"All About Supreme
Court Justice Clarence Thomas" with Myron Magnet, City
Journal editor-at-large
FULL TWO HOURS
HOUR 1
HOUR 2
About Myron Magnet
Myron Magnet is
a prizewinning author and journalist, editor-at-large of City
Journal, and author of the new book, Clarence
Thomas and the Lost Constitution. He previously served
as editor of City Journal and a member of the board
of editors of Fortune magazine. He is one of
America’s leading public intellectuals and a recipient of
the National Humanities Medal in 2008. Magnet is a frequent
media guest who has appeared on major radio and television
programs nationwide. He has written extensively for some of
our nation’s leading publications such as The Wall
Street Journal, National Review, Commentary, The American
Spectator, and The New York Times. His work
has covered a wide range of topics from American society and
social policy to history, economics, literature, and the
American founding. He previously authored The Founders
at Home, The Dream and the Nightmare, and
other titles. Magnet holds bachelor’s degrees from Columbia
University and the University of Cambridge. He earned an
M.A. from Cambridge and a Ph.D. from Columbia, where he
taught for several years. He lives in New York City.
"Clarence Thomas and the Lost
Constitution"
- By Myron Magnett
Washington, DC—When Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in
1991, he found with dismay that it was interpreting a very different
Constitution from the one the Framers had written—the one that had
established a federal government manned by the people’s own elected
representatives, charged with protecting citizens’ inborn rights
while leaving them free to work out their individual happiness
themselves, in their families, communities, and states. How did we
lose the republic of the Framers’ imagination and how can we restore
their magnificent self-governing nation of liberty?
In CLARENCE THOMAS AND THE LOST CONSTITUTION (Encounter Books, May
7, 2019), renowned author and City Journal editor-at-large Myron
Magnet contends that Clarence Thomas’s radical originalist
jurisprudence presents a path forward for recovering our nation’s
“Lost Constitution” and restoring America as a free, self-governing
nation made up of independent-minded, self-reliant citizens. And the
book reveals how the mortal combat between the original Constitution
of Liberty and the evolved “Living Constitution” lies at the heart
of the animosity that divides Americans today.
Magnet recounts the gripping tale of how the Constitution got
twisted beyond recognition from the 1787 document, the 1789 Bill of
Rights that the Founders had framed, and the Reconstruction-Era
Amendments ratified to fulfill Lincoln’s dream of a new birth of
freedom. Woodrow Wilson, who despised the Framers’ checks and
balances as obsolete and inefficient, purposely began that
distortion, aiming to replace the Founders’ government of separated,
enumerated, and limited powers with government by unelected,
“scientific” experts in executive-branch agencies, dispassionately
making binding rules like a legislature, carrying them out like a
president, and adjudicating and punishing infractions of them like a
court.
Seeking to bypass cumbersome congressional lawmaking, Wilson saw the
Supreme Court as a permanent constitutional convention, the soul of
a “Living Constitution” that would evolve continually, in Darwinian
fashion, with the Bench legislating to meet modernity’s ever-new
needs. What Wilson set going, Franklin Roosevelt supersized,
creating in the alphabet soup of New Deal agencies what he
acknowledged was a fourth branch of government with no
constitutional basis. Then, under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the
1950s and 1960s, the Nine set about realizing Wilson’s dream of a
Supreme Court sitting as a permanent constitutional convention,
conjuring up laws out of smoke and mirrors and justifying them as
expressions of the spirit of the age.
But Clarence Thomas—who joined the Court after eight years running
one of the myriad administrative agencies that the Great Society had
piled on top of FDR’s batch—had deep misgivings about the new
governmental order. He shared the Framers’ vision of free,
self-governing citizens forging their own fate. And from his own
experience growing up in hyper-segregated Savannah under the
vigilant eye of his ferociously self-reliant grandfather, flirting
with and rejecting black radicalism at college, and running an
agency that supposedly advanced equality, he doubted that unelected
experts and justices really did understand the moral arc of the
universe better than the people themselves, or that the rules and
rulings they issued made lives better rather than worse.
More painful to Clarence Thomas, his predecessors on his own Court
had helped kill Reconstruction in its cradle through grotesque 1870s
decisions that neutered the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and
ensured decades of Jim Crow black subservience in the South. Even
worse, the Court still cites those decisions as precedents for its
rulings to this very day. But such racist judgments surely don’t
merit the status of Constitutional law, Clarence Thomas concluded.
In the Justice’s radical originalism, clearly explained in these
pages in engaging, non-lawyerly prose, the only legitimate
Constitutional law is the Constitution.
So in the hundreds of opinions he has written in more than a quarter
century on the Court, Clarence Thomas has questioned the
constitutional underpinnings of the new order and tried to restore
the limited, self-governing original one, as more legitimate, more
just, and more free than the one that grew up in its stead. The
Court now seems set to move down the trail he blazed. So far, few of
Clarence Thomas’s searching opinions have served as the Court’s
majority ruling. But he is laying down, within the Court’s official
record, a blueprint for future Justices to restore the authentic
U.S. Constitution, just as his own character embodies the old ideal
of American citizenship, with liberty at its heart.
To arrange an
interview with Clarence
Thomas and the Lost Constitution author Myron Magnet,
please contact Stephen Manfredi at 202.222.8028 orsmanfredi@ManfrediStrategyGroup.com.
Clarence
Thomas and the Lost Constitution
10 Interview Questions
for Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution Author Myron Magnet.
y1. Why did you write CLARENCE THOMAS AND THE LOST
CONSTITUTION?
2. In CLARENCE THOMAS AND THE LOST CONSTITUTION, you contend
that upon his ascension to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas was
dismayed to discover that the Court was interpreting a very
different Constitution from the one the Framers had written. How was
this Constitution fundamentally different?
3. What is the “Lost Constitution”? How did we lose the
republic of the Framers’ imagination?
4. What impact did Clarence Thomas’s own life
experiences—growing up in segregated Savannah under the vigilant eye
of his fiercely self-reliant grandfather, running an agency that
supposedly advanced equality, and encountering race and sex politics
at his confirmation hearings—have on his judicial philosophy and
quarter century of service on the Supreme Court?
5. How did Woodrow Wilson’s notion of a “Living Constitution”
and dream of a permanent Constitutional convention develop from the
Progressive Era and FDR’s New Deal to the Warren Court and beyond?
6. Why has the new constitutional order based on a permanent
Constitutional convention undermined American freedom and the
Framers’ vision of free, self-governing citizens forging their own
fate? To what extent is this new constitutional order based on
judicial policy-making directly responsible for the creation of our
undemocratic “Administrative State” in which unelected bureaucrats
rule? To what extent does the battle between the original
Constitution of Liberty and the “Living Constitution” lie at the
heart of the animosity that divides Americans today? Does our
constitutional order face a crisis of legitimacy?
7. How did the Supreme Court actually undercut Reconstruction
efforts after the Civil War, weakening the Fourteen and Fifteenth
Amendments to ensure decades of Jim Crow black subservience in the
South? Why does the Court continue to cite these decisions as
precedent for its modern rulings?
8. What is “originalism”? You note that Clarence Thomas holds
firmly that the only legitimate Constitutional law is the
Constitution itself. Does this mean that legal precedent is
irrelevant? Why is the Court so wedded to the doctrine of stare
decisis? Please explain Clarence Thomas’s originalist judicial
philosophy.
9. You contend that in the hundreds of opinions he has written
in more than a quarter century on the Court, Clarence Thomas has
questioned the constitutional underpinnings of the new order and
tried to restore the limited, self-governing original one, as more
legitimate, just, and free than the one that grew up in its stead.
What are a couple of the most important opinions Clarence Thomas has
written? How do Clarence Thomas’s legal rationales generally differ
from his fellow justices, even those with whom he usually agrees?
10. CLARENCE THOMAS AND THE LOST CONSTITUTION argues that the
Court now seems set to move down the trail Clarence Thomas has
blazed—that he is laying down within the Court’s official record a
blueprint for future justices to restore the authentic U.S.
Constitution. Do you think that Clarence Thomas’s “radical
originalism” will ultimately prevail? Are Neil Gorsuch and Brett
Kavanaugh in the same mold as Clarence Thomas?
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