00:02:43.480And seeing you through different phases in your life as a law clerk, hanging out in my
00:02:49.800chambers um as the sg of texas and now senator so it's been a long journey and also it's just
00:02:59.300it's also an opportunity to say you're one of the people who actually stands up uh particularly um
00:03:06.520at times when others seem to wither and um i appreciate it and more personally when we my
00:03:15.020wife and I were under attack for obvious reasons. You and Mike Lee and some of the other friends
00:03:24.860would stand up, Senator Kennedy, et cetera. So I really appreciate that.
00:03:30.240Justice, that is very kind of you. And especially for you to observe that I stand up in the face of
00:03:38.580criticism and attacks. That is powerful coming from you because you're someone who knows
00:03:43.700knows what that's like and and has done so in a way that has been been world changing and and
00:03:50.220so justice thomas decades ago wrote a a phenomenal autobiography my grandfather's son and you told
00:03:58.320your own story and it's it's it's it may be the best autobiography ever read i read it at the time
00:04:04.060it came out it it inspired me actually shortly after it came out i i was at home and as it so
00:04:13.080happened, a young African-American boy, he's probably 15, 16 years old, came by the house,
00:04:19.160and I think he was selling magazines or something, knocked on the door, and I struck up a conversation
00:04:22.880with him. I went and grabbed the book and gave it to him and said, look, you should read this.
00:04:28.540You may not have heard Justice Thomas's story and journey, but I hope this will inspire you.
00:04:34.740And I think for a lot of the folks who listen to the podcast or watch the podcast, and some people
00:04:40.940listen to it on their phones. Others watch it on YouTube or Facebook. They know who you are,
00:04:46.800but they don't know your actual story. And it is, as I mentioned at the beginning, it is unlike
00:04:53.680any other justices on the court. So maybe we can just start with, tell us about growing up. You
00:04:59.540grew up in Pinpoint, Georgia. What was it like growing up? Well, I was born in Pinpoint, but
00:05:05.880And most of my growing up, I've been fortunate.
00:05:09.940I think the misfortunes you have can lead to different things.
00:05:14.540And the house in Pinpoint burned down when I was six in the first grade.
00:05:20.420And we lived in a tenement with my mother in one room in Savannah for about a year.
00:05:27.460And eventually wound up living with our grandparents, moving there when I was seven.
00:05:33.740And that was probably, well, actually was the best thing that could have ever happened to me, because that was life-changing.
00:05:42.160You describe in your book, and I recount in my book, when you were in that tenement, and that it did not have indoor plumbing, and so you used a chamber pot.
00:05:52.520And you describe walking down the stairs carrying a chamber pot.
00:06:01.480Yeah, well, it was, you know, it's sort of when I think of people saying they're having a bad day and you're seven years old and that happens and you don't have like a shower or the kind of a bathroom that people would normally have, you realize, I mean, to me it defined a bad day.
00:06:28.200But then things that happened after that outweigh that.
00:06:34.220There's a wonderful song by a black minister that you hear from time to time if you go to a funeral at small southern black churches, and I won't complain.
00:06:48.880And you can have all these bad things, this litany of bad things happen, and you can say, I won't complain.
00:06:56.180because it's outweighed by all the good things that have happened.
00:07:02.660And those good things began with my grandparents.0.94
00:07:06.600And my grandfather was a Catholic convert, which was an oddity.1.00
00:07:12.460Catholics were an oddity in Savannah.1.00
00:07:15.260Black Catholics were really an oddity.1.00
00:07:18.660And it was because of that we were educated at parochial schools with my Irish nuns.1.00
00:07:24.980And those in combination, my grandparents, the neighborhood I grew up in, the nuns, Catholicism, forged a foundation that I've benefited from.
00:07:42.600Well, and your deep faith is integral to who you are, who you are as a man, I think who you are as a justice to your journey.
00:07:51.060Many people don't know, you almost became a priest, and for a long time you thought that's what you wanted to do.
00:07:57.220Well, I think I would have been a priest, had the bishops at the time or the leadership in the church been as firm and had the resolve of the nuns during segregation and desegregation and civil rights movement, et cetera.
00:08:16.880My nuns were immovable as far as their propagation of the faith, their belief in us.
00:08:26.460They were the ones who planted the seed that, in God's eyes, and you heard it at home too, we're all equal.
00:08:35.640That God made us, we were made in his image and likeness.
00:08:39.840So were the nuns more willing to speak out about civil rights?
00:08:44.900Of course, they had a vow of chastity and poverty and obedience, so there's only so much, but they were adamant, and they were adamant outwardly to the world and inwardly to us, so we couldn't use race or some of the other things as excuses.
00:09:06.740And it's hard to put it in context, but when I was in the second and third grade, this is, again, post-Brown, and the Georgia legislature was in the midst of drafting legislation that was reasserting segregation.
00:09:24.300and so people and for our listeners brown is brown versus board of education which was a seminal
00:09:31.080seminal supreme court decision 1954 that that overturned plessy versus ferguson plessy versus
00:09:37.520ferguson i think is one of the most in fact almost everyone thinks is one of the most disgraceful
00:09:41.980decisions the courts has ever decided where it it uh embraced the doctrine of separate but equal
00:09:49.880And Brown overturned it and ordered that schools be desegregated.
00:09:53.760And you were a student when this – I mean, this impacted your life.
00:10:50.640In Georgia, there's a dialect called Geechee, and in South Carolina, they call it Gullah.
00:10:57.020But it's just, it's a patois that for people who were not, who did not assimilate in the culture or who were not a part of the culture, we were isolated near the water.
00:12:09.000There was a lot of order, and that's what my grandfather wanted.
00:12:12.440Now, I think anyone understanding your life has to start by understanding your grandfather.
00:12:19.720You were raised by your grandparents principally, and your grandfather, Myers Anderson, I think you would say was the most important man in your life.
00:18:13.560And its attitude was, look, I was here first, and you're going to have a bad day, and I'm not moving.0.85
00:18:19.560But his point was about the warning that you had some people in Georgia who didn't like blacks, and they were bigots, and they were openly so.0.97
00:18:29.060And what you said is the southern racists were like rattlesnakes.0.98
00:19:16.400I loved, we used to get these magazines of the Mary Knoll priests and serving, you know, kids who were, had disease or were poor or were having difficulties.
00:19:31.800And you get, you begin to feel that that would be a good way to spend your life.
00:19:36.880And then it becomes an issue when you enter the minor seminary.
00:19:40.900It's really a time of discernment and to see whether you have the capabilities.
00:19:45.380And I like the idea of being called to serve to do that.
00:19:53.400You know, when you have a vocation, you're asking yourself, what is God calling me to do?
00:20:00.760And that became actually, again, but for the weakness of the bishops, I think I'd be a priest today.
00:20:10.960Or not specific bishops, but the church itself.
00:20:15.380seem to be vacillating on the issue of race.
00:20:18.960And to me, the big, the major wrong in the country,
00:20:23.460the major contradiction in this country was the race issue.
00:20:28.960That you treat, you can place the importance of equality at the center of your founding document.
00:20:39.380And then you have this issue of slavery and its offshoots.
00:20:45.380Well, and the church was slow to recognize that.
00:20:50.020One point that I make many times is you look at Dr. King's letter from a Birmingham jail, and people forget to whom it is addressed.
00:21:02.160It's addressed to the clergy of America.
00:21:04.620He's writing to the leaders of the church saying, wake up and speak up.
00:21:08.640And my favorite portion of that letter, there's a group of senators, bipartisan senators, who regularly read that letter on the floor of the Senate.
00:21:20.340It's really powerful to read the words out loud.
00:21:22.740And there's a portion in it where he says the church should be a thermostat and not a thermometer, that it should be changing society and not just reacting to what's around.
00:21:33.320And that's ultimately what led you to leave the seminary and say that you were not going to go down the path of being a priest.
00:24:33.300So the church, the belief, the tenets of the church are not wrong.
00:24:37.320It's that the people are failing in living up to that.
00:24:41.520But at any rate, when you're young, you don't make those fine distinctions.
00:24:45.500And so I think an easy way to deal with that or a quick way to sort of respond when you're that age is to find these sort of radical movements you participate in, you protest.
00:25:02.920You sort of let off steam and you're angry and you feel empowered by that anger.
00:25:08.800But then as time goes on, you take a step back and you start thinking about what you're doing.
00:25:14.480And probably, you know, my grandfather asked me a question, and I've said this before.
00:25:20.360I would come, return home, and he would be upset with me.
00:25:24.580And he would say, after all his sacrifices, this is what I've become.
00:25:30.380And he would challenge me because I'd say the country's racist and we need to destroy it and all that sort of thing.
00:25:39.980And he said, and when you destroy it, where are you going to go?
00:25:43.140That was always the unanswerable question.
00:25:45.800What country is better than this country with all its problems, to which I had no answer?
00:25:53.460So I think that's planted the seed of doubt from this.
00:26:00.200And as I grew older and more mature and thought about things, in fact, about the time I was at Yale and had participated in enough,
00:26:58.020To spend all night doing something I don't quite understand.
00:27:01.940But that return, it was April 16, 1970.
00:27:11.240So I returned to Holy Cross from Cambridge and passed, walked in front of the chapel because I was exhausted but couldn't sleep, walked in front of the chapel.
00:27:23.380And again, I'm not attending or anything, but I'm still deeply Catholic.
00:27:28.820And I face it in the Blessed Sacrament, and I ask God to take hate out of my heart.
00:27:34.100And I said, if you take hate out of my heart, I will never hate again.
00:27:38.780And that was the moment when you began to, for me, when I began to move in a more positive direction, when you begin to offload, it was like lancing a boil.
00:29:19.620and that means you have to take responsibility for it.
00:29:22.460And I really didn't like people saying, you have to do this, you have to do that.0.99
00:29:26.900We had this saying that there are only two things I have to do, stay black and die.
00:29:31.720And that was a retort to people who had these sort of requirements for us, these mandates for us because of our skin color.
00:29:43.160And the thing that's really kind of interesting, it wasn't until later on that people began to say that when I came to this town, one of the greatest difficulties, if you think about it, was that there were those who thought that I should think a certain way.
00:29:59.860And the difficulty has been that they said, oh, you're confused.
00:35:12.060but he was but you loved that oh i loved it i it was the best job i've ever had
00:35:18.380eleven thousand dollars a year and he promised he said i can give you more work for less money
00:35:24.060than anybody in the country and that turned out to be a blessing um but at any rate um that office
00:35:30.940the the way that he ran that office um was just just wonderful even-handed one of the people i
00:35:39.080met who became a very dear friend was a quadriplegic from uh west point nebraska and i went
00:35:46.160to university of missouri law school graduated order of the coif but um had suffered from polio
00:35:52.880and was a quadriplegic just a they just a very very very dear friend he calls me up one day and
00:36:00.100he said clarence there's another black guy out here like you and his name is thomas sow and it's
00:36:06.980Thomas Sowell, and it was a book review in the Wall Street Journal, and it was on race and economics.
00:36:14.720And I obtained copies of that, and it became just sort of the beginning of the long intellectual walk back of thinking about these things.
00:36:28.800And I met him at Washington University on a panel with Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she was a professor.
00:36:35.540in the late 70s, and then when I came here in 79, I think I met him again either in 79 or 80
00:36:45.740when he was making the rounds with Hill Staffers, and we've been friends since the early 1980s.
00:36:53.560By the way, for what it's worth, I'm urging the White House to award him the Presidential Medal
00:36:58.580of Freedom. I hope they do so. I've publicly called for that, and I'm trying to make that
00:37:03.300happen? Because I think that would be very appropriate. Yeah. Well, I think it would be
00:37:07.860deserved. Yes. He is a great, great man and one of the great thinkers.
00:37:16.340I've never met him, but I've admired him. He's brilliant and courageous.
00:37:20.080Well, he's courageous. He and I met him. I met Walter Williams back then when I got here.
00:37:27.380I met Walter Williams when I was in high school. Is that right?
00:37:29.780Yeah, he was inspiring even when I was a kid.
00:37:33.580Brash, but he's – and there was another gentleman that you don't know that's also passed away, like Walter, who's done – was also very quiet but a libertarian and was very, very helpful.
00:37:52.180But anyway, the whole point is that in Jefferson City, again, I go back to what I said at the very beginning, that things that initially seem like a negative, you know, you can't get a job, so you wind up in Jefferson City, turn out to be a blessing.
00:38:12.240So I – and what I say in retrospect is that God closed all the doors that I should not have gone through and left one door open, my Hobson's choice, and turned out to be the best job I've ever had.
00:38:24.960Well, and ultimately you're in the AG's office.
00:38:27.980You go get a job in corporate America at Monsanto, which paid you a good chunk of money but was not rewarding and you were not happy with corporate America.
00:38:36.620And then Jack Danforth has gone to the Senate, and you go work for him in the Senate.
00:38:43.560And you're a Capitol Hill staffer, and you go to a conference with Thomas Sowell.
00:38:49.960Yeah, he invited me personally to that in San Francisco.
00:38:54.360And at the time, you're a Republican staffer, but you're on the journey.
00:39:00.560I mean, one of the things I try to do in the book is chronicle the intellectual journey and awakening from an angry left-wing radical to a principled conservative.
00:39:11.880That's a pretty big shift, and reading was an important part of it.
00:39:17.260Questioning was an important part of it.
00:39:19.220But you've described how you're sitting at lunch table with Juan Williams, the reporter, having what you thought was a conversation, and it was one of your first interactions with the press, and it ended up having a big feature article in the Washington Post describing you as the black conservative, which was a pretty startling thing for you.
00:39:45.720Well, I'd never call myself conservative.
00:39:49.140You know, that was a way of character.
00:39:52.640They called us black conservatives in order to dispose of us.
00:39:57.420They called Tom Sowell that, Walter Williams, Jay Parker, who's another dear friend, has passed away.
00:40:40.440And there is a nastiness as a black conservative that I don't think anyone else experiences. You get some of it as an Hispanic who's a conservative because I'm not supposed to be a conservative, but you're really not supposed to be a conservative.1.00
00:40:55.260And there's – part of the reason I wanted to write the book is the vitriol that has been directed at you is different.
00:41:03.740Look, Justice Scalia, you knew him extremely well.
00:41:07.900He was brilliant, extraordinarily principled.
00:41:12.140He never had the kind of hate directed to him that you did.
00:41:15.780And the left, they view you – a black man is not allowed to think that way.1.00
00:41:57.420Yeah, but see, underneath that, and Paul Johnson makes the point that you scratch the surface of things like the Marxists and the socialists.
00:42:06.460That's what you find because they have to categorize people.
00:42:11.040But I crossed that bridge in my early 30s that I accepted that this is the way they were going to treat me, this is what was going to happen, this is what would happen, and who knew where it would leave, but God would take care of that part.
00:42:31.080But the fact that they have all this vitriol, to me, is a white flag that they have no argument.
00:42:56.280But there's this sense that don't you know what you're supposed to think?
00:43:03.040And that is with me, that is the wrong argument.
00:43:05.840Well, and related to that, one of the things that you have really powerfully written and spoken about is with affirmative action and racial quotas, it brings with it a stigma.
00:43:20.320You rather famously put a sticker of 15 cents on your Yale law degree from a cigar box because – and you talked about coming out of Yale but not being able to get a job.
00:43:33.540And look, I went to school at a different time than you did, but I'll tell you, as an Hispanic, I still remember this one supercilious liberal in law school explaining that everyone who wasn't a white man was on the law review because of affirmative action.
00:43:50.460That was the only reason anyone could possibly do well is because they were giving us this gift, and it was infuriating.
00:43:59.020You know, I've heard, I've been, there are many, many slights along the way.
00:44:47.260Just pause for a second and think about the marvel of America, that your grandfather who raised you was raised by his grandmother who was a freed slave, and now you are the second longest serving Supreme Court justice in American history and in a couple of years will be the longest serving.
00:45:10.140That is – it's one of the things – look, those who point to the flaws in our nation's history, they're not wrong.
00:45:21.060Our racial history in particular, it has been a history of injustice and slavery was grotesque.0.66
00:45:26.560But I agree with Dr. King that the arc of history is long and it bends towards justice.
00:45:33.440And that journey was possible because of the principles America was built on, even if it took us decades and even centuries to begin living up to it.
00:45:45.140Well, you know, he always – my grandfather would talk about don't throw out the Ten Commandments because people don't obey them.
00:45:54.380There's nothing wrong with the Ten Commandments.
00:45:56.820It's just we have weaknesses or for whatever reasons we don't comply.
00:46:02.300And I think sometimes when you're angry and you see suffering and difficulties, you are willing to throw everything out, the baby with the bath water.
00:46:13.800And as you get older, you can be more discerning.
00:46:18.580And one of the things I think that's unfortunate is that the people who should know better haven't stood up and defended those principles and asserted them and then tried to live up to them and not be hypocritical and not to sacrifice the principles for a share of the power or for a share of the loot that they're getting from the country or whatever.
00:46:41.980And so one of the things that I tried to do when I was teasing out the speech at the University of Texas is to make this point.
00:46:51.800Two things that I wanted to talk about was the fact that here you had uneducated people who believed that God made them equal.
00:47:03.180And you had Irish nuns, immigrants, that believed strongly that in God's eyes we're all equal.
00:47:18.140It was not—no matter what the laws around us said, this was not debatable.0.88
00:47:24.040So now that means if they're Irish immigrants and uneducated people who have no formal education believe this, my point was simply that it must be self-evident.0.95
00:47:37.780Otherwise, how else would they know?0.80
00:47:41.660The other part of it that I was interested in is there are a lot of nice words in the Declaration, for example.
00:48:40.440Do you really believe as a church what you said you believe?
00:48:45.040And it was the gap between that, what you said, the church said, and what the leadership seemed to a 19-year-old to believe.
00:48:55.560And I think in this country now, think about it.
00:48:59.220When last have you had a leader that said something that is the equivalent of I pledge my life, my property, my fortune, and my sacred honor?
00:49:12.420So you referenced the speech you gave at University of Texas. I want to commend all the listeners here. Go and listen to that speech. It really was an extraordinary speech. I'm proud of UT. I spent a couple of years on the faculty as an adjunct law professor there.
00:49:28.520And look, most law schools are so left-wing. I'm proud of UT for inviting you there. The president, Jim Davis, is a good friend, had you there. But it really is an important speech and conversation, and if folks haven't listened to it, they should.
00:49:42.640What I want to do in the interest of time, that there are additional chapters in your life from being a Hill staffer to an assistant secretary of the Department of Education to the chairman of the EOC and the Reagan administration to a court of appeals judge on the D.C. circuit to going through one of, if not the most brutal confirmation hearing of any justice.
00:50:08.140You and Brett Kavanaugh can arm wrestle for who had the rougher time, but in many ways you're – and I talk about this in the book, how what Justice Kavanaugh went through was a replay of the playbook that you were subjected to.
00:50:21.540I want to skip over all of those periods, although I recount them in detail in the book.
00:50:29.300And I want to go to after you are confirmed and you're sworn in and you're in your early 40s and suddenly you're a Supreme Court justice.
00:50:42.780And your autobiography ends with your being a justice.
00:50:46.680So it tells your life story, but then does not cover your jurisprudence.
00:50:52.820I want to start with just a human thing.
00:50:54.320What's it like the first day you're a justice?
00:50:57.820You walk in, like just what's day one of being a Supreme Court justice?
00:52:26.080And I must say, I'm on the other side of that spectrum now.
00:52:31.740But I was treated royally, fabulously by my new colleagues.
00:52:36.700Your old boss, Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice Scalia, Stevens, O'Connor, a great woman who doesn't get the credit she deserves, Justice Kennedy.
00:52:48.680And now I'm on the other side of it where I have newer colleagues, wonderful and brilliant young people like Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, you mentioned.
00:53:55.620It's the World War II. Byron White. They were just wonderful people. They were very kind to me. The courts changed a bit now since the Dobbs leak. Back then, there was a trust.
00:54:34.580And now we're in—it's a different generation now.
00:54:38.840But the point is that you have equally good people who are there.
00:54:43.600I mean, I loved – I knew some of them as law clerks.
00:54:46.800They've become very dear friends, and I hope to be a model to them as the older members of the court who were there when I arrived were to me.
00:54:56.780So of all the justices who have served on the court, I think you are the most willing to reconsider precedent and to think of an issue anew, which is in some ways to think about it as it was – in fact, in many ways to think of it as it was originally understood.
00:55:16.680And that – your opinion writing is – you write straightforward opinions in ordinary English.
00:55:30.660You don't tend to use fancy highfalutin words, but your opinions are written so that the regular person can read them and understand what you're saying.
00:55:40.280And I think there's a workmanship quality to your opinions.
00:55:46.500I analogize it to a farmer or someone building a home that you – and you draw that same analogy.
00:55:55.340Why do you think it is that you are the most willing to reconsider precedent?
00:56:00.980You know, I start with something you and I, I think, have talked about over the years, and that is that I start with something that has to make sense.
00:56:11.660The quote from your grandfather, if it don't make no damn sense, it don't make no damn sense.
00:56:15.640Yeah, and I keep that in my office because the – you can – he would call some of these professors fast-talking.
00:56:29.900You know, we have had throughout history court intellectuals who can make all sorts of justifications for things and theories and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:56:40.920And I've been blessed because I can sort through the theories and I read lots and lots and lots of books.
00:57:26.160I cannot explain it to that guy on the ranch.
00:57:31.340And if he has said, boy, that don't make no sense.
00:57:34.620You know, he should be a – when I go out to ordinary people, they should be able to understand their constitution.
00:57:41.220And by the way, ordinary people, one thing people may not know, you do that a lot.
00:57:45.500You and Jenny go out in your RV, like in the summertime, you head across the country and are in Walmart parking lots just hanging out with regular people.
00:59:14.920This is a point that Murray Rothbard makes in his book, Conceived in Liberty, okay?
00:59:19.760That we've taken something that was passionately achieved and that was believed in passionately, and we turned it into this thing that you need an oracle to explain.
00:59:31.900The Federalist Papers were newspaper editorials.
00:59:34.640And they were only in New York, by the way.
00:59:36.580And those were basically Hamilton and those guys.
00:59:41.560There's a big difference between Hamilton and some of the more radical guys, like a Sam Adams, which is more than a beer, by the way.
00:59:49.760I will admit there was an amusing exchange of one commentator on the left who was on TV saying, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, can you imagine those people overthrowing the government?
01:00:08.400And I couldn't help but respond, yes, yes, I can.
01:00:19.760One of the things you have been really eloquent on and I think profoundly influential on is the – look, the Constitution is the foundational document that created our government.
01:00:36.680But you have focused a great deal on the Declaration of Independence.
01:00:40.800And why is the Declaration so important, and what is the relevance that people should know about it?
01:00:50.460Well, the Constitution sets up the government, the form of the government.
01:02:04.480And that's what I was interested in, that what establishes this whole notion of liberty?
01:02:10.800What establishes this order of rights?
01:02:13.700And so it matters if you think the government is the primary giver or grantor of rights and you receive rights and benefits from the government versus you have the rights and the government receives its authority from you.
01:02:35.420And I think that that border, being able to establish that in each case is important.
01:02:43.260And that's, if you go back, and that explains Justice Scalia's writings on the structure of the Constitution being the safeguard of these rights that you have that are antecedent and that are transcended.
01:02:58.200So I focus on that to always get the order right.
01:03:02.780When you farm, every farmer knows, like when you plant or when you plow, I don't know if you've ever plowed.
01:03:11.080I'm a city boy, so I've watched it on TV.
01:03:14.100So my granddaddy said, boy, he would always say, and he put a little cuss word in there from time.
01:03:20.620He said, and those rows better be straight.
01:03:23.480So you have to take your first row, and it has to be absolutely straight.
01:03:27.700Then you put your tire in a groove where the plows, especially if you're using a dish plow, and they go different ways, you go and you follow that.
01:03:37.960So now every subsequent row is straight.
01:03:41.320Well, going back to your point about precedent, what if that first row is crooked?
01:03:47.440Would you keep going, pretending that it's straight, or do you go back and make it straight?
01:03:54.160That's why you say, well, I'm not accepting precedent.
01:03:56.820If something doesn't make any sense, I can't – what am I going to do?0.54
01:04:00.680Am I a fool for following that or not questioning it?
01:04:03.940And where does it – I taught a course on stare decisis just for this point.
01:04:08.520It makes sense when you have this unwritten laws and when you have traditions and when barons are like ruling on cases in these rural areas in England.0.79
01:04:19.540But when you have positive law, when it's written down and you can see the deviation, who's the fool?0.90
01:04:28.160Why would you follow something that's absurd?
01:04:30.640Well, look, a great example of that, and a case I talk about quite a bit in the book, is the Kelo case, where Kelo involved a city that was condemning a woman's home.
01:04:45.500There's a tiny house, regular person's house, not a mansion, and for a public purpose, not a public use.
01:04:56.560And that started in southwest D.C., by the way, the precedent for that.
01:05:01.540And the court was willing to say that the public purpose was the equivalent of public use.
01:05:07.700Well, a public purpose could be to increase your tax base.
01:05:10.860Well, and actually as I was driving over here to do this, I wanted to – look, I pulled up the language of the Fifth Amendment and the relevant prohibition at the end of it is, nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.
01:05:31.360So that's the actual language. And Kilo, unfortunately, it was 5-4, the majority said that the city of New London, Connecticut could take her home, not for a highway or a road or a city building, but for a parking lot for a planned Pfizer building.
01:05:54.380And you dissented, you dissented, and it focused on the words public use versus purpose.
01:06:40.320A public purpose doesn't necessarily, is much, much broader.
01:06:45.640So just imagine you have a somewhat blighted area, but suddenly it's attractive to people with lots of money.
01:06:54.460And a city decides, well, we'd like to increase our tax base.
01:07:01.420Well, there are all these young people with lots of money who want to build these McMansions or these high-end $2 million or $3 million structures.
01:07:11.480Well, the public purpose would be to increase that tax base.
01:07:17.840And now you've given people who have authority to take your property a much broader way and much more power to take an individual's property.
01:07:31.700I took quite a bit of property at Yale for this reason.0.67
01:07:34.620If you go back to Georgia, if you go back to the South, you go to places like South Carolina, there was all this land that blacks owned in the way that my family received land over the years.0.55
01:07:53.180Well, a lot of that land was, there was aggressive effort, there were aggressive efforts to take, to use that land for developments.
01:08:06.000It could be for resorts in Hilton Head.
01:08:08.900It could be for strategic purposes in Harris Neck, Georgia.0.82
01:08:13.560It could be for conservation in places where blacks were subsistence farmers, like in McIntosh, Georgia.0.51
01:08:22.060So my only point is simply this, that the word – if you want to protect the property, you have to stick to the words in the Constitution or it sort of spreads out to broader powers that were not intended and public purpose allows it.
01:08:41.160Plus that word appears no place in the Constitution.
01:08:43.280Well, I will say even though you were in dissent, you did not command the majority in the court, I think over time the view you articulated has prevailed, and it's persuaded Texas and many other states have enacted laws to prevent the taking of public property for public purposes.
01:09:01.360And it was inspired by your very – Justice O'Connor used an effective analogy and dissent in that case where she said under this reasoning, the government could condemn every Motel 6 to build a Ritz-Carlton.
01:10:23.220And I think you see throughout the founding, all those things, those were always paired, liberty and property.
01:10:32.840And we treat it as though it's a benefit from the government rather than a right that transcends the government and is to be protected from the government.
01:10:42.880One thing you did there just a minute ago that is really powerful and that is a consistent theme of your jurisprudence is you understand the rights protected in the Constitution with an understanding of the context of history.
01:11:01.480So when you're talking about condemning land or property for public purpose rather than use, you quickly brought it to when government power is used, historically it has been used over and over by the rich and powerful against the more vulnerable in society, often against African-Americans or Hispanics or people who don't necessarily have the ability to defend themselves against government power.
01:11:29.580that's something also that you've powerfully done in the second amendment context uh and and one of
01:11:38.320the things that that you've said you and i when we were sitting down doing interviews you you
01:11:42.700talked about the importance of reconstruction that if you're going to understand american
01:11:46.780history in the constitution you got to understand reconstruction tell us about that well it's
01:13:18.840They have a right to defend themselves from these marauders.
01:13:24.400And anyone who lives in a rural area, who lives in the south, it could be in Texas, in rural Texas, everybody is armed for a variety of reasons.
01:13:33.220to defend themselves, to hunt, et cetera.
01:14:16.040If you look at the reports, they were saying they're getting killed down here with the Knights of Camellia, the Ku Klux Klan, et cetera.0.81
01:14:24.120And so you get the 14th Amendment and defining them, of course, answering Taney and responding to his notion that blacks cannot be citizens.
01:14:36.800But this also brings in the Privileges of Immunities Clause.
01:14:41.320And Taney was the author of Dred Scott, which if there's a decision that is more disgraceful than Plessy versus Ferguson, it was Dred Scott.
01:14:49.180Well, it is – for a lot of different reasons.
01:14:54.780I've spent a lot of time on Dred Scott and the history around Dred Scott.0.81
01:15:00.320But the whole point is that he – here's a man who's trying to figure out a way to say that no way blacks could ever be citizens of this country just by their very nature.
01:15:13.900And, of course, we revisit that old notion in the birthright case last term, but in a different way and for different reasons.
01:15:23.340But the 14th Amendment in this country is critical because it's basically the second founding.
01:15:31.360So what I think I owe my fellow citizens is not just to read the words of the Constitution, but to try to understand not just the 14th Amendment, but the revolution, leading up to the revolution, the history of England, the things that influence it, the Civil War, the post-Civil War, the Reconstruction era.
01:15:53.480And you may have to read people you don't necessarily agree with.
01:15:56.960For example, I read and reread Eric Foner on Reconstruction.
01:16:01.180Now, he's a revisionist historian, but he's fine.
01:16:04.040He does a great job of explaining Reconstruction and a lot of these problems, and I admire the work that he's done.
01:16:10.620At the same time, you may not agree with the revolutionary period with Murray Rothbard because he's a libertarian, but he's written a couple of thousand pages on this and conceived in liberty.
01:16:26.200And it's worth reading because it gives you that sort of granular understanding of the revolutionary period.
01:16:34.120But you told me a story about Justice Breyer when he was robbed.
01:19:04.540It's different now because I'm the oldest member as opposed to the youngest.
01:19:09.140As the New York Times said, the youngest and the cruelest.
01:19:13.460But, you know, it's just I've just changed perspective.
01:19:16.660But still, it's a human institution with decent people on board.
01:19:20.340So I saw Brett and Ashley at Lindsey Graham's funeral, and they've been friends. I've known them for 30 years. Ashley was on the 2000 George W. Bush campaign with Heidi and me, so we were all young staffers on that campaign.
01:19:35.120So I saw the two of them at Lindsay's funeral. I actually told Brett at the funeral a story during his confirmation hearing when Lindsay Graham went off. And I think it's his – Lindsay was a dear friend of mine and it was his finest moment, I believe, as a senator where he unloaded on the unfairness of what was happening.
01:19:58.000And my mother had not previously been a fan of Lindsey Graham's.
01:20:04.580And in the hearing, she texts me and she says, okay, I now love Lindsey Graham.
01:20:12.280And she goes online and gives him 40 bucks.
01:20:14.540And so I walk over to Lindsey, I pull out my phone and I show him the text from my mom.
01:20:30.900And as I said to you from the beginning, I do not understand a lot about this town.
01:20:36.580I don't know who has the time for all this animus toward other people.
01:20:41.020I don't spend any of my day on that sort of thing.
01:20:43.400But the lying that takes place, the attacks on financial disclosure, which was laughable in one way, but just painful to just the lies.
01:20:56.360But you and Mike Lee and the others who stood up are dearly appreciated because we could not believe the inundation of just misstatements and falsehoods.
01:21:13.340And we don't have the capacity at the court to defend ourselves.
01:21:17.560We don't have a bully pulpit or anything like that.
01:21:20.640Most of us just simply are doing our jobs.
01:21:23.840And we can disagree, you know, in the old days, I think the—I first became aware of the court when they're riding along U.S. 17 between Savannah and the farm.
01:21:40.780There were these impeach Earl Warren signs after Brown v. Board of Education.
01:21:45.960And so I understand that people have different ways of reacting to the work that we do.
01:21:55.440But this current environment that we're in is quite, excuse me, quite different from signs saying impeach Earl Warren.
01:22:07.000Thank you for – you've been incredibly generous with your time.
01:22:10.000Thank you for joining us on this podcast.
01:22:11.560Thank you for spending the time in the interviews to write this book.
01:22:17.300And look, I've said this before, but you are a true American hero.
01:22:21.000And I want to say to the folks listening, if you're a young person, there are a lot of young people that listen to this podcast.
01:22:26.760If you are a young person and you're looking for someone to admire, someone to emulate, someone to walk along a path and be inspired by, you would be very hard-pressed to find a better role model than Clarence Thomas.
01:22:43.640And that's why I wrote this book, because I think you are an incredibly historically significant human being and leader with courage and principle, and I am grateful.
01:22:58.720You can order the book, goingfurther.com, pre-order the book, buy it for your family.