Thursday

You Think You're Original Clarince T?


Slate doesn't. Out on a witch hunt from the start against a dear colleague of mine, Doug Kendall and Jim Ryan use "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" and the voluntary integration cases to demonstrate the contradiction in Thomas' originalism: That he invokes the will of the founding fathers when it suits his conservative points and not when it doesn't.

In Morse, they say, Clarince T argued that the original First Amendment didn't give schoolchildren any rights inside the schoolhouse because the founders didn't contemplate that. But then they say Mr. T contradicts himself in voluntary integration, because he doesn't ask whether the Fourteenth Amendment was originally meant to implicate voluntary integration:

The question is not asked because it does not yield an answer Justice Thomas would like. There is no way to make an argument, at least with a straight face, that the 14th Amendment was originally understood to prohibit voluntary school integration. No way. Indeed, given how flimsy the evidence is for Justice Thomas' other argument—that students have no free-speech rights in school—it's clear that he is not shy about stitching together a historical tale from very slim pieces of material. The fact that he doesn't even try to make the historical case in the voluntary integration decision speaks volumes.

Of course, Mr. Kendall and Mr. Ryan fail to mention all the cases where Thomas did cite to originalism: Seems to me like they just cherry-picked their examples to get to the conclusion they wanted, which kind of undermines the impact of their claim that Thomas did the same thing...

1 comment:

Kimbersmith said...

Thanks for standing up for me JP. Perhaps all those times I didn't cite to originalist intentions it was because I just didn't FEEL like it. Take THAT Kendall and Ryan. Assholes.