“Amy Coney Barrett brings a resume that could make her the most conservative new justice since Clarence Thomas and a dream addition for Republicans looking to remake the U.S. Supreme Court,” a trio of reporters wrote in Bloomberg News.
Brian Clardy, a Murray State University historian, sees another parallel between the Barrett and Thomas nominations: “It smacks of cynical tokenism, pure and simple.”
He also compares Thomas to Kentucky Attorney Gen. Daniel Cameron. More on that in a minute.
In 1991, President George H.W. Bush chose Thomas, a well-known Black conservative, to replace the retiring Thurgood Marshall, the first African American justice and a liberal. In 1954, seven years before President John F. Kennedy nominated Marshall, he and a team of NAACP attorneys were victorious in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case in which the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools.
“You had one of the most progressive legal minds in the history of American jurisprudence in Thurgood Marshall,” Clardy said. “He spent a life as a lawyer and as a justice fighting for civil rights.
“Who does he get replaced by? A partisan and ideological hack. The right embraced Clarence Thomas as somebody who was Black and non-threatening. If president Bush wanted to choose a Black person to be on the court, he could have found at the federal or state level far more qualified people than Thomas.
“That was cynical tokenism.”
Clardy is an unapologetic liberal Democratic activist. But he’s hardly the only historian to question Bush’s motives in the Thomas appointment.
“Bush could have honored [Marshall’s] … legacy by naming a respected African-American judge or legal scholar such as Amalya Kearse or Leon Higginbotham,” wrote Rutgers Professor David Greenberg in Politico. “But he selected a staunch conservative in Clarence Thomas – served up with the implausible assertion that he was the most qualified person for the job.”
Barrett, like Thomas, is a favorite of the Republican right. She will replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a longtime champion of gender equality and a pillar in the court’s four-member liberal minority. “She was always determined to fight for justice for women and other marginalized groups,” said Clardy. “She made a great impact on the bench.
“Trump chose Barrett, another woman, to help dismantle many of the gains that have been made by women, by people of color, by the LGBTQ community and others. Here again, that is cynical tokenism.”
Barrett, as an appeals court judge, “has compiled an almost uniformly conservative voting record in cases touching on abortion, gun rights, discrimination and immigration,” wrote Adam Liptak in The New York Times, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s hometown paper.
“Judge Ginsburg had a dying wish that the next president choose,” Clardy said. “Justice Ginsburg must be turning over in her grave up in Heaven to see that the person they chose seems to be intent on undoing all the things that Ginsburg did.”
Like Thomas, Cameron represents a long tradition of Black conservatism, according to Clardy. “The African American community has never been an ideological or political monolith. Black conservative thought goes all the way back to the self-help movement of Booker T. Washington. That has always been a constant within our community. It was an ideology I was brought up on [in South Fulton, Tennessee] – work hard and you’ll make it.”
But Clardy said the Black conservative movement has produced “folks who are self-serving, who want to use their status in the establishment as Black conservatives to advance their own agendas, and they do so at the expense of people who look like them. That is exactly what Clarence Thomas did and what Daniel Cameron has done.”
Added Clardy: “He does nothing about Breonna Taylor and then he makes this grandstanding, self-serving speech at the Republican Convention. But his failure to charge with murder or manslaughter any of the police involved in her shooting was the last straw.”
–30–