What Precedents Would Clarence Thomas Overturn Next?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 8 July 2022

⏱️ 24 minutes

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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.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.7	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.0	The Supreme Court has issued a deluge of big rulings in recent weeks, and it defines a new epic in American law.
0:22.9	The majority on the court has dramatically limited the ability of the U.S. government to issue environmental regulations or to limit gun
0:28.6	ownership, and at the same time, they greatly increase the power of the states to regulate a woman's
0:34.9	right to control her own body. That decision, the Dobbs ruling, ended federally guaranteed abortion rights.
0:42.2	But within the court's majority, there were different opinions on why those rights should be abolished.
0:47.9	Justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority, but he also wrote a separate opinion known as a concurrence
0:53.5	that expresses an even more
0:55.7	conservative view of the world and the law. And Thomas's concurrence foreshadows how this newly
1:01.2	ascendant conservative block might reshape American law. Jeannie Suk Gerson teaches constitutional
1:07.5	law at Harvard Law School. She clerk for former justice David Souter on the Supreme Court, and she's a contributor to the New Yorker.
1:16.2	Jeannie, you just wrote a comment on the Supreme Court for the magazine, and in that piece you say,
1:22.0	the year 2022 will go down in history as a turning point when the Supreme Court's conservative revolution
1:28.1	seem to arrive all at once. What do you mean by that by all at once?
1:34.7	Well, so what we saw over the course of a few days in late June was the conservative justices
1:41.8	asserting their power, right? They've recently consolidated this power,
1:47.0	and now they're exercising it all at once. In that several, in the space of several days,
1:52.9	what we see is the end of the right to abortion, a very significantly expanded gun right,
1:58.5	a hole in the wall between church and state, a big one, and then curbing of the
2:03.8	ability to fight climate change. All of those things are happening within several days.
2:08.3	It's like boom, boom, boom. This is not just an incremental building of a conservative agenda.
	...

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