Is Clarence Thomas a prick?

Ok, Justice Thomas is not without his err...blemishes. Some pretty good ones at that.

• That Anita Hill thing.

• His acceptance of gifts from Billionaire Harlan Crow and attendance at Koch events. Inaccurate financial disclosures.

• His wife belongs in Belleview. She's looney tunes.

On the other hand, nobody's all bad and Riley is one of my favorite WSJ writers. Besides Ted likes him. Hey wait a minute, maybe I've rushed to judgement here?

Clarence Thomas, Stalwart for the Constitution

Ted Cruz’s new biography looks back admiringly at the justice’s first 35 years on the Supreme Court.

By Jason L. Riley, WSJ

Sept. 29, 2026 4:27 pm ET

The Supreme Court begins its new term on Monday, and a few weeks later Clarence Thomas will complete his 35th year on the bench. If Justice Thomas remains on the court another 19 months, he will surpass William O. Douglas as the longest-serving justice in history.

The contrast between Justices Thomas and Douglas, who was nominated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and served from 1939 to 1975, is especially stark. Some call Douglas the most liberal justice ever. He regarded the Constitution as a “living document” that could be molded to address contemporary needs without being formally amended.

Justice Thomas is a George H.W. Bush nominee and perhaps the most conservative member of the current court. He is a leading advocate of originalism, which holds that the Constitution doesn’t change meaning on a whim. The document means what the people who adopted it understood it to mean at the time. Where Douglas aimed to expand the discretion of judges, Justice Thomas has worked to limit it. Justice Antonin Scalia was a fellow originalist, as was Robert Bork, who wrote in 1971 that a “judge must stick close to the text and the history and their fair implications, and not construct new rights.”

The personalities of the two men likewise diverged. “Apart from being a flagrant liar, Douglas was a compulsive womanizer, a heavy drinker, a terrible husband to each of his four wives, a terrible father to his two children, and a bored, distracted, uncollegial, irresponsible and a times unethical Supreme Court justice,” according to Richard Posner, the retired appellate court judge and legal scholar. “Rude, ice-cold, hot-tempered, ungrateful, foul-mouthed, self-absorbed, and devoured by ambition, he was also financially reckless—at once a big spender, a tightwad, and a sponge.”

By contrast, Justice Thomas’s colleagues regard him as the kindest and most genial person in the building, someone who goes out of his way to get to know everyone from the custodial staff to the clerks of his fellow justices. He is principled, plain-spoken and known for his booming laugh. In the late 1990s, he and his wife, Virginia, took in his grandnephew, who was in danger of entering the foster care system, and raised him as their own.

What has distinguished Justice Thomas as a jurist, however, isn’t merely his longevity. It is how he has used his time on the nation’s highest tribunal. In his new book, “Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas,” Sen. Ted Cruz describes the justice as someone who has marched to his own drum and in the process become one of the most consequential jurists ever to serve.

Throughout his tenure, “Justice Thomas has insisted that the text and original meaning of the United States Constitution, not past decisions of the Supreme Court or politics, should be the highest authority,” Mr. Cruz writes. “There were times when this made him something of an outcast among his colleagues. But he never wavered. Indeed, no justice in our nation’s history has been more willing to overturn past decisions of the Court that were wrongly decided.”

Before Mr. Cruz was elected to the U.S. Senate from Texas, he spent more than a decade as a Supreme Court litigator. Before that, he clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist in the mid-1990s. While the book covers familiar ground about Justice Thomas’s hardscrabble upbringing and controversial Senate confirmation, its most important contribution is Mr. Cruz’s informed analysis of Justice Thomas’s jurisprudence and legacy, which he gleaned from hours of personal interviews.

On issue after issue, Justice Thomas’s lone dissents, and his concurrences urging the majority to “go further,” have resulted in the court’s ultimately following his path. He had argued since the 1990s that although Supreme Court jurisprudence had been gutting the Second Amendment for two centuries, the amendment’s plain language clearly protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms. He had argued at least as long that the only proper interpretation of the 14th Amendment was that the government can’t discriminate based on race, even when it is supposedly benign discrimination in the form of affirmative action.

Over time, court majorities have come around to Justice Thomas’s reasoning on guns and racial preferences. More broadly, even liberals on the court who reject originalism nevertheless take the text and history of the Constitution more seriously than they did in the pre-Thomas era. Mr. Cruz speculates that the justice’s thick skin and stick-to-itiveness will be his most important legacy, regardless of how much longer he serves. “He has endured seemingly unendurable hatred without becoming hateful himself,” Mr. Cruz writes. “He has lived a life defined not by ambition, but by duty. Most importantly, he has not changed his views simply because a majority of the country—or some political party—have changed theirs.”