Thirty-two years ago, Senator Joe Biden gaveled the Senate Judiciary Committee to order and addressed Clarence Thomas.
Senator Biden: The committee will please come to order. Judge, tough day and tough night for you, I know. Let me ask, do you have anything you'd like to say before we begin? And I understand that your preference is — which is totally and completely understandable — that we go one hour tonight, 30 minutes on each side. Is — Am I correct in that?
Judge Thomas: That's right.
Senator Biden: Do you have anything you'd like to say?
Clarence Thomas took the microphone and delivered a four-part opening. First, he issued a flat denial around the sexual harassment charges made against him by Professor Anita Hill.
Judge Thomas: Senator, I would like to start by saying unequivocally, uncategorically, that I deny each and every single allegation against me today that suggested in any way that I had conversations of a sexual nature or about pornographic material with Anita Hill, that I ever attempted to date her, that I ever had any personal sexual interest in her, or that I in any way ever harassed her.
Second, he angrily attacked the confirmation process and the allegations as a national disgrace.
A second, and I think more important point. I think that this today is a travesty. I think that it is disgusting. I think that this hearing should never occur in America. This is a case in which this sleaze, this dirt, was searched for by staffers of members of this committee, was then leaked to the media, and this committee and this body validated it and displayed it at prime time over our entire nation. How would any member on this committee, any person in this room, or any person in this country, would like sleaze said about him or her in this fashion? Or this dirt dredged up and this gossip and these lies displayed in this manner? How would any person like it?
Third, he professed indifference towards the Supreme Court and asserted the importance of his integrity and good name.
The Supreme Court is not worth it. No job is worth it. I am not here for that. I am here for my name, my family, my life, and my integrity. I think something is dreadfully wrong with this country when any person, any person in this free country would be subjected to this.
This is not a closed room. There was an FBI investigation. This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It's a national disgrace.
Lastly, he played the race card, and tried to turn the sexual harassment allegations made against him by a Black woman law professor into what he famously called a “high tech lynching.”
And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I'm concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. -- U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.
Thirty-two years later, the institutional integrity of the Supreme Court has been annihilated. The American people have lost trust in its rulings and members. They have been appalled by the shoddy character of the judges, their intemperance, extremism, pique, anger and entitlement. The court has become the lifetime redoubt of an unaccountable judiciary that holds itself arrogantly above the law, ethics and transparency.
There is no justice on the court who has played a greater role in the destruction of its stature than the crooked Clarence Thomas. His ethics, judgment and integrity are a disgrace — and not just to him, but to every justice, every paralyzed US senator, who refuses to look at the collapse of the court’s legitimacy in the eye, and declare what is obviously true: the American judiciary has been corrupted by politics, money and arrogance.
The revelations about Clarence Thomas began with investigative reports in ProPublica, which detailed his inappropriate relationship with a man who functions as his “sugar daddy.” Harlan Crow is a MAGA mega-donor, who collects Hitler memorabilia and has interests before the court.
Now it has been reported again by ProPublica that there is more. The Thomas’s great-nephew, who they were raising as their son, attended a prestigious and very expensive boarding school. Do you want to guess who paid for it? That’s right, Harlan Crow, but I’m sure he didn’t want anything from it.