Sunday, May 10, 2009
Supreme Court watch: Leah Ward Sears and Clarence Thomas
The front page of the Washington Post has a very interesting story about the enduring friendship between Justice Thomas and Leah Ward Sears, the relatively liberal George Supreme Court judge who is on the short list to fill Justice Souter's seat. The relationship started with an expression of sympathy, or even empathy, from Justice Thomas when Ms. Sears was under political attack at home.
One day in the early 1990s, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas telephoned Leah Ward Sears to introduce himself. She was a rising star in Georgia's legal community, a relatively liberal black woman on the state's conservative Supreme Court. Thomas had read about political attacks against Sears and called to say he didn't like it.
They have remained friends ever since, notwithstanding their big political differences and pressure from the rest of the black legal community, the leading lights of which boycotted her swearing in as Chief Justice of the George Supreme Court simply because Thomas was going to attend (the noted exception being Andrew Young, to his credit).
Now the question is whether that friendship will cost Sears the nomination, or help her get past conservatives in the Senate who might otherwise object. Both are possibilities.
In any case, the story reflects well on both Thomas and Sears, and not so well on the ideologues for whom everything personal is political and complex individuals are drawn as two dimensional cartoons.
2 Comments:
By 
, at
Sun May 10, 12:45:00 PM:
Subject matter aside, that article is written explicitly including so much of the lefty identity politics word formations that I can barely contain myself. To think that two people could actually be friends despite different politics! Horror! To think, there is such a thing as "Thurgood Marshalls" personal seat on the supreme court! Who knew! That black lawyers characterize Justice Thomas as a traitor to his race! Wow.
What BS. The Post is awful.
Justice Thomas explicitly made one of the first serious arguments against lefty demagoguery during his contentious confirmation, when he used the memorable phrasing "high tech lynching" to describe the response of the Democrat power structures to any black man who thinks for himself, or does for himself. Thomas argued against the very dependency model of government that Obama is seeking to imbue into the deepest fabric of our society, and he stood all by himself against the media attacks that have come to characterize the end of the free press and the near total cooperation of newspapers into the propaganda arm of the party.
Justice Thomas is a hero, and his friendship speaks highly of the independence of mind Justice Sears must have. Of course the Democrats will not support her, she evidently refuses to be their confirmed property.
By 
AmPowerBlog, at
Mon May 11, 08:43:00 AM:
"In any case, the story reflects well on both Thomas and Sears, and not so well on the ideologues for whom everything personal is political ..."
Good point. Now maybe if I could just be friends with Ezra Klein!
