Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination facts for kids
On July 1, 1991, President George H. W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court of the United States to replace Thurgood Marshall, who had announced his retirement. At the time of his nomination, Thomas was a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; President Bush had appointed him to that position in March 1990.
The nomination proceedings were contentious from the start. Many women's groups and civil rights groups opposed Thomas on the basis of his conservative political views, just as they had opposed Bush's Supreme Court nominee from the previous year, David Souter.
On October 15, 1991, Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States by a narrow Senate majority of 52 to 48. He took the oath of office on October 23, 1991.
Contents
Nomination
Justice William Brennan stepped down from the Supreme Court in 1990. Thomas was one of five candidates on Bush's shortlist and was the one Bush was most interested in nominating. Bush's staff made three arguments against nominating Thomas at the time: Thomas had only served eight months as a judge; Bush could expect to replace Thurgood Marshall with Thomas in due time; and multiple senior advisors told Bush that they did not feel that Thomas was ready. Bush eventually decided to nominate Judge David Souter of the First Circuit instead, who was easily confirmed.
White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu promised that Bush would fill the next Supreme Court vacancy with a "true conservative" and predicted a "knock-down, drag-out, bloody-knuckles, grass-roots fight" over confirmation. On July 1, 1991, President Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, a young (43 years-old) black conservative judge, to replace retiring justice Thurgood Marshall, a civil rights icon and the court's first African American justice. When introducing Thomas that day, The president called him "the best person" in the country to take Marshall's place on the court, a characterization belied, according to constitutional law expert Michael Gerhardt, by Thomas' "limited professional distinction, with his most significant legal experiences having been a controversial tenure as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and barely more than one year of experience as a federal court of appeals judge."
In 1992, Gerhardt described the Thomas nomination as "a bold political move calculated to make it more difficult for many of the same civil rights organizations and southern blacks, who opposed Judge [Robert] Bork's [Supreme Court] nomination, to oppose Justice Thomas." He also wrote that, "in selecting Justice Thomas, President Bush returned to a practice – nominating extreme ideologues for the Supreme Court – that many hoped had ended with the Senate's rejection of Judge Bork."
First hearing
Public confirmation hearings on the Thomas nomination began on September 10, 1991, and lasted for ten days. The senators' focus as they questioned Thomas and an array of witnesses for and against the nomination was on Thomas' legal views, as expressed in his speeches, writings, and the decisions he had handed down as a federal appeals court judge.
Under questioning, Thomas repeatedly asserted that he had not formulated a position on Roe v. Wade, or had any conversations with anyone regarding the issue.
At one point in the beginning of the proceedings, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Joe Biden asked Thomas if he believed the Constitution granted any sort of property rights to individuals as described in Richard Epstein's book Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain, which had been published by Harvard University Press in 1985. Biden held the book up for Thomas to see and denounced its contents. In his book, Epstein argues that the government should be regarded with the same respect as any other private entity in a property dispute. The Cato Institute later paraphrased Biden's general line of questioning in the hearing as, "Are you now or have you ever been a libertarian?"
Senate votes
Committee vote
After extensive debate, the Judiciary Committee voted 13–1 on September 27, 1991 to send the Thomas nomination to the full Senate without recommendation. A motion earlier in the day to give the nomination a favorable recommendation had failed 7–7. Anita Hill's harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas became public after the nomination had been reported out from the committee. Up to that time, there had been no public suggestion of inappropriate behavior or misconduct in Thomas' past.
Full Senate
The Senate voted 52–48 on October 15, 1991, to confirm Thomas as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. In all, Thomas won with the support of 41 Republicans and 11 Democrats, while 46 Democrats and 2 Republicans voted to reject his nomination.
The 99 days that elapsed from the date Thomas' nomination was submitted to the Senate to the date on which the Senate voted whether to approve it was the second longest of the 16 nominees receiving a final vote since 1975, second only to Robert Bork, who waited 108 days. Also, the percentage of senators voting against his confirmation, 48% (48 of 100), was the greatest against a successful nominee since 1881, when 48.9% of senators (23 of 47) voted against the nomination of Stanley Matthews. Vice President Dan Quayle presided over the vote in his role as President of the Senate, prepared to cast a tie-breaking vote if needed for confirmation.
Eight days after winning confirmation, on October 23, Thomas took the prescribed constitutional and judicial (set by federal law) oaths of office, and became the 106th member of the court. He was sworn-in by Justice Byron White in a ceremony initially scheduled for October 21, but postponed due to the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist's wife.
Cultural impact
Public interest in, and debate over, Hill's testimony is said by some to have launched modern-day public awareness of the issue of harassment in the United States. Some people also link this to what is known as the Year of the Woman (1992), when a significant number of liberal women were simultaneously elected to Congress. Some also called these women the "Anita Hill Class".
Michael Isikoff claimed the case influenced the coverage of the allegations of harassment against Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
Books
Authors skeptical about Hill's allegations
David Brock wrote an article titled "The Real Anita Hill" for the 1992 The American Spectator magazine, which argued against her veracity. He also wrote a 1993 book of the same name. However, he would later denounce these works in a 2003 book titled Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative.
Ken Foskett, an investigative reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wrote a book about Justice Thomas in 2004. Foskett concludes that, "Although, it was plausible that Thomas said what Hill alleged, it seems implausible that he said it all in the manner Hill described." Foskett elaborates:
Bullying a woman simply wasn't in Thomas's nature and ran contrary to how he conducted himself around others in a professional environment. And if the context wasn't as Hill alleged, was it fair to turn private conduct into a political weapon to defeat his nomination?
Scott Douglas Gerber wrote a book in 1998 about the jurisprudence of Justice Thomas, and came to the following conclusion about the Anita Hill allegations: "Frankly, I do not know whom to believe." Gerber also wryly noted the reaction when an author (David Brock) who had criticized Hill did a U-turn: "the left maintains that it proves that Hill was telling the truth, while the right contends that it simply shows that Brock is an opportunist trying to sell books."
Authors supporting Hill's allegations
Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, reporters for The Wall Street Journal, wrote an article for the May 24, 1993 issue of The New Yorker challenging David Brock's assertions. The two authors would later conclude in an investigative book on Thomas that "the preponderance of the evidence suggests" that Thomas lied under oath when he told the committee he had not harassed Hill. Mayer and Abramson say Biden abdicated control of the Thomas confirmation hearings and did not call Angela Wright to the stand. They report that four women traveled to Washington, D.C., to corroborate Anita Hill's claims, including Wright and Jourdain.
Strange Justice was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1994 and received an extraordinary amount of media attention. Conservatives like John O'Sullivan panned the book, while liberals such as Mark Tushnet praised it, saying it established "that Clarence Thomas lied" during the hearings.
Autobiographies by Hill and Thomas
In 1997, Anita Hill penned her autobiography, Speaking Truth To Power, and she addressed why she filed no complaint at the time of the alleged harassment in the early 1980s:
I assessed the situation and chose not to file a complaint. I had every right to make that choice. And until society is willing to accept the validity of claims of harassment, no matter how privileged or powerful the harasser, it is a choice women will continue to make.
In 2007, Clarence Thomas published his memoirs, also revisiting the Anita Hill controversy. He described her as touchy and apt to overreact, and described her work at the EEOC as mediocre. He wrote:
On Sunday morning, courtesy of Newsday, I met for the first time an Anita Hill who bore little resemblance to the woman who had worked for me at EEOC and the Education Department. Somewhere along the line, she had been transformed into a conservative, devoutly religious Reagan-administration employee. In fact, she was a left-winger who'd never expressed any religious sentiments whatsoever during the time I'd known her, and the only reason why she'd held a job in the Reagan administration was because I'd given it to her.
In an op-ed piece written by Anita Hill, appearing in The New York Times on October 2, 2007, Ms. Hill wrote that she "will not stand by silently and allow [Justice Thomas], in his anger, to reinvent me."
Films
Showtime dramatized the confirmation hearing in the 1999 television movie Strange Justice that stars Delroy Lindo as Thomas and Regina Taylor as Hill. The film aired on Showtime on August 29, 1999.
HBO dramatized the confirmation hearing in the 2016 film Confirmation that stars Kerry Washington as Hill and Wendell Pierce as Thomas. The film aired on HBO on April 16, 2016.
Clarence Thomas discussed his confirmation hearings and the Anita Hill allegations in the 2020 documentary Created Equal: Clarence Thomas In His Own Words.
