Supreme Court

Justice Thomas Speaks Out

-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is known for not asking questions during oral arguments. Thomas has not asked a question from the bench in 6 years and no other Supreme Court justice has made it through a single year without asking a question.

in an AP interview, he defended his silence. Thomas said the habit of frequent interruptions is unproductive and “I think that when somebody’s talking, somebody ought to listen.”

Thomas claims that most of the information is already in the briefs and amicus curiae, “and there are a few questions around the edges.”

They don’t call it an oral monologue. It’s called an oral argument. This is the opportunity for the Justices to test the validity and soundness of the attorney’s arguments. It would be a waste of time for attorneys to get up before the Court and simply recite their briefs.

Thomas concludes by saying “I don’t like to badger people.” Is that how he sees it? Either you remain utterly silent or you badger people? In logic, this is know as the False Dichotomy fallacy. This type of logical fallacy occurs when only two alternatives are considered, when in fact there is at least one additional option.

H/T: The Hill, The Washington Post.

69 thoughts on “Justice Thomas Speaks Out”

  1. Incurious is one way to put it, Elaine. It really isn’t an attractive quality in someone who is supposed to be serving as an impartial trier of fact. Active questioning of both benches is integral to doing the job properly. Otherwise, why have a trial with an interrogative and adversarial function? Relying solely upon briefs? He might as well be taking a nap.

  2. Has anyone ever seen Thomas speak at the same time as Scalia? Ventriloquism isn’t as easy as you might think and Scalia isn’t that talented. Unless you consider interfering with electoral process, perverting the course of justice and urinating on the Constitution talents. However, the robes do hide the arm running up Thomas’ pants so they got that going for them. Which is nice.

  3. He’s an incurious man who reads the briefs, thinks they contain all the information he needs to render a decision, and has no questions. That does not speak well of his intellect.

  4. For you, TalkinDog:

    “The very beasts associate the ideas of things that are like each other or that have been found together in their experience; and they could hardly survive for a day if they ceased to do so. But who attributes to the animals a belief that the phenomena of nature are worked by a multitude of invisible animals or by one enormous and prodigiously strong animal behind the scenes? It is probably no injustice to the brutes to assume that the honor of devising a theory of this latter sort must be reserved for human reason.” Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion

    Whether Dog has blessed or cursed America with Justice Thomas remains an interesting exercise for human reason but not, in my opinion, a terribly difficult one.

  5. It’s very simple: Thomas is a puppet, & no one wants to put their hand up the back of his robe to make him talk (or give the appearence of doing so).

  6. Anonymously Yours,

    Justice Thomas’s wife only allows him to count her income on their joint tax returns when not doing so becomes too scandalous for even our lawless corporate oligarchs to abide. Others have gotten theirs, so Justice Thomas feels fully entitled to get his, too — whatever they and he consider theirs and his.

    “When Rodrigo Borgia was 62, after 35 years as Cardinal and Vice-Chancellor, his character, habits, principles or lack of them, uses of power, methods of enrichment, mistresses and seven children were well enough known to his colleagues in the College and Curia to evoke from young Giovanni de’ Medici at his first conclave the comment on Borgia’s elevation to the Papacy, ‘Flee, we are in the hands of a wolf.” — Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly

    Not only a lone wolf, I fear, but a pack of five of them.

  7. Thomas is a shabby excuse for a Justice and a poor excuse for a decent human being.

    He was appointed by George H.W. Bush, and we should never forgive Bush for that.

  8. The other eight justices badger the lawyers incessently. It is not an oral argument. Justice Thomas need not ask a single question in twenty years with these schmucks with their Bronx accents jabbering and poking their points to the audience. Dog forbid that they ever televise these events. The orals are bad enough. The drama this past week with the health care showed me only that Scalia and the federal bench are no more entitled to ScaliaCare than I am to medical care on the public dime. AARP exists to sell us medical insurance. It is time that the talkindogs on the bench have to pay up like the rest of us. The two new Justices were heard on television in an interview recently lamenting the fact that they have to jump in with their questions right away or get frozen out. Justice Thomas may be a bad Justice but it is not because he keeps mum in oral argument. As he said when he was an Assistant Missouri Attorney General back in Jefferson City, MO in the seventies when asked about the Confederate Flag on the wall behind his desk in his office: I am unreconstructed. Y’ll know what that means do you not?

  9. Why ask questions when you already have your mind made up? They could move a lot more cases though the court if they didn’t waste time pretending to care what the lawyers want to argue before them in chambers.

    Hell, since the little 5 are so obvious in their opinions, most cases could be decided by Cokie Roberts telling us what they think. The clerks write the opinion to match bullshit rationalizations they want to bring

  11. Justice Thomas seems to live by the aphorism: “Better to keep the mouth closed and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.”

    Unfortunately for Justice Thomas, not only does his closed mouth make him appear stupid, but on the few occasions when he opens it, he confirms the appearance.

  12. MM….. Very good…

    But you can also look at it from the perspective of his wife…… He will only speak when he is told too…….

  14. If Justice Scalia wanted us to know what Justice Thomas thinks, Justice Scalia would tell Justice Thomas to tell us what he thinks.

  15. Nal:

    “Thomas concludes by saying ‘I don’t like to badger people.’”

    *******************

    Can we get an Anita Hill comment on this assertion, please?

  17. No lawyer I but, once again, rcampbell succinctly says it all, IMO.

  19. I never argued a case before the Supreme Court but did argue before the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and, a much longer time ago, probably in 1968, before the Court of Military Appeals. I looked forward to questions from the bench because they permitted me to focus on points that were troubling the judges. Rarely did I have to go through an entire argument without questions and when I did it was quite boring. Judge, now Justice, Ginsburg was on the bench during several of my arguments and I have no recollection that she had a tendency to ask probing questions.

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