The effort to cancel the one black person on the Court.

On the front page of The Washington Post right now:



Can you even guess what that's about? I tried and I guessed wrong. I thought maybe there was a prediction that Justice Thomas might be conscious of a likelihood that he'd be leaving the Court within the next 4 years and he might be swayed by a desire to control who appoints his replacement. But, no, that would also be a ground to demand that Justice Breyer recuse himself.

Here's the column. The reason is that he might be carrying a decades-long grudge against Joe Biden for the way he ran the Senate Judiciary Committee in the hearings on his confirmation.

Thomas wrote in his memoir “My Grandfather’s Son” that he looks back at the process in “horror and disgust.” Thomas described the hearing in which he responded to Anita Hill’s sexual harassment accusations as “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”

“A few days before I faced the Judiciary Committee, Joseph Biden invited Virginia [Thomas’s wife] and me to tour the Caucus Room in the Russell Senate Office Building where the hearings would take place,” Thomas wrote. He said Biden was reassuring, stressing that the hearings weren’t meant to be an ordeal. “He said that since I’d be nervous at first, he would start the questioning with a few ‘softballs’ that would help me relax and do my best, assuring me that he had no tricks up his sleeve.”

On the morning of the hearing, wrote Thomas, “Senator Biden was the first questioner. Instead of the softball questions he’d promised to ask, he threw a beanball straight at my head, quoting from a speech that I’d given four years earlier at the Pacific Legal Foundation and challenging me to defend what I’d said.”

At the break in the proceedings, young lawyers who had helped Thomas prepare for the hearing looked at the text of the speech quoted by Biden. “The point I’d been making [in the speech] was the opposite of the one that Senator Biden claimed I had made.” Thomas later referred to a favorite recording, “Smiling Faces Sometimes,” which warns against trusting people who pretend they are your friend while secretly planning to do you wrong. “Now I knew I’d met one of them: Senator Biden’s smooth insincere promises that he would treat me fairly were nothing but talk.”

Before the committee vote, Thomas said he spoke to Biden on the phone.

“Biden came on the line. I held the receiver sideways so that Virginia could hear him speak as we stood together in the kitchen,” Thomas wrote. Biden explained why he couldn’t vote for him, after which Thomas said, “That’s fine. It’s doesn’t matter to me whether I’m confirmed or not. But I entered this process with a good name, and I want to have it at the end.”

Thomas wrote that Biden replied, “Judge, I know you don’t believe me, but if any of these last two matters come up [referring to Anita Hill’s allegations as well as a leaked draft opinion he had written as an appellate judge that had drawn criticism], I will be your biggest defender.”

“He was right about one thing,” Thomas wrote. “I didn’t believe him. Neither did Virginia. As he reassured me of his goodwill, she grabbed a spoon from the silverware drawer, opened her mouth wide, stuck out her tongue as far as she could, and pretended to gag herself.”

Thomas, in a recent documentary, condemned the hearings, charging that they they were designed to “get rid of me” because they viewed him the “wrong” African American for the high court.

Given these statements, does anyone really believe that Thomas can impartially hear a case impacting Biden and come to an opinion based on the law and facts?

I don't usually quote so much from an article, but most of that is quotation from Thomas's book. I think it's a terrible idea that Senators can mistreat a judicial candidate and then silence him once he's on the Court. Should Kavanaugh recuse himself every time anything related to Kamala Harris comes up in the Supreme Court? This would give Senators an incentive to abuse — not that they need more incentive — every nominee put up by a President who isn't a member of their party.

Quite aside from Thomas, we're all able to read that account and use it to judge Joe Biden.