Clarence Thomas Laments Dobbs Draft Leak: ‘Kind of an Infidelity’
Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas criticized the leak of a draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade for undermining trust at the Court in remarks at a conference on Friday.
“The institution that I’m a part of—if someone said that one line of one opinion would be leaked by anyone, you would say, ‘Oh, that’s impossible. No one would ever do that,'” Thomas said, according the Washington Post, at the Old Parkland Conference, which was sponsored by conservative think tanks the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the Manhattan Institute.
“There’s such a belief in the rule of law, belief in the court, belief in what we’re doing, that that was verboten,” Thomas added. “And look where we are, where now that trust or that belief is gone forever. And 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.”
Thomas also appeared to express concern over the future of the Court following the leak.
“Anybody who would, for example, have an attitude to leak documents, that general attitude is your future on the bench. And you need to be concerned about that,” Thomas said.
The remarks come after Politico published a draft opinion of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case earlier this month that would overturn the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that found a constitutional right to an abortion. Pro-abortion demonstrators have held rallies outside the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices in the days since the leak.
Thomas on Friday suggested that conservatives would not have organized similar demonstrations.
“You would never visit Supreme Court justices’ houses when things didn’t go our way. We didn’t throw temper tantrums,” Thomas told the conference. “I think it is incumbent on us to always act appropriately and not repay tit for tat.”
Thomas made the remarks in conversation with University of California at Berkeley professor John Yoo, a former clerk for Thomas.
The event marked the second time that Thomas has warned about declining trust in institutions since the leak of the Dobbs draft.
“We are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like,” Thomas said at a judicial conference last Friday, according to Reuters. Without explicitly referring to the leak, Thomas added, “We can’t be an institution that can be bullied into giving you just the outcomes you want. The events from earlier this week are a symptom of that.”
