Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is, to put it mildly, known for his scorn for anything resembling “affirmative action”. So why was Thomas joining a bunch of, you know, liberals, in Cooper v. Harris to affirm a lower court ruling overturning a little scheme cooked up by North Carolina Republicans to pack all the black voters they could find into two districts, including what is (hopefully) the most litigated congressional district in the country, NC-12?
In his concurring opinion, Thomas is at pains to explain why the Court is right this time, after getting right the “first time” in a suit involving NC-12 (in a decision that he wrote), but then getting it wrong in a second case involving the 12th (naturally, Thomas dissented on that one) However, Thomas’s reasoning doesn’t seem to hold much water with his usual right-wing compadres—Alioto, Roberts, and Kennedy, who huff, in a wonderfully fustian manner: “A precedent of this Court should not be treated like a disposable household item—say, a paper plate or napkin— to be used once and then tossed in the trash. But that is what the Court does today in its decision regarding North Carolina’s 12th Congressional District: The Court junks a rule adopted in a prior, remarkably similar challenge to this very same congressional district.”
I confess that I’m not up to the task of reading and weighing three Supreme Court decisions just to make fun of Justice Thomas, so if I’m not being entirely fair, well, free speech and all that.
