“The institution of which I am a part, if someone says that a line of opinion will leak from everyone, you will say: ‘Oh, this is impossible. No one would ever do that. “There is such a belief in the rule of law, a belief in the court, a belief in what we do, that it has been denied,” Thomas said. “It was beyond anyone’s understanding, or at least someone’s imagination, that someone would do it.”
The 73-year-old judge’s comments were given at the Old Parkland Conference event, sponsored by the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute in Dallas. The remarks echoed those he made earlier this month in Atlanta, when he said government institutions should not be “harassed” to provide what some see as a preferred outcome.
Thomas was interviewed by former lawyer John Yu, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, over a three-day conference dinner focused on the challenges facing black Americans.
Thomas, who was appointed in 1991 and sat on the bench with appointments since 1993. Ginsberg for nearly 30 years, said: “We actually trusted each other. We may have been a dysfunctional family, but we were a family and we loved it. So I trusted each other, laughed together, went to lunch together every day, and I can only hope you can keep it. “
The leak, he said, has undermined trust and “you’re starting to look over your shoulder. It’s kind of infidelity that you can explain it, but you can’t undo it.”
The final opinion in the case – which is a direct challenge to the maintenance of the federal constitutional right to abortion by Rowe v. Wade – has not been published and the votes and language may still change before that. The opinion is expected to be issued only at the end of June.
“I think what happened in court is extremely bad,” Thomas said. “I wonder how long we will have these institutions with the speed with which we are undermining them, and then I wonder when they will not exist or will be destabilized, what we will have as a state – and I do not. we lose them. “
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