Going Further—The Incomparable Clarence Thomas Week In Review

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome, it is Verdict with Ted Cruz, Week in Review,
Ben Ferguson with you, and we've got one big story
for you. If you missed the incredible interview with Clarence
Thomas that Senator Cruz did about his new book, well,
then we've got it for you in its entirety. It
was a phenomenal week with the book launch and an
incredible story about the history of Clarence Thomas. how he

(00:22):
got to be a Supreme Court justice, and a lot
of questions and facts about him, well, that he answers
that you may have never even heard. It's The Weekend Review,
and it starts right now.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Today we have a very special podcast. My brand new
book is coming out. It's my fifth book, and it
is entitled Going Further, The Incomparable Clarence Thomas. And this
book does a couple of things. Number one, It tells
the story of Justice Thomas, a truly extraordinary human being
and extraordinary justice. It tells his life story, a journey

(00:55):
that is unlike the journey of any other justice who
has served on the Supreme Court. But it also takes
up his three decades of jurisprudence and tries to explain
it in a way that is accessible, a way that
is understandable, a way that brings home why it matters,
why it matters for the court, why it matters for
the Constitution, why it matters for the country. And today,

(01:17):
what makes this podcast very special, and by the way,
the book will be available August 25th. You can pre-order it.
There's a special website for that called goingfurther.com, goingfurther.com. I
would encourage you, go to the website, pre-order the book.
And today's podcast is a very special one because our
guest is none other than the incomparable Justice Clarence Thomas. Justice, welcome.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
Well, thank you. It's a little embarrassing to say you'd
be called incomparable. Let me call lots of things, though.
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
I really appreciate your joining us. I think this is
the first podcast you've ever done.

Speaker 3 (01:52):
I have no idea. I think so. I don't normally
do any sort of, I don't do much media type things.
But you're you. I mean, I've known you now, what,
30 years? Yeah. And seeing you through different phases in
your life as a law clerk. hanging out in my

(02:15):
chambers as the SG of Texas and now Senator. So
it's been a long journey. And also, it's also an
opportunity to say you're one of the people who actually
stands up, particularly at times when others seem to wither.

(02:36):
And I appreciate it. And more personally, when my wife
and I were under attack, for obvious reasons. You and
Mike Lee and some of the other friends would stand up,
Senator Kennedy, et cetera. So I really appreciate that.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
Justice, that is very kind of you, and especially for
you to observe that I stand up in the face
of criticism and attacks. That is powerful coming from you
because you're someone who knows what that's like. And has
done so in a way that has been world-changing. And

(03:16):
so Justice Thomas, decades ago, wrote a phenomenal autobiography. My
Grandfather's Son. And you told your own story. And it
may be the best autobiography I've ever read. I read
it at the time it came out. It inspired me. Actually,
shortly after it came out, I was at home. And

(03:38):
as it so happened, a... young African-American boy, he was
probably 15, 16 years old, came by the house, and
I think he was selling magazines or something, knocked on
the door, and I struck up a conversation with him.
I went and grabbed the book and gave it to
him and said, look, you should read this. You may
not have heard Justice Thomas' story and journey, but I

(03:58):
hope this will inspire you. And I think for a
lot of the folks who listen to the podcast or
watch the podcast, and some people listen to it on
their phones, others watch it on YouTube or Facebook, they
know who you are, but they don't know your actual story.
And it is, as I mentioned at the beginning, it
is unlike any other justices on the court. So maybe

(04:21):
we can just start with, tell us about growing up.
You grew up in Pinpoint, Georgia. What was it like
growing up?

Speaker 3 (04:29):
Well, I was born in Pinpoint, but most of my
growing up, I've been fortunate. I think the misfortunes you have,
can lead to different things. And the house in Pinpoint
burned down when I was six in the first grade.
Then we lived in a tenement with my mother in

(04:49):
one room in Savannah for about a year and eventually
wound up living with our grandparents, moving there when I
was seven. And that was probably, well, actually was the
best thing that could have ever happened to me because
that was life-changing.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
You describe in your book, and I recount in my book,
when you were in that tenement and that it did
not have indoor plumbing, and so you used a chamber pot,
and you describe walking down the stairs carrying a chamber pot.

Speaker 3 (05:21):
Oh, I fell down. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
It ended up being coated in urine. I mean, that's–
it's a pretty.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
Yeah, well, it was– you know, it's sort of what
I think of people saying they're having a bad day. Yeah.
and you're seven years old, and that happens, and you
don't have a shower or the kind of a bathroom
that people would normally have, you realize, I mean, to me,

(05:50):
it defined a bad day. But then things that happened
after that outweigh that. There's a wonderful song by a
black minister that you hear, from time to time, if
you go to a funeral with small southern black churches,

(06:11):
and I won't complain. And, you know, you can have
all these bad things, this litany of bad things happen,
and you can say, I won't complain, because it's outweighed
by all the good things that have happened. And that's
pretty much my life. And those good things began with
my grandparents and My grandfather was a Catholic convert, which

(06:36):
was an oddity. Catholics were an oddity in Savannah. Black
Catholics were really an oddity. And it was because of
that we were educated at parochial schools with my Irish nuns.
And those in combination, my grandparents, the neighborhood I grew
up in, the nuns, Catholicism forged a foundation that I've

(07:06):
benefited from.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
Well, and your deep faith is integral to who you are,
who you are as a man, I think who you
are as a justice to your journey. Many people don't
know you almost became a priest, and for a long
time you thought that's what you wanted to do.

Speaker 3 (07:23):
Well, I think I would have been a priest had
the bishops at the time or the leadership in the
church been as firm and had the resolve of the
nuns during segregation and desegregation and civil rights movement, etc.
My nuns were immovable as far as their propagation of

(07:49):
the faith, their belief in us. they were the ones
who planted the seed that in God's eyes, and you
heard it at home too, we're all equal. That God
made us, we were made in his image and likeness.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
So were the nuns more willing to speak out about
civil rights?

Speaker 3 (08:08):
They were in their way. Of course, they had a
vow of chastity and poverty and obedience. So there's only
so much, but they were adamant. And they were adamant
outwardly to the world and inwardly to us. So we
couldn't use race or some of the other things as excuses.

(08:32):
And it's hard to put it in context, but when
I was in the second and third grade, this is
again post-Brown, and the Georgia legislature was in the midst
of drafting legislation that was reasserting segregation.

Speaker 2 (08:51):
And for our listeners, Brown is Brown versus Board of Education,
which was a seminal Supreme Court decision in 1954 that
overturned Plessy versus Ferguson. Plessy versus Ferguson, I think, is
one of the most– in fact, almost everyone thinks is
one of the most disgraceful decisions the courts has ever decided.

Speaker 3 (09:09):
Where it.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
Embraced the doctrine of separate but equal. And Brown overturned
it in order that schools be desegregated. And you were
a student when this, I mean, this impacted your life.

Speaker 3 (09:23):
Well, I started first grade in 1954. Yeah. But still,
schools were still segregated.

Speaker 2 (09:31):
Do you remember as a little kid, like being a
first grader, were you aware of Brown at the time?

Speaker 3 (09:36):
Well, no. Brown had almost, I mean, you're a kid.

Speaker 2 (09:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
And school meant you got like a new pair of
pants and. It was the first time I'd been to school.
I went with my cousins to a little school called
Haven Home School. But then when the house burned down,
I moved in. There's a big difference between urban poverty
and rural poverty. And rural, we were with relatives. it was,

(10:00):
we were always together. You could run around barefooted and
everybody knew you.

Speaker 2 (10:05):
It was sort of an enclave. And you didn't grow
up with English as your first language.

Speaker 3 (10:09):
Well, it was a version. We, people know it now,
they celebrate it back then. They used to make fun
of us. In Georgia, there's a dialect called Geechee. Mm-hmm.
And in South Carolina, they call it Gullah. But it's just,
it's a patois that for people who were not, who

(10:30):
did not assimilate in the culture or who were not
a part of the culture, we were isolated near the water.
So you kept that language. And that's the way I,
until I moved to Savannah, that was all I knew.
They called us, back then they said we were bad talkin'.
Today they celebrate it as a cultural thing. But when

(10:53):
I moved to Savannah, you were in urban poverty, which
was quite different. And I'm not going to go into
all the details. But then when I went to live
with my grandparents, even though the schools were segregated, they
were parochial schools. And that was different from the public

(11:13):
schools because there was quite a bit of order. You
wore a uniform. The bell rang a certain time. You
said the Pledge of Allegiance in the schoolyard before you
marched in. You had a catechism class. It was a
first class. It was every unison, good morning, sister. There

(11:34):
was a lot of order, and that's what my grandfather wanted.

Speaker 2 (11:37):
Now, I think anyone understanding your life has to start
by understanding your grandfather. You were... raised by your grandparents principally,
and your grandfather, Myers Anderson, I think you would say
was the most important man in your life. And tell
us about your grandfather.

Speaker 3 (11:56):
Well, I mean, he was not only the most important,
I think he's the greatest man I've known, and my
grandmother is the greatest woman. They were, and that's what
I mean when I say, look, you can look at
the negative side of things, but the blessings are enormous.
I mean, to be, just think of the idea of
living with those two people and being raised by them.

(12:19):
And you can, after all these years, say that they
are the two greatest people you've ever known.

Speaker 2 (12:25):
Well, and he instilled a lot of discipline in you.
He was, I think, a hard man and a strong man.

Speaker 3 (12:31):
Yeah. Well, you're from Texas. When you live a hard life,
you have to be hard or you collapse. I mean,
today we are inundated with fragile people. you are not permitted.
And when you live in poverty and you have to
figure things out, and he had a total of nine

(12:52):
months of education. My grandmother had six years, and those
weren't six full years, six, nine months. They knew how
to make do with life. They knew how to make
a way in the world without no education. So things
that we have today, like education, freedom, etc. They prized,

(13:17):
they dreamt about. They wanted us to have a chance
to have those things.

Speaker 2 (13:22):
Well, and your grandparents prioritized education with you and reading
in particular. That became an outlet for you as a boy.

Speaker 3 (13:29):
Well, they were absolute about education. But the other thing
was work. He didn't believe in sports. That was foolishness.
We didn't have time for that. We delivered fuel oil
in the winter and we farmed in the summer.

Speaker 2 (13:44):
You know, one story you told that stood out to
me is that when you were delivering fuel oil, and
there were times when it was really cold, your grandfather
wouldn't let you wear gloves.

Speaker 3 (13:52):
No. He lost a finger on his right hand working,
and he never really got too much into the details
of it. But it must have involved a glove because
he would not, I mean, he got caught in a
chain or a winch or something, and it ripped it

(14:13):
off about right. above the first knuckle or below the
first knuckle. And so he would make us work with
no gloves. And for us, cold would be 40 degrees
in Georgia. You felt like you were freezing. But he believed.

(14:35):
It was a way not to be harsh or anything
like that. It was, he thought, safety. It was safer
not to have gloves on.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
Now, you tell a story about being in Catholic high
school and one of the boys passing you a note
about Martin Luther King. Tell us that story and how
it impacted you.

Speaker 3 (14:58):
Well, that was only one student out of dozens, and
there was one bad apple, and he wasn't there very long,
but it was my first year in the seminary, and
There were two of us, two blacks in the seminary.
I was the only one in my class. I was
a sophomore. There was a young man behind me in

(15:20):
the ninth grade. And the note was, I mean, it
was offensive, but it wasn't debilitating. And you say, you
consider the sender. And it just said on the outside
something like, I like you. Martin Luther King, and then
you open it up and it said dead on the inside,

(15:42):
something like that. And it was, you know, again, this
is 1964, 65, a lot going on. And, you know,
I knew who it was. I know who it is.
I'm not going to say who it was. But he
left after a year or so. And that was that.
But the rest of my classmates were and have been

(16:06):
just phenomenal. You know, I was treated better there in
the minor seminary. Because remember, we're at the beginning of desegregation.
This is 1964. The next two years after my first year,
I'd be the only black in that school. And I
was treated very well. I was a really good student.

(16:28):
I was treated fairly. The great thing about it was
if you got a 95 in physics, you got a
95 in physics. Right. Latin was the nemesis of most kids.
I did very, very well at St. John Vianney Minor Seminaries.
And I have zero complaints. It was, again, one of
the benefits that I received in Savannah. I was treated,

(16:54):
and I like to say this for obvious reasons, I
was treated better there than I was at Yale.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
Well, and your time at Yale.
In fact, you draw an analogy between two kinds of snakes,
which I think is revealing.

Speaker 3 (17:11):
Well, I think most people who live in rural areas
know the difference. My grandfather always used this analogy. And
the difference between a rattlesnake and a moccasin, which we
had both, and they were pretty big in Georgia, in
South Georgia. A rattlesnake always warned you. And if you
gave it time, it'll get out of your way. You

(17:33):
leave me alone, I'll leave you alone. A moccasin basically
wouldn't warn you. And its attitude was, look, I was
here first, and you're going to have a bad day.
And I'm not moving. But his point was about the warning,
that you had some people in Georgia who didn't like blacks,
and they were bigots, and they were openly so.

Speaker 2 (17:55):
And what you said is the Southern... The southern racists
were like rattlesnakes.

Speaker 3 (17:59):
They were like rattlesnakes.

Speaker 2 (18:00):
You knew who they were. They made noise, and they
were visible. But when you went to the north and
the northeast, they were like moccasins. They were hidden until
they'd strike.

Speaker 3 (18:08):
Yeah, and the attitude. That was sort of one of
the things that surprised me. We were told basically that
the north was the Holy Grail. So it was shocking
to see in New England the kind of, ethnic divisions,
the bigotry toward minorities, etc.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
Now, what is it that attracted you to being a priest?
Because that's what you thought you wanted to spend your
life doing.

Speaker 3 (18:36):
Well, I'm Catholic. I was an altar boy. I loved
being an altar boy. I loved, we used to get
these magazines, marrying old priests and serving, you know, kids
who were, had disease or were poor or were, having difficulties,

(18:57):
and you begin to feel that that would be a
good way to spend your life. And then it becomes
an issue when you enter the minor seminary. It's really
a time of discernment and to see whether you have
the capabilities. And I like the idea of being called
to serve to do that. When you When you have

(19:21):
a vocation, you're asking yourself, what is God calling me
to do? Right. And that became actually, again, but for
the weakness of the bishops, I think I'd be a
priest today. Or not specific bishops, but the church itself
seemed to be vacillating on the issue of race. And

(19:44):
to me, the big, the major wrong in the country,
the major major contradiction in this country was the race
issue that you treat you can place the importance of
equality at the center of your founding document and then

(20:05):
you have this issue of slavery and It's offshoots.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
Well, and the church was slow to recognize that. One
point that I make many times is you look at Dr.
King's letter from a Birmingham jail, and people forget to
whom it is addressed. It's addressed to the clergy of America.
He's writing to the leaders of the church saying, wake

(20:33):
up and speak up. And my favorite portion of that
letter was there's a group of senators, bipartisan senators, who
regularly read that letter on the floor of the Senate.
It's really powerful to read the words out loud. And
there's a portion in it where he says the church
should be a thermostat and not a thermometer, that it

(20:54):
should be changing society and not just reacting to what's around.
And that's ultimately what– led you to leave the seminary
and say that you were not going to go down
the path of being a priest?

Speaker 3 (21:06):
Well, I think it was an overreaction. I think I
was 19 years old.

Speaker 2 (21:10):
And when Dr. King was assassinated, that was a pivotal moment.
That was a pivotal moment. I was in my first
year in college in the seminary. I would love to,
I loved the Benedictines. I was there in Magna Conception
Seminary in Missouri. I loved being there. The people, it
was wonderful. Um, But it was not there that things

(21:34):
were difficult. It was the world around me. It was
the church generally. I thought that as a sort of
a moral beacon, we should talk about the court, that
we should have taken a leadership role in the church. Unquestionably.
And it's been a long and difficult journey for our country. Now,

(21:58):
you went... from the seminary to Holy Cross and then
Yale Law School. A lot of people listening, I mean,
they know you were one of the greatest conservative leaders
to have ever lived. But as a young man, you
were not in any way, shape or form a conservative.
Tell folks what your worldview was as a 19, 20,

(22:21):
21 year.

Speaker 3 (22:24):
Well, I think when you're 19 and you're angry, you're
confused for the most part. I came from a very
traditional background. In fact, as I went through that period
when I quit the seminary and returned home, my grandfather
invited me to leave his house immediately. And so I've
basically been on my own since then. And, of course,

(22:45):
as you're 19— And that was a hard moment for you. Oh,
it was more than hard. Hard is an understatement. Yeah.
And it was in that vein or in that posture
that I wound up going to New England in sort
of a negative posture. And I think we react to

(23:07):
our circumstances in certain ways. And I was reacting to
the church's sort of... not doing what it should be doing.
I overreacted. I reacted as a 19-year-old, emotionally.

Speaker 2 (23:24):
And you were angry at the time. You were angry
at God. You stopped going to Mass.

Speaker 3 (23:28):
Well, I left the church completely. And I think if
I had to do over, I would not have left
the church. And I think it's a matter of, and
this is a point my grandfather was making at the time.
He said, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

(23:49):
That it is people not living up to what is right.
That's the problem, not the underlying principles. So the church,
the belief, the tenets of the church are not wrong.
It's that the people are failing in living up to that.
But at any rate, when you're young, you don't make

(24:09):
those fine distinctions. So I think an easy way to
deal with that or a quick way or a to
sort of respond when you're that age is to find
these sort of radical movements you participate in, you protest,
you sort of let off steam and you're angry and

(24:31):
you feel empowered by that anger. But then as time
goes on, you take a step back and you start
thinking about what you're doing. You know, my grandfather asked
me a question, and I've said this before, I would
come return home and he would be upset with me.
And he would say, after all his sacrifices, this is

(24:54):
what I've become. And he would challenge me because I'd
say the country's racist and we need to destroy it
and all that sort of thing. And he said, and
when you destroy it, where are you going to go?
That was always the unanswerable question. Yeah. What country is
better than this country with all its problems? To which

(25:17):
I had no answer. So I think that's planted the
seed of doubt from this. And as I grew older
and more mature and thought about things, in fact, about
the time I was at Yale and had participated in
enough sort of demonstrations.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
Well, and you had You took part in a protest
that became a riot in Harvard Square.

Speaker 3 (25:47):
At your alma mater. Yeah, I did. See, I could
have saved you trouble. That was sort of, I think
that was the road to Damascus moment. That's the moment
where you look into the abyss and it looks back.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
Well, you realized that it could have gone much worse
for you. You could have been thrown in jail. You
could have been expelled from school.

Speaker 3 (26:11):
Well, I couldn't answer why I was doing it. You know, again,
it goes back when you ask the hard question, why?
Why did I just do what I just did? Right.
To spend all night doing something I don't quite understand.
But that return, it was... April 16, 1970. So I

(26:37):
returned to Holy Cross from Cambridge.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
Right.

Speaker 3 (26:41):
And walked in front of the chapel because I was
exhausted but couldn't sleep. Walked in front of the chapel.
And again, I'm not attending or anything, but I'm still
deeply Catholic. And I face it, the Blessed Sacrament, and
I ask God to take hate out of my heart.
And I said, if you take hate out of my heart,

(27:02):
I will never hate again. And that was the moment
when you began to, for me, when I began to
move in a more positive direction. When you begin to offload,
it was like lancing a boil. And it was long, erratic.
There was not a straight line. But it was away

(27:22):
from the thing that it consumed to me. Well, and even.

Speaker 2 (27:28):
when you were a left-wing radical, you could see glimmers
of the man that Clarence Thomas would become. That in
many ways, I think, was the wisdom your grandfather and
your grandmother had imparted to you, but you could see
the individualist. You have never liked to conform.

Speaker 3 (27:48):
Well, I don't like being told what to do. I
just think when you, the nuns made it clear that
when God created us. It was mind, soul, and body.
And you don't just liberate the body. And you were responsible.

(28:10):
You committed a sin. It wasn't because the devil didn't
make you do it. You did it. You gave in.
You made the decision. And you were responsible. And you
didn't do your homework. You were responsible. Excuses didn't count.
And my grandfather was that way. You were accountable. And
that's similarly when you made— it was my life. And I

(28:37):
wasn't—I'm not talking about being a libertine or anything like that.
It's more libertarian. Right. That you believe in liberty, and
that means you have to take responsibility for it. And
I really didn't like people saying, you have to do this,
you have to do that. we had this saying that
there are only two things I have to do, stay
black and die. And that was a retort to people

(29:00):
who had these sort of requirements for us, these mandates
for us because of our skin color. And the thing
that's really kind of interesting, it wasn't until later on
that people began to say that when I came to
this town, one of the greatest difficulties, if you think

(29:20):
about it, was that There were those who thought that
I should think a certain way. And the difficulty has
been that they said, oh, you're confused. Well, I'm not confused.
You're confused. You confuse me with someone who's been in
indentured servitude. or something. But at any rate, they think

(29:43):
that here's the way you're supposed to think. Again, here's
your skin color. There's this kind of deterministic view that
you're supposed to think this because we say so. And I,
of course, declined that invitation to And so now that
means that something, that I'm a walking contradiction because I've

(30:03):
deviated from their perception of what I should think. Explain
to me how that is different. Here's what I've asked people.
I said, when I was a kid, the Savannah Public
Library was segregated. I said, do you think it was
right that the Savannah Public Library was segregated? Oh, no,
you should have been able to go in. I said,

(30:25):
what if they allowed me in but said I couldn't
go to certain floors? That would be wrong. I said,
what if they said you couldn't go to certain stacks? Well,
that would be wrong. What if they had certain books
marked that were off limits to me? That would be wrong.
Then my question is, why is it then that you

(30:46):
have a problem with me embracing certain ideas in certain books?
What's the difference? Of course, that's unanswerable. In fact, I
would prefer not to go in the building to not
being able to embrace the ideas that I find that
I agree with or that are important.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
By any measure, one of your greatest legacies in the court,
and there are many, but has been on race. And
you have been a clarion voice in your entire tenure
on the court for the principle that the Constitution... does
not allow racial distinctions, does not allow racial discrimination. The
Constitution is colorblind and protects everyone. It's interesting as you

(31:30):
tell the story or the analogy of the library and
then the stacks and the books that you might not
be allowed to read. One story you have told is
as a young man, I think in law school, somebody
gave you a copy of a book by Thomas Sowell.
you started to read it and threw it in the
trash and said, if I remember right, that no black
man can think this way.

Speaker 3 (31:51):
That was Black Education, Myths and Tragedies, I think, one
of his early books, and he laughs about it. Then,
of course, he sent me a copy just to make
sure I had it. But then, in the after law school,
I was working in Jeff City. It's one of those
Hobson's choices. That's how I wound up there. The only

(32:14):
job offer I had, but It's the best job I've
ever had.

Speaker 2 (32:17):
But all the fancy law firms wouldn't give you an offer.
You came out of Yale Law School, did really well
in law school.

Speaker 3 (32:22):
It didn't matter. And I always tell them now when
I see them, they're the reason I'm on the court.
Because but for them, I'd be a tax lawyer someplace.
And they woke now, but they were fast asleep when
I got out of school. So anyway, God works in
mysterious ways. I wind up in Jeff City.

Speaker 2 (32:42):
So you're working for Jack Danforth, who is the attorney
general in Missouri.

Speaker 3 (32:47):
Absolutely wonderful man.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
And your classmates were asking, what are you doing going
to work for a Republican?

Speaker 3 (32:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:53):
He was the only one who would give you a job.

Speaker 3 (32:55):
He was the only one who gave me a job.
I mean, I had trouble with that. I mean, I
was dying. Remember, I just voted for McGovern. Yeah. You know,
and I thought he was too conservative. So you can
see ideologically where I was. But I go to work
for him. Best job I've ever had.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
Well, and you said when you came in, you said, look,
I don't want to work on matters of race. I
don't want to be treated differently than anyone else. And
you joked that he took you very seriously.

Speaker 3 (33:21):
He ignored all of us. But you loved that job.
I loved it. It was the best job I've ever had.
$ 11, 000 a year. And he promised. He said, I can
give you more work for less money than anybody in
the country. And that turned out to be a blessing.
But at any rate, that office, the way that he

(33:42):
ran that office was just wonderful, even-handed. One of the
people I met who became a very dear friend was
a quadriplegic from West Point, Nebraska. And went to University
of Missouri Law School, graduated, ordered the co-wife, but had
suffered from polio and was a quadriplegic. Just a very, very,

(34:07):
very dear friend. He calls me up one day and
he said, Clarence, there's another black guy out here like you.
And his name is Thomas Sowell. And it was Thomas Sowell.
And it was a book review in the Wall Street Journal.
And it was on race and economics. And I obtained
copies of that. And it became just sort of the

(34:32):
beginning of the long, intellectual walk back of thinking about
these things. And I met him at Washington University on
a panel with Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she was a
professor in the late 70s. And then when I came
here in 79, I think I met him again either

(34:54):
in 79 or 80 when he was making the rounds
with Hill staffers. And we've been friends since the early 1980s.

Speaker 2 (35:04):
By the way, for what it's worth, I'm urging the
White House to award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
I hope they do so. I've publicly called for that.
I'm trying to make that happen because I think that
would be very appropriate.

Speaker 3 (35:16):
Well, I think it would be deserved. He is a great,
great man and one of the great thinkers.

Speaker 2 (35:27):
I've never met him, but I've admired him. He's brilliant
and courageous.

Speaker 3 (35:30):
Well, he's courageous. He and I met him. I met
Walter Williams back then when I got here.

Speaker 2 (35:37):
I met Walter Williams when I was in high school.

Speaker 3 (35:39):
Is that right?

Speaker 2 (35:40):
Yeah, he was inspiring even when I was a kid.

Speaker 3 (35:43):
Brash, but he's... And there was another gentleman that you
don't know that's also passed away, like Walter, who's... Dunn
was also very quiet, but a libertarian and was very,
very helpful. But anyway, the whole point is that in

(36:07):
Jefferson City, again, I go back to what I said
at the very beginning, that things that initially seem like
a negative, you know, you can't get a job, so
you wind up in Jefferson City, turn out to be
a blessing. And what I say in retrospect is that
God closed all the doors that I should not have

(36:28):
gone through and left one door open, my Hobson's choice,
and turned out to be the best job I've ever had.

Speaker 2 (36:35):
Well, and ultimately you're in the AG's office. You go
get a job in corporate America at Monsanto, which paid
you a good chunk of money but was not rewarding
and you were not happy with corporate America. And then
Jack Danforth has gone to the Senate and you go
work for him in the Senate. and you're a Capitol

(36:56):
Hill staffer, and you go to a conference with Thomas Sowell.

Speaker 3 (37:00):
Yeah, he invited me personally to that in San Francisco.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
And at the time, you're a Republican staffer, but you're
on the journey. One of the things I try to
do in the book is chronicle the intellectual journey and
awakening from an angry left-wing radical to a principled conservative.
That's a pretty big shift. And reading was an important

(37:27):
part of it. Questioning was an important part of it.
But you've described how you're sitting at lunch table with
Juan Williams, the reporter, having what you thought was a conversation.
And it was one of your first interactions with the press.

Speaker 3 (37:45):
And it ended up.

Speaker 2 (37:47):
Having a big feature article in the Washington post describing
you as the black conservative, which, which was a pretty
startling thing for you.

Speaker 3 (37:56):
Well, I'd never called myself conservative. I, I've, you know, the, um,
that was a way of character. They called us black
conservatives in order to dispose of us. Uh, they called Tom.
So that, um, the Walter Williams, Jay Parker, who was
another dear friend has passed away. Um, But I was shocked.

(38:19):
Remember now, I'm 32 years old. I'm a Hill staffer.
I've never been in the press. I had just made
my first trip to California.

Speaker 2 (38:28):
You got the inkling that there was going to be
something on you when they sent a photographer.

Speaker 3 (38:32):
To take a picture. I was sharing an office with
three other staffers, and this photographer shows up from the post.
And December 16, 1980, there's my smiling face on the
op-ed page. And then my whole life. changed and the
attacks the negativity.

Speaker 2 (38:51):
And there is a nastiness as a black conservative that
I don't think anyone else experiences you get some of
it as an Hispanic who's a conservative because I'm not
supposed to be a conservative but you're really not supposed
to be a conservative and there's part of the reason
I wanted to write the book is the vitriol that
has been directed at you is different look Justice Scalia

(39:16):
You knew him extremely well. He was brilliant, extraordinarily principled.
He never had the kind of hate directed to him
that you did. And the left, they view you... a
black man is not allowed to think that way. You're
a traitor. And that, there's an ugliness to that.

Speaker 3 (39:37):
Yeah, well, I mean, that's, you know, I grew up, again,
I've been fortunate to have had misfortunes. And one of
the things you learned during segregation is there was this
idea that, boy, don't you know your place. And that's
the same thing. I mean, these are the same, some
of the worst people that you would meet, like the progressives.

(39:58):
That's why I mentioned people like Woodrow Wilson, one of
the early progressives.

Speaker 2 (40:06):
Who was a vicious racist.

Speaker 3 (40:08):
Yeah, but see, underneath that, and Paul Johnson makes the
point that you scratch the surface of things like the
Marxists and the socialists. That's what you find because they
have to categorize people. So I understand that. But I
crossed that bridge in my early 30s that I accepted

(40:29):
that this is the way they were going to treat me.
This is what was going to happen. This is what
would happen, and who knew where it would leave, but
God would take care of that part. But the fact
that they have all this vitriol, to me, is a
white flag that they have no argument. When you start calling.

Speaker 2 (40:52):
If they think you're wrong, persuade you.

Speaker 3 (40:54):
Look, I'm open to reason, but I will not be
told what to do. No one cajoles me, no one
makes me do anything. Slavery is over. But there's this
sense that don't you know what you're supposed to think?
And that is with me, that is the wrong argument.

Speaker 2 (41:16):
Well, and related to that, one of the things that
you have really powerfully written and spoken about is with
affirmative action and racial quotas, it brings with it a stigma.
You rather famously put a sticker of 15 cents on
your Yale law degree from a cigar box because, and

(41:39):
you talked about coming out of Yale, but not being
able to get a job. And look, I went to
school at a different time than you did, but I'll
tell you, as an Hispanic, I still remember this one
supercilious liberal in law school explaining that everyone who wasn't
a white man, was on the law review because of

(42:00):
affirmative action. That was the only reason anyone could possibly
do well is because they were giving us this gift.
And it was infuriating.

Speaker 3 (42:10):
You know, I've heard, I've been, there are many, many
slights along the way. But it doesn't make you wrong.
These are little bumps in the road. And what I
compare it to, again, I compare it to what My
grandparents went through. Like, just take my grandfather. Yeah. If

(42:32):
I'm going to complain, right, I have to look at him,
at a man who didn't complain. He never knew his father.
His mother dies when he's six or seven, maybe eight.
And then he goes to live with his grandmother, who's
a freed slave who lives on a part of the

(42:54):
plantation that they're from.

Speaker 2 (42:57):
Just pause for a second and think about the marvel
of America, that your grandfather who raised you was raised
by his grandmother who was a freed slave. And now
you are the second longest serving Supreme Court justice in
American history and in a couple of years will be

(43:19):
the longest serving. That is– it's one of the things– Look,
those who point to the flaws in our nation's history,
they're not wrong. Our racial history in particular has been
a history of injustice, and slavery was grotesque. But I
agree with Dr. King that the arc of history is long,

(43:42):
and it bends towards justice. And that journey was possible
because of the principles America was built on, even if
it took us decades and even centuries to begin living
up to it.

Speaker 3 (43:55):
Well, you know, he always, my grandfather would talk about
don't throw out the Ten Commandments because people don't obey them.
There's nothing wrong with the Ten Commandments. It's just we
have weaknesses or for whatever reasons we don't comply. And
I think sometimes when you're angry and you see suffering

(44:17):
and difficulties, you are willing to throw everything out, the
baby with the bathwater. And as you get older, you
can be more discerning. And one of the things I
think that's unfortunate is that the people who should know
better haven't stood up and defended those principles and asserted

(44:40):
them and then tried to live up to them and
not be hypocritical and not to sacrifice the principles for
a share of the power or for a share of
the loot that they're getting from the country or whatever.
And so one of the things that I tried to
do when I was teasing out the speech at the
University of Texas is to make this point. Two things

(45:03):
that I wanted to talk about was the fact that
here you had uneducated people who believed that God made
them equal. And you had Irish nuns, immigrants, that believed
strongly that in God's eyes, we're all equal. And this

(45:25):
was not to be debated. No matter what the laws
around us said, this was not debatable. So now that
means if there are Irish immigrants and uneducated people who
have no formal education believe this, my point was simply
that it must be self-evident. Otherwise, how else would they know?

(45:52):
The other part of it that I was interested in
is there are a lot of nice words in the Declaration,
for example. But what do they pledge? Their lives, their fortune,
and their sacred honor. And this is after what the
king says, I'm going to hang all of you.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
And that was not theoretical.

Speaker 3 (46:12):
No, I know it. He was not happy. But at
any rate, my point is if you end it by saying,
I'm willing to die for this. Now, that gives value
to what you just said. In your wedding vows, you say,
I do, and you mean it. Right. You said you've
been married, what, 29 years?

Speaker 2 (46:31):
25.

Speaker 3 (46:32):
25 years. So that gives content to your wedding vows. Yeah.
When I said, I do, to my wife, that gives content. Otherwise,
it's just nice words. And I think one of the things,
and this goes back to my point about leaving the seminary,
do you really mean it? Do you really believe as

(46:53):
a church what you said you believe? And it was
the gap between that, what you said, the church said,
and what the leadership seemed to a 19-year-old to believe.
And I think in this country now, think about it.
When last have you had a leader that made– that

(47:14):
said something that is the equivalent of, I pledge my life,
my property, my fortune, and my sacred honor.

Speaker 2 (47:23):
So you referenced the speech you gave at University of Texas.
I want to commend all the listeners here. Go and
listen to that speech. It really was an extraordinary speech.
I'm proud of UT. I spent a couple of years
on the faculty as an adjunct law professor there. And look,
Most law schools are so left-wing. I'm proud of UT
for inviting you there. The president, Jim Davis, is a

(47:45):
good friend, had you there. But it really is an
important speech and conversation, and if folks haven't listened to it,
they should. What I want to do in the interest
of time, there are additional chapters in your life from
being a Hill staffer to an assistant secretary of the
Department of Education to the chairman of the EOC and

(48:05):
the Reagan administration. to a court of appeals judge on
the D.C. Circuit, to going through one of, if not
the most brutal confirmation hearing of any justice. You and
Brett Kavanaugh can arm wrestle for who had the rougher time,
but in many ways, and I talk about this in
the book, how what Justice Kavanaugh went through was a

(48:28):
replay of the playbook that you were subjected to. I
want to skip over all of those periods, although... I
recount them in detail in the book. And I want
to go to after you are confirmed and you're sworn
in and you're in your early 40s and suddenly you're

(48:50):
a Supreme Court justice. And your autobiography ends with your
being a justice. So it tells your life story but
then does not cover your jurisprudence. I want to start
with just a human thing.

Speaker 3 (49:04):
What's it like?

Speaker 2 (49:06):
The first day you're a justice, you walk in, like
just what's day one of being a Supreme Court justice?

Speaker 3 (49:13):
Well, you feel a little small. And, like, what the
heck am I doing here? Which is still a question.
But this is, you know, the, as I said, just
Lord grant me the wisdom to know what's right and

(49:34):
the courage to do it. That has been a constant
plea of mine. Um, and it is what brought me
back to the church being stopping at first St. Nicholas,
then sometimes St. Mary's and sometimes St. Joe, uh, to
just ask for the wisdom and to know what is

(49:56):
right and the courage to do it. But you know, you,
it is just the, you pledge to, uh, I gave
President Bush my promise. I took an oath. He said,
can you call him as you see him? He asked
me that in Kennebunkport, July 1, 1991. I said, I can.

(50:21):
And that's what I've lived up to. My grandfather, when
I asked him when I was being attacked in the
early 80s, 1982, I said, what should I do? He said, boy,
you got to stand up for what you believe in.
It's pretty simple. And I must say, I'm on the
other side of that spectrum now. But I was treated royally,

(50:45):
fabulously by my new colleagues. Your old boss, Chief Justice Rehnquist,
Justice Scalia, Stevens, O'Connor, a great woman who doesn't get
the credit she deserves, Justice Kennedy. And now I'm on
the other side of it where I have newer colleagues,
wonderful and brilliant young people like Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh,

(51:09):
you mentioned. We have Amy Barrett. And then Sam Alito
and I were at Yale together. Just a wonderful, wonderful group.

Speaker 2 (51:19):
You were classmates at Yale.

Speaker 3 (51:21):
He was a year behind me.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
He was a year behind you, but you didn't know
each other.

Speaker 3 (51:24):
He's a funny guy. He's brilliant. He was always nerdy.
Princeton guy like you, right? And so I said, Sam,
how come we were there two years together? Why weren't
we friends? Clarence, you were scary. I'm so glad they
didn't have these phones where you could take a lot

(51:44):
of pictures. I wore bib overalls throughout law school and
combat boots. It was awful. But, you know, you have
just the chief has been a good friend. But my
point is simply this, that, you know, I was embraced there.
It was a different generation. It's the World War II.

(52:07):
Byron White. They were just wonderful people. They were very
kind to me. You know, the courts changed a bit
now since the Dobbs League. Back then, there was a trust. Yes.
There was an honor. Even as you disagreed, there were

(52:28):
lines you did not cross, and I like that. These
people were the age of my... My mother and older.
And so it was a different era. And now we're in,
it's a different generation now. But the point is that

(52:50):
you have equally good people who are there. I mean,
I loved, I knew some of them as law clerks.
They've become very dear friends. And I hope to be
a model to them as the older members of the
court who were there when I arrived were to me.

Speaker 2 (53:08):
So of all the justices who have served on the court,
I think you are the most willing to reconsider precedent
and to think of an issue anew, which is in
some ways to think about it as it was– in fact,
in many ways to think of it as it was
originally understood. And that– your opinion writing– is you write

(53:37):
straightforward opinions in ordinary English. You don't tend to use
fancy highfalutin words, but your opinions are written so that
the regular person can read them and understand what you're saying.
And I think there's a workmanship quality to your opinions.
I analogize it to a farmer or someone building a home.

(54:02):
And you draw that same analogy. Why do you think
it is that you are the most willing to reconsider precedent?

Speaker 3 (54:11):
You know, I start with something you and I, I think,
have talked about over the years, and that is that
I start with something that has to make sense.

Speaker 2 (54:21):
The quote from your grandfather, if it don't make no
damn sense, it don't make no damn sense.

Speaker 3 (54:26):
And I keep that in my office because you can–
He would call some of these professors fast talking.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (54:38):
And you think about it. You know, we have had
throughout history court intellectuals who can make all sorts of
justifications for things and theories and et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera. And I've been blessed because I can sort
through theories and I read lots and lots and lots
of books. Yeah. And I've been at it a long time.

(55:01):
And I have young people who have that energy, and
they say, we're going to go find the answer. Now,
it may not be what we want, but we're going
to go look for it. And what we find in
many instances is it's been a theory. So you can
have deductive reasoning, you have a theory and you work down,

(55:23):
or you can have inductive, which any rancher or farmer uses,
which is, You do something, and it's experience, and you
keep generalizing up to something more general. And that's the
world I grew up. The latter is the world I
grew up in. I cannot explain it to that guy
on the ranch. Yep. And if he says, boy, that
don't make no sense. You know, he should be a hero.

(55:47):
When I go out to ordinary people, they should be
able to understand their constitution.

Speaker 2 (55:51):
And by the way, ordinary people, one thing people may
not know, you do that a lot. You and Jenny
go out in your RV, like in the summertime, you
head across the country and are in Walmart parking lots
just hanging out with regular people.

Speaker 3 (56:05):
Well, I'm Bucky's now. All right, now as.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
A Texan, that makes me happy. Bucky's is a destination.

Speaker 3 (56:12):
But, you know, I love, I grew up with, as
my granddad said, po-folks. And that's the world I like.
I like people who work with their hands. I like
people who are regular people. That's my preferred world. And,

(56:33):
you know, I was, my wife laughs at me because
I was, our motor home is, motor coach is 35
years old. So I like the old buses. And so
you hang out with the guys who do work on
old buses. And I got to spend time with one
of them this in the December and we're like, we

(56:53):
take all the wheels off and you're up. So I said,
that was happy as I could be because you're under
the air. You got all the shocks, all the airbags,
you know, the lines he's, he's showing you all these things,
the valves. And it was just, I could not, I
wish I could spend two weeks there instead of two days. But,
The point is, it's their constitution. It's that truck driver's constitution.

(57:16):
It's that school teacher's constitution. It's not the preserve of
court intellectuals and law professors. And we've turned it into that.
We've over-intellectualized it. This is a point that Murray Rothbard
makes in his book, Conceived in Liberty. We've taken something
that was passionately achieved and that was believed in passionately,

(57:38):
and we turned it into this thing that you need
an oracle. to explain.

Speaker 2 (57:42):
The Federalist Papers were newspaper editorials.

Speaker 3 (57:45):
And they were only in New York, by the way.
Those were basically Hamilton and those guys. There's a big
difference between Hamilton and some of the more radical guys,
like a Sam Adams, which is more than a beer,
by the way.

Speaker 2 (58:03):
I will admit there was an amusing exchange of one
commentator on the left who was on TV saying, James Madison,
Thomas Jefferson, can you imagine those people overthrowing the government?
And I couldn't help but respond, yes, yes, I can.

Speaker 3 (58:25):
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (58:27):
It kind of happened. One of the things you have
been really eloquent on, and I think profoundly... influential on
is is the look the constitution is is the foundational
document that that created our government uh... but but you

(58:48):
have focused a great deal on the declaration of independence
and and and why is the declaration so important and
and what what is the relevance that that that people
should know.

Speaker 3 (59:00):
About well the the constitution sets up the government the
form of the government but what precedes that? What does
it mean? What defines you, your rights? How do they
view your rights? Where do they come from? And where
does the government come from? And it sets the order right.

(59:22):
Just take it simple. It says your rights come from God, basically,
from nature's God. And then from that, you give up
some of those God-given natural rights in order to be governed.

(59:43):
And what does that lead to? That leads to the Constitution.
I was pointing out to my clerks the other day,
because you get these Second Amendment cases, and I said,
you know, Why do we keep saying there's a Second
Amendment right? The Second Amendment says the right to bear
arms shall not be infringed. It assumes a right. It

(01:00:06):
doesn't grant a right. So you can go First Amendment,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Where does that come from?
And that's what I was interested in, that what establishes
this whole notion of liberty. What establishes this order of rights?
And so it matters if you think the government is

(01:00:29):
the primary giver of, grantor of rights, and you receive
rights and benefits from the government versus you have the
rights and the government receives its authority from you. And
I think that that order... being able to establish that

(01:00:51):
in each case is important. And if you go back,
and that explains Justice Scalia's writings on the structure of
the Constitution being the safeguard of these rights that you
have that are antecedent and that are transcended. So I
focus on that to always get the order right. When

(01:01:14):
you farm, every farmer knows, like when you plant, or
when you plow, I don't know if you've ever plowed.

Speaker 2 (01:01:21):
I'm a city boy, so I've watched it on TV.

Speaker 3 (01:01:24):
So my granddaddy said, boy, he would always say, and
he put a little cuss word in there from time
to time, he said, and those rows better be straight.
So you have to take your first row, and it
has to be absolutely straight. Then you put your tire
in a groove where the plows, especially if you're using
a dish plow, and they go different ways, You go

(01:01:47):
and you follow that. So now every subsequent row is straight. Well,
going back to your point about precedent, what if that
first row is crooked? Will you keep going, pretending that
it's straight, or do you go back and make it straight?
That's why you say, well, I'm not accepting precedent. If

(01:02:07):
something doesn't make any sense, what am I going to do?
Am I a fool for following that or not questioning it?
And I taught a course on stare decisis just for
this point. It makes sense when you have this unwritten
laws and when you have traditions and when barons are
like ruling on cases in these rural areas in England.

(01:02:30):
But when you have positive law, when it's written down
and you can see the deviation, who's the fool? You
follow something that's absurd. Why would you follow something that's absurd?

Speaker 2 (01:02:41):
Well, look, a great example of that, in a case
I talk about quite a bit in the book, is
the Kelo case, where Kelo involved a city that was
condemning a woman's home.

Speaker 3 (01:02:54):
That they had for 100 years. Yes. This tiny house,
regular person's house, not a mansion, and for a public purpose,
not a public use. And that started in southwest D.C.,
by the way, the precedent for that. And the court
was willing to say that the public purpose was the

(01:03:16):
equivalent of public use. Well, a public purpose could be
to increase your tax base.

Speaker 2 (01:03:22):
Well, and actually, as I was driving over here to
do this, I wanted to look. I pulled up the
language of the Fifth Amendment. And the relevant prohibition at
the end of it is, nor shall private property be
taken for public use without just compensation. So that's the

(01:03:42):
actual language. And Kelo, unfortunately, it was 5-4, the majority
said that the city of New London, Connecticut could take
her home, not for a highway or a road or
a city building, but for a parking lot for a
planned Pfizer.

Speaker 3 (01:04:04):
Building.

Speaker 2 (01:04:05):
And you dissented, you dissented, and it focused on the
words public use versus purpose. And explain that distinction to us.

Speaker 3 (01:04:13):
Well, purpose is a very broad term.

Speaker 2 (01:04:17):
And the court and its precedent had basically turned use
into purpose.

Speaker 3 (01:04:21):
But there's another thing. principle or that we have followed
for years, which is you don't take, the government doesn't
take property, private property from person A and give it
to private person B. Right. That's not a public use. So,
but going back to your point that the, a public

(01:04:43):
use would be a park, it'd be a hospital, it'd
be a highway, et cetera. Something that the public uses.
A public purpose doesn't necessarily, is much, much broader. So
just imagine you have a somewhat blighted area. But suddenly
it's attractive to people with lots of money. And a

(01:05:06):
city decides, well, we'd like to increase our tax base. Well,
there are all these young people with lots of money
who want to build these McMansions or these high-end $ 2
or $ 3 million structures. Well, the public purpose would be
to increase that tax base, but that's not a public use.

(01:05:28):
And now you've given people who have authority to take
your property a much broader way and much more power
to take an individual's property. Now, why is the issue?
I took quite a bit of property at Yale for
this reason. If you go back to Georgia, if you
go back to the South, you go to places like

(01:05:49):
South Carolina, There was all this land that blacks owned
in the way that my family received land over the years.
It was called heirs' property. Everybody owns it. Nobody's really
in charge. Well, a lot of that land, there were

(01:06:10):
aggressive efforts to use that land for developments. It could
be for resorts in Hilton Head. It could be for
strategic purposes in Harris Neck, Georgia. It could be for
conservation in places where blacks were subsistence farmers, like in McIntosh, Georgia.

(01:06:32):
So my only point is simply this, that the word,
if you want to protect the property, you have to
stick to the words in the Constitution, or it sort
of spreads out. to broader powers that were not intended,
and public purpose allows it. Plus that word appears in
no place in the Constitution.

Speaker 2 (01:06:53):
Well, I will say, even though you were in dissent,
you did not command the majority in the court, I
think over time the view you articulated has prevailed, and
it's persuaded Texas and many other states have enacted laws
to prevent the taking of public property for public purposes,
and it was inspired by inspired by your very, you know,

(01:07:17):
Justice O'Connor used an effective analogy in dissent in that
case where she said under this reasoning, the government could
condemn every Motel 6 and to build a Ritz-Carlton.

Speaker 3 (01:07:30):
Yeah. And she's right. And she and I, and remember
she comes from, a rancher.

Speaker 2 (01:07:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:07:39):
I think the, just think about it, hand in hand
with liberty. Uh, you had, they, they were traveling companion,
Liberty and property. Okay. Wherever you see it, if you
look at the new process clock, what does it protect?

Speaker 2 (01:07:55):
Life, Liberty and property.

Speaker 3 (01:07:57):
Okay. Wherever you see it. And that was my grandfather.
What did he say? These were PO. He said a
little bit of land. You get to raise crops. You
get to build a little place to live. Uh, you
get to raise some animals. Okay. The property was a
part of your way to take care of yourself. So

(01:08:19):
liberty and property, it was the fruit of your labor.
So you worked in the cornfield, you planted it, you
took care of it, you harvested it. It's yours. And
the land is yours. You earned it. And I think
you see throughout the founding, all those things, those were

(01:08:40):
always paired, liberty and property. And we treat it as
though it's a benefit from the government rather than a
right that transcends the government and is to be protected
from the government.

Speaker 2 (01:08:53):
One thing you did there just a minute ago that
is really powerful and that is a consistent thing. of
your jurisprudence is you understand the rights protected in the
Constitution with an understanding of the context of history. So
when you're talking about condemning land or property for public

(01:09:17):
purpose rather than use, you quickly brought it to when
government power is used, historically it has been used over
and over by the rich and powerful against the more
vulnerable in society, often against African-Americans or Hispanics or people
who don't necessarily have the ability to defend themselves against

(01:09:39):
government power. That's something also that you've powerfully done in
the Second Amendment context. And one of the things that
you've said, you and I, when we were sitting down
doing interviews, you talked about the importance of Reconstruction. That
if you're going to understand American history and the Constitution,

(01:09:59):
you've got to understand Reconstruction. Tell us about that.

Speaker 3 (01:10:02):
Well, it's everything. I mean, it's, you know, the, I think, Reconstruction.
Why did you have Reconstruction? I mean, because you had
the Civil War. You had slaves that were freed. You
had the South that was not going to do what
it should do. And so you basically had the military
in the South. And after Reconstruction, of course, you got

(01:10:25):
the Redeemers. You got the Redeemers. You have the former
Confederates who've been disempowered, disenfranchised, and they start forming these
vigilante groups. And who are they going after? Are they
going after the Republicans in the South, they're going after
particularly the freedmen. And what's the argument? If you just

(01:10:48):
take a look at it, you'd see they would maraud.
They would intimidate. They would lynch. And there was a
big difference. But the 14th Amendment is passed. And the
whole point is to now make these slave citizens. But
there's something further going on. If you look at the

(01:11:10):
debates in the 14th Amendment, the argument is these people
have a right to defend themselves. Now, the radical Republicans
felt that with these rights, privileges or immunities, also brings
the right to bear arms. They have a right to

(01:11:32):
defend themselves from these marauders. And anyone who lives in
a rural area, who lives in the South, It could
be in Texas, in rural Texas. Everybody is armed for
a variety of reasons. To defend themselves, to hunt, etc.
And if you live in rural Georgia, I didn't know
anybody who didn't have at least one weapon. And you

(01:11:55):
could have a mad dog. You could have a big
six-foot rattlesnake. You could have a moccasin. You could have
all sorts of things. And you could have an opportunity
to kill an animal for food. But my point is
that the radical Republicans understood that without that right to

(01:12:16):
defend themselves.

Speaker 2 (01:12:18):
And fundamentally, it's a right to life, a right to
protect your life, your kids' life, your family.

Speaker 3 (01:12:22):
Well, that was the point. That was the Freedmen Bureau.
If you look at the reports, they're getting killed down
here with the Knights of Camellia, the Ku Klux Klan, etc.,
And so you get the 14th Amendment. Right. And defining them,
of course, answering Taney and responding to his notion that

(01:12:45):
blacks cannot be citizens. But this also brings in the
privileges or immunities clause.

Speaker 2 (01:12:51):
And Taney was the author of Dred Scott, which if
there's a decision that is more disgraceful than Plessy versus Ferguson,
it was Dred Scott.

Speaker 3 (01:13:00):
Well, it is.
For a lot of different reasons. I've spent a lot
of time on Dred Scott and the history around Dred Scott.
But the whole point is that here's a man who's
trying to figure out a way to say that no
way blacks could ever be citizens of this country, just

(01:13:22):
by their very nature. And, of course, we revisit that
old notion in the birthright case last term. Yep. in
a different way and for different reasons. But the 14th
Amendment in this country is critical because it's basically the
second founding. And so you have to understand that. So
what I think I owe my fellow citizens is not

(01:13:45):
just to read the words of the Constitution, but to
try to understand not just the 14th Amendment, but the revolution,
leading up to the revolution, the history of England, the
things that influence it. The Civil War, the post-Civil War,
the Reconstruction era. And you may have to read people

(01:14:05):
you don't necessarily agree with. Sure. For example, I read
and reread Eric Foner on Reconstruction. Now, he's a revisionist historian,
but he's fine. He does a great job of explaining
Reconstruction and a lot of these problems. And I admire
the work that he's done. And at the same time,
you may not agree. with the revolutionary period with Murray

(01:14:28):
Rothbard because he's a libertarian. But he's written a couple
of thousand pages on this and conceived in liberty. And
it's worth reading because it gives you that sort of
granular understanding of the revolutionary period.

Speaker 2 (01:14:44):
But you told me a story about Justice Breyer when
he was robbed. And if you just share that story.

Speaker 3 (01:14:57):
Poor Steve Breyer. He's such a good man. So, Steve,
this is a joke, and I hope I don't offend Steve.
He's a very decent man. We spent a lot of
years sitting next to each other. What a fun time.
But at any rate, so Steve Breyer, he'd been robbed,
and he didn't want it to be public. He didn't

(01:15:18):
want the attention. And Nevis, where they have little property there.
And he said, so he's telling the story to a
number of us, a number of others as I walk
in the room, that he turns to me because I
wasn't there at the beginning. He said, Clarence, I had
a question for you. You're on your porch. You're playing

(01:15:42):
bridge with another couple, you and your wife, and a
guy walks up with a machete. What would you do?
And I said, I don't play bridge. He said, okay, okay,
you're playing poker. And the guy walks over to the machete,
and he says he demands money. What would you do?

(01:16:04):
He said, I don't play poker. I don't play cards, Steve.
He said, what would you be doing on your porch?
I said, cleaning my guns. And I said, do you
want some ketchup with that? But at any rate, he
is such– I hope that doesn't offend him. He is
the nicest man. You know, I– And that goes back.

(01:16:25):
I just, let me just say a word. You ask about,
you know, the, the court and the work, et cetera.
It's a human institution. And I've been blessed because I
get along with the members of the court. Uh, we
have a different set of colleagues now. Um, but they're wonderful.
You've got, uh, Neil and Louise Gorsuch, the delightful, just

(01:16:48):
wonderful couple. Um, And, you know, it takes a few
years to get your legs, and he's done that. Brett
Kavanaugh was just the nicest person. He and his wife, Ashley,
she's a Texan. You've got the Alitos, Martha Ann and Sam. Again,
and the Chief and Jane. I mean, it's a wonderful

(01:17:11):
group of people. And it was when I came on
the court. It's different now because I'm the oldest member
as opposed to They're the youngest. As the New York
Times said, the youngest and the cruelest. But, you know,
it's just I've just changed perspective. But still, it's a
human institution with decent people on board.

Speaker 2 (01:17:30):
So I saw Brett and Ashley at Lindsey Graham's funeral.
And they've been friends. I've known them for 30 years.
Ashley was on the. 2000 George W. Bush campaign with
Heidi and me. So we were all young staffers on
that campaign. So I saw the two of them at
Lindsey's funeral. I actually told Brett at the funeral a
story during his confirmation hearing when Lindsey Graham went off.

(01:17:57):
And I think it's his– Lindsey was a dear friend
of mine and it was his finest moment I believe
as a senator where he unloaded on the unfairness of
what was happening and My mother had not previously been
a fan of Lindsey Graham's. And in the hearing, she
texts me and she says, okay, I now love Lindsey Graham.

(01:18:22):
And she goes online and gives him 40 bucks. And
so I walk over to Lindsey, I pull out my
phone and I show him the text from my mom
and Lindsey is cracking up laughing.

Speaker 3 (01:18:32):
Well, you know, it is really interesting. And that goes
to our country. People like people who stand up for
what's right. And as I said to you from the beginning,
I do not understand a lot about this town. I
don't know who has the time for all this anima.
toward other people. I don't spend any of my day

(01:18:52):
on that sort of thing. But the lying that takes place,
the attacks on financial disclosure, which was, it was laughable
in one way, but just painful to just the lies.

Speaker 2 (01:19:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:19:07):
But you and Mike Lee and the others who stood
up are dearly appreciated because we could not believe the
inundation of just misstatements and falsehoods. And we don't have
the capacity at the court to defend ourselves. We don't

(01:19:28):
have a bully pulpit or anything like that. Most of
us just simply are doing our jobs. And we can disagree,
you know, in the old days, I first became aware
of the court when they're riding along US 17 between

(01:19:49):
Savannah and the farm. There were these impeach Earl Warren
signs after Brown v. Board of Education. And so I
understand that people have different ways of reacting to to
the work that we do, but this current environment that
we're in is quite, excuse me, quite different from signs

(01:20:13):
saying impeach Earl Warren.

Speaker 2 (01:20:14):
Well, Justice, let me say thank you. Thank you for,
you've been incredibly generous with your time. Thank you for
joining us on this podcast. Thank you for spending the
time in the interviews to write this book. And look,
I've said this before, but you are a true American hero.
And I want to say to the folks listening, if
you're a young person, there are a lot of young

(01:20:35):
people that listen to this podcast. If you are a
young person and you're looking for someone to admire, someone
to emulate, someone to walk along a path and be
inspired by, you would be very hard pressed to find
a better role model than Clarence Thomas. And that's why

(01:20:55):
I wrote this book, because I think you are an
incredibly historic significant human being and leader with courage and principle,
and I am grateful. You can order the book, goingfurther.com,
pre-order the book, buy it for your family. I think

(01:21:15):
you'll like it. I think you'll learn. I hope in
this podcast you've seen why I admire Justice Thomas so
much and why I think you should as well. And
thank you very much, and we'll see you on the
next podcast. Thank you, Justice.

Speaker 3 (01:21:28):
Thank you.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Going Further—The Incomparable Clarence Thomas Week In Review