Justice Clarence Thomas on Friday compared the leak of fellow Justice’s Samuel Alito’s draft opinion regarding Roe v Wade to ‘infidelity.’
Thomas, 73, said that the leak would weaken the public’s trust in the Supreme Court as an institution.
He told host John Yoo that the leak from the Supreme Court was ‘tremendously bad.’
Thomas pondered: ‘I wonder how long we’re going to have these institutions at the rate we’re undermining them and then I wonder when they’re gone or destabilized what we will have as a country and I don’t think the prospects are good if we continue to lose them.’
He continued: ‘When you lose that trust, especially in the institution that I’m in, it changes the institution fundamentally. You begin to look over your shoulder. It’s like kind of an infidelity – that you can explain it but you can’t undo it,’ reports Politico.
Thomas was speaking at the Old Parkland Conference, a meeting of black conservatives, in Dallas where he was Friday’s keynote speaker. Following his speech, Thomas sat for a questions and answers session with John Yoo of Berkeley Law School.
He also hinted that the atmosphere on the court had changed for the worse since he was confirmed in 1991, and suggested that a liberal justice’s clerk could be behind the leak.
Thomas said: ‘This is not the court of that era. I sat with (famously liberal justice) Ruth Ginsburg for almost 30 years and she was actually an easy colleague to deal with… We may have been a dysfunctional family, but we were a family.’
‘Anybody who would, for example, have an attitude to leak documents, that is your general attitude, that is your future on the bench.’
Politico first reported on the leak of Alito’s draft opinion, an opinion that was the biggest indication yet that the conservative leaning court could overturn a constitutional right to abortion that has been in place since an earlier 1973 ruling.
Six of the court’s nine justices are conservatives, and five of them – all bar John Roberts – are believed to be in favor of overturning Roe, meaning the federal right to an abortion will almost certainly soon be scrapped.
The leak went on to prompt nationwide protests, including angry crowds outside of the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices.
The George H.W. Bush appointee said that conservatives ‘would never visit Supreme Court justice[s’] houses when things didn’t go our way’ and that they don’t ‘throw temper tantrums.
Thomas put into context the gravity of the leak saying: ‘If someone said that one line of one opinion would be leaked by anyone, and you would say that, ‘Oh, that’s impossible. No one would ever do that.’ He described the idea of a leak as ‘verboten.’
Chief Justice John Roberts confirmed the leak was authentic but said that it was not the court’s final position on the issue of Mississippi’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Speaking at the conference, Thomas did not mention any of his colleagues by name when speaking about the leak.
Thomas’ comments come a day after Justice Samuel Alito was asked about the leak during an appearance at George Mason University. Alito dodged the question, answering by the saying that it was business as usual within the court, reports The Washington Post.
Famously, it was at the same conference of black conservatives in 1980 when Thomas relayed the audience with one of his most anecdotes when he spoke about his sister who was on welfare.
Thomas, who was then an aide to Republican Senator John Danforth, said of his sister: ‘She gets mad when the mailman is late with her welfare check. That is how dependent she is. What’s worse is that now her kids feel entitled to the check too. They have no motivation for doing better or getting out of that situation,’ reported The Atlantic.