Seth Cotlar: Now let's talk about Thomas's mendacious citation of Gordon Wood's Creation of the American Republic. Again, Thomas has just said the original intent was to create a unitary executive with virtually unchecked power. Here's what Wood says about the founding generation's thoughts on executive power.

Just read Thomas's concurrence in the Trump case and OMG, the mendacity! Thomas says yes, the President is immune, but also the appointment of special council Smith was an abuse of Presidential power that threatens the foundations of American liberty. He cites Thomas Paine to back this up. Wut?....

Paine helped draft the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776. That constitution created a 13 PERSON EXECUTIVE because the people who wrote it were anxious to constrain the power of that branch. It's the exact opposite of Thomas's "unified executive" theory. avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century...

The Avalon Project : Constitution of Pennsylvania - September 28, 1776avalon.law.yale.edu

Now let's talk about Thomas's mendacious citation of Gordon Wood's Creation of the American Republic. Again, Thomas has just said the original intent was to create a unitary executive with virtually unchecked power. Here's what Wood says about the founding generation's thoughts on executive power.

Just 6 pages before the section of Wood that Thomas cites to support his argument that the appointment of Jack Smith is a terrible threat to liberty, Wood talks about Pennsylvania's very non-unitary executive that Paine had played a hand in crafting.

The question of what "the founding generation" thought about executive power is immensely complicated. What Thomas is doing here is not "originalism" in any meaningful sense, it's just history a la carte. It's "living constitutionalism" as done by pro-Trump judges.

The idea that the greatest threat to liberty in the US today is the power to appoint a special counsel rather than, oh I dunno, a President inciting an insurrection to overthrow the results of an election and then claiming immunity for those actions is...I mean...Thomas has to be trolling us, yes?

To be completely fair, I should admit that there were a number of quite trollish Federalist judges back in the era of the Alien and Sedition Acts...so in that sense, perhaps Thomas really is acting in the spirit of originalism.

So just to make sure I am following. While the founders were extremely concerned about kings amassing too much power, this concern was exclusively focused on the monarch's power to appoint officers. Other forms of royal power did not concern them at all. Do I have that right?

He's the student who has read only one page of the reading, and just goes on and on about that.

Precisely. Appointing Jack Smith = tyranny. Telling your VP to do a coup and then having a mob you assembled threaten to hang him while violently attacking the Capitol = official acts which are totally within the scope of presidential power.

Hippies.

No. Fox News broke his brain and into the cracks went money from the billionaires. He also wasn’t a good person to begin with.

He has been a nihilist ever since his early 1970s disillusionment with black nationalism. He isn’t concerned with history, jurisprudence, or logic. Only in a simplistic Hobbesian world of unchecked power through strength.

Clarence Thomas’s Radical Vision of Racewww.newyorker.com Thomas has moved from black nationalism to the right. But his beliefs about racism, and our ability to solve it, remain the same.

However brilliant the founding fathers were, they did not envision the world in which we now live. If they had, I believe they would have worded many things differently and would have relied less on people being honorable, but put real enforceable ethics into the Constitution. Times have changed!

My bet is that Thomas never even saw the book. And his clerks this year...not a single history major. Their undergrad degrees: 1. Economics at Creighton 2. Government and Economics at UVa (grandson of Scalia) 3. Sociology at Wheaton 4. Political Science and Psychology at Auburn

Yes and yes!

to quote the kids way back in the Shrub-Cheney days, "we are ruled by monsters." (and the kids had no idea what real monsters are...)

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