your honor. And that’s not a crime. But they can do as much harm that way,” Thomas said.

Ah, yes.

Over the next seven weeks, Thomas will be one of nine people releasing decisions in 40 cases at the Supreme Court that will set forth the standard for whether presidents will be immune from criminal prosecution for actions taken in office for life, whether his Bruen decision renders unconstitutional the federal ban on gun possession by those people who have a domestic-violence restraining order out against them, and whether medication abortion remains accessible in a post-Roe America on its current terms, among many other pivotal decisions.

Further still — and throwing his cries of grievance even further into doubt — he will be doing so on a court that is the most conservative it has ever been since he joined it.

Thomas’s vote matters in all of those 40 cases, he will write an opinion in many of them; and he will write the court’s opinion in a handful of cases — setting the national rule for whatever legal question is at issue in those cases.

It is the 33rd year in which Clarence Thomas is doing so as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. From this “hideous place.”

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