Source: http://justicethomas.com/category/analysis/
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 01:51:13+00:00

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Of the various powers granted to Congress by Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, none has been more central to modern federal legislation than the authority “[t]o regulate commerce . . . among the several states.” The Commerce Clause has been the basis for congressional enactments dealing with topics from child support recovery to religious land use, to take only a couple of examples. In the sixty years following the New Deal era, the Supreme Court repeatedly upheld such statutes as within the scope of Congress’ commerce power. The Court interpreted the term “commerce” broadly to cover different forms of economic activity, and it held that, in addition to regulating interstate commerce, Congress can regulate activities that substantially affect interstate commerce.
This essay addresses a basic question about Justice Clarence Thomas’s originalist jurisprudence. When Justice Thomas looks for the original meaning of the Constitution, does he seek (a) the meaning intended by the Framers at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia (“original intent”), (b) the meaning as understood by the delegates to the thirteen state ratifying conventions (“original understanding”), (c) the objective meaning of the Constitution’s text at the time of its adoption (“objective meaning”), or (d) some other type of original meaning? The answer to this question may be helpful in predicting the outcome of constitutional issues that might come before the Supreme Court and benefit litigants deciding what arguments to make to the Court. The answer also may contribute to scholarly assessments of the theory behind Justice Thomas’s decisions.
My research leads me to conclude that the answer to date is that Justice Thomas, unlike certain other originalists, has not shown a notable preference for any of the first three kinds of original meanings listed above. Instead, Thomas has developed his own brand of originalist jurisprudence. He looks for what might be called the “general original meaning.” When Thomas decides constitutional issues, what is important to him is an agreement among multiple sources of evidence of the original meaning. Rather than focusing on whether historic documents might show the original intent of the Framers, the original understanding of the ratifiers, or the original objective meaning, Justice Thomas looks for a general meaning shown in common by all relevant sources.
In advancing this thesis, I must begin by making one important disclaimer. Although I clerked for Justice Thomas in the 1991 October Term of the Supreme Court and have had regular contact with him since, we have not discussed the subject of this essay. I claim no inside knowledge, and I am revealing no confidential information. Instead, in this essay, I have sought to discern which original meaning of the Constitution matters to Justice Thomas solely from his written opinions.
Justice Thomas has extended his unapologetic effort of recovering the original meaning of the Constitution into the law of criminal procedure.
Justice Thomas has also proved willing to part company with precedent and his peers in pursuit of the Fourth Amendment’s original meaning. In Safford Unified School District No. 1 v. Redding, the Court held that school administrators violated the Constitution by performing a partial strip search of a middle-school girl who was accused of distributing pain pills to other students. In dissent, Justice Thomas explained that Fourth Amendment jurisprudence cannot ignore the doctrine of in loco parentis that gave early American school officials substantial discretion to establish and enforce rules to maintain order. Because a parent could have lawfully performed the same search as the school administrators, the Fourth Amendment should not restrict school officials from doing what is necessary to maintain order.
The Fifth Amendment, which provides that no person . . . shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” has also proved ripe for Justice Thomas’ originalist reexamination. In United States v. Hubbell, the Court held that someone who is subpoenaed to provide documents could not invoke the Fifth Amendment unless the act of producing those documents would be the equivalent of self-incriminating testimony (such as a confession that the documents belonged to that person). Although Justice Thomas (joined by Justice Scalia) agreed that the Fifth Amendment protects testimonial acts of production, he explained that the Court should go much further and apply the Fifth Amendment to the compelled production of all incriminating evidence. As he explained, the Fifth Amendment should protect all witnesses, as that term was originally understood. Justice Thomas examined the founding-era evidence to show that the Fifth Amendment should apply even to witnesses who provide only documentary evidence, not just testifying witnesses.
As in other areas of the law, here we see Justice Thomas returning to the original meaning of the Constitution and restoring the liberty that has been so crucial to our Nation’s growth and prosperity. And perhaps more importantly, he has laid the foundation for more principled law in the future.
The Fifteenth Amendment provides that “[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” and it further empowers Congress to “enforce” this right “by appropriate legislation.” Justice Thomas has been steadfast in his support of this transformational provision. But he has recognized that Congress may not override the power of States to control their elections. In several opinions, Justice Thomas has pushed back against Congress’s attempts to seize authority over elections that the Constitution did not confer upon it.
Early in his tenure, Justice Thomas gave a speech in Memphis, Tennessee to the National Bar Association—one of the nation’s oldest organizations of African-American attorneys. In that famous speech, Justice Thomas claimed the right “to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I’m black. I come to state that I’m a man, free to think for myself and do as I please. I’ve come to assert that I am a judge and I will not be consigned the unquestioned opinions of others.” In perhaps no other area of the law has Justice Thomas’s assertion of independence been more notable—and indeed more important—than with regard to affirmative action. No one has advocated more doggedly for Justice Harlan’s conception of a “color blind” Constitution than has Justice Thomas.
So much of the power of Justice Thomas’s work on the Supreme Court springs from his vigilant contemplation of the fuller context of the Court’s decisions. Even when construing statutes, as much as in interpreting the Constitution, Justice Thomas exhibits a constant awareness of how the Court’s exercise of its duties contributes to the greater goals of preserving freedom and attaining equal treatment under law for all Americans. This judicial virtue is on full display in Justice Thomas’s Second Amendment jurisprudence.
By a single-Justice majority, including Justice Thomas, the Supreme Court has recognized that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s fundamental right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). With the loss of Justice Scalia, of course, that basic constitutional right now hangs in the balance. But even if the individual right to own and use a firearm for self-defense survives at the high court, how far government may go to restrict and regulate that right remains a wide-open question.
In certain contexts, the Court has given the government extremely broad leeway to take away a person’s Second Amendment right forever, and Justice Thomas, alone among the remaining eight Members of the Court, has raised constitutional objections. Most Americans may be surprised to learn that Congress has imposed a lifetime ban on the possession of a gun by anyone who has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor act of “domestic violence,” which the Court has said may include, for example, firmly squeezing a spouse’s arm. United States v. Castleman (2014). Most recently, the Court has interpreted this federal lifetime ban on gun ownership to extend to any “reckless” act that results in injury to a family member, such as texting while driving. Voisine v. United States (2016). Only Justice Thomas objected to this statutory decision on the ground that it treats a fundamental protection of the Bill of Rights “so cavalierly” as to relegate the Second Amendment to “second-class” status. It is difficult to imagine the Court would let Congress permanently revoke a person’s First Amendment right to use social media based on a single guilty plea for texting while driving, but that is essentially what the Court has said Congress may do when it comes to the right to keep and bear arms. Justice Thomas has stood firm against this encroachment on individual liberty.
And Justice Thomas has stressed the importance of the Second Amendment in our Nation’s long march toward equal justice under law, including equal justice for Americans of all races. When the Court held in McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) (again by a tenuous five-to-four margin) that the Second Amendment’s individual right to keep and bear arms is binding on the States under the Fourteenth Amendment, Justice Thomas wrote separately, with particular focus on the savage legacy of slavery, to emphasize that this right should be viewed as a privilege of citizenship that no State may abridge.
The Fourteenth Amendment, he pointed out, was ratified “to repair the Nation from the damage slavery had caused” and was based on the historical lesson that “slavery, and the measures designed to protect it, were irreconcilable with the principles of equality, government by consent, and inalienable rights proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence and embedded in our constitutional structure.” One of the motivating purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment was to stop those exercising local authority in the former Confederate States from continuing to deprive African-American citizens of the fundamental right to keep and bear arms. Justice Thomas recited the history of how Southerners from before the Civil War had tried to suppress slave rebellions by depriving African Americans of their basic rights to learn to read, to speak out in dissent, to assemble peaceably, and to possess and carry firearms. In his separate opinion in McDonald, Justice Thomas, again alone among his colleagues, urged the Court to recognize, in light of this history, that the Second Amendment right was originally meant to be given stronger and more consistent application as a substantive guarantee protected by the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, rather than being relegated to uncertain and situational application under the procedural protections of the Due Process Clause.
These Second Amendment precedents show Justice Thomas’s abiding dedication to ensuring that the substantive liberties guaranteed by the Constitution are given effective and meaningful protection and that the fundamental provisions of the Bill of Rights are applied equally and consistently for the benefit of all Americans.

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