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The Political Scene | The New Yorker

What Precedents Would Clarence Thomas Overturn Next?

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

Politics, Washington, News, Obama, Wnyc, President, Lizza, Barack, Wickenden

4.33.9K Ratings

🗓️ 11 July 2022

⏱️ 26 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Justice Clarence Thomas once was an outlier for his legal views. But Thomas is now the heart of the Court’s conservative bloc, and his concurring opinion in the recent abortion ruling calls out some other precedents the Court might overturn. Jeannie Suk Gersen teaches constitutional law at Harvard Law School and clerked for former Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court; she has been covering the end of Roe v. Wade for The New Yorker, and she spoke with David Remnick about Thomas’s concurrence. It articulates a view more extreme than Justice Alito’s majority opinion, saying that other rights derived from privacy—such as contraception and same-sex intimacy—are not constitutional rights at all. “We have to remember he’s been saying it out loud for quite some time,” Suk Gersen says. “This is not a new thing from Justice Thomas. It’s just that we normally—over decades—didn’t pay that much attention to him, because he was alone in his dissents and concurrences.”

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This is the Politics and More podcast. I'm David Remnick.

1:20.0

The Supreme Court has issued a deluge of big rulings in recent weeks, and it defines a new epic in American law. The majority on the

1:29.3

court has dramatically limited the ability of the U.S. government to issue environmental regulations

1:34.8

or to limit gun ownership, and at the same time, they greatly increase the power of the states

1:40.7

to regulate a woman's right to control her own body. That decision, the Dobbs ruling,

1:46.9

ended federally guaranteed abortion rights. But within the court's majority, there were different

1:52.0

opinions on why those rights should be abolished. Justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority,

1:58.1

but he also wrote a separate opinion known as a concurrence that expresses

2:02.2

an even more conservative view of the world and the law. And Thomas's concurrence foreshadows

2:07.9

how this newly ascendant conservative block might reshape American law. Jeannie Suk Gerson

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