The leading intellectual on the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas, is also the people’s justice. Is that paradoxical? Not to me, it isn’t.
We live under the rule of law, which means that we live under the rule of words. Words can, of course, be ambiguous, and applying them to a particular situation can be tricky. But any good-faith effort to apply the laws or the Constitution to a particular case must always begin with a common-sense understanding of the words in question: what they mean to a normal reader.
When proponents of the Constitution argued for its adoption, as in the Federalist Papers, they did not say that delegates to state conventions should take it on faith; that it is too hard for a normal person to understand; that only a small priesthood of initiates could tell you what it really means. No: everyone assumed that the language of the Constitution was normal English, and it could be understood by ordinary persons of good intelligence.
Again, that doesn’t mean that there could be no disagreement or room for debate, but rather that Americans of good intelligence could engage in those debates on an equal footing. Certainly no one at the time suggested that the words of the Constitution had some arcane meaning that would be “discovered,” and would take our government in a new direction, 100 or 200 years hence. I don’t suppose anyone would have voted to adopt the Constitution if it had been sold on that basis.
This is why I have long thought that it would be a good idea to have one or two Supreme Court justices who are not lawyers. These days, most Supreme Court justices are members of a caste who likely have been aiming for a position on the Court since high school. Nothing wrong with that, perhaps, but it would be good to have one or two members of the Court whose experience is different–someone who spent his career in the business world, preferably.
All of this is a preface to the following brief clip of Justice Thomas explaining his judicial philosophy as a “textualist.” My comment would be, as a judge, if you are not a textualist, what in the world are you? Thomas has of course expounded on his views many times in various forums, and this brief clip is only a glimpse into his thinking. But, in part because it is brief, I thought it was worth sharing with our readers:
