Going Further—The Incomparable Clarence Thomas Week In Review

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Welcome, it is Verdict with Ted Cruz, Week in Review, Ben Ferguson with you, and we've got one big story for you. If you missed the incredible interview with Clarence Thomas that Senator Cruz did about his new book, well, then we've got it for you in its entirety. It was a phenomenal week with the book launch and an incredible story about the history of Clarence Thomas. how he got to be a Supreme Court justice, and a lot of questions and facts about him, well, that he answers that you may have never even heard. It's The Weekend Review, and it starts right now.
00:00:34
Speaker 2: Today we have a very special podcast. My brand new book is coming out. It's my fifth book, and it is entitled Going Further, The Incomparable Clarence Thomas. And this book does a couple of things. Number one, It tells the story of Justice Thomas, a truly extraordinary human being and extraordinary justice. It tells his life story, a journey that is unlike the journey of any other justice who has served on the Supreme Court. But it also takes up his three decades of jurisprudence and tries to explain it in a way that is accessible, a way that is understandable, a way that brings home why it matters, why it matters for the court, why it matters for the Constitution, why it matters for the country. And today, what makes this podcast very special, and by the way, the book will be available August 25th. You can pre-order it. There's a special website for that called goingfurther.com, goingfurther.com. I would encourage you, go to the website, pre-order the book. And today's podcast is a very special one because our guest is none other than the incomparable Justice Clarence Thomas. Justice, welcome.
00:01:38
Speaker 3: Well, thank you. It's a little embarrassing to say you'd be called incomparable. Let me call lots of things, though. Thank you.
00:01:47
Speaker 2: I really appreciate your joining us. I think this is the first podcast you've ever done.
00:01:52
Speaker 3: I have no idea. I think so. I don't normally do any sort of, I don't do much media type things. But you're you. I mean, I've known you now, what, 30 years? Yeah. And seeing you through different phases in your life as a law clerk. hanging out in my chambers as the SG of Texas and now Senator. So it's been a long journey. And also, it's also an opportunity to say you're one of the people who actually stands up, particularly at times when others seem to wither. And I appreciate it. And more personally, when my wife and I were under attack, for obvious reasons. You and Mike Lee and some of the other friends would stand up, Senator Kennedy, et cetera. So I really appreciate that.
00:02:56
Speaker 2: Justice, that is very kind of you, and especially for you to observe that I stand up in the face of criticism and attacks. That is powerful coming from you because you're someone who knows what that's like. And has done so in a way that has been world-changing. And so Justice Thomas, decades ago, wrote a phenomenal autobiography. My Grandfather's Son. And you told your own story. And it may be the best autobiography I've ever read. I read it at the time it came out. It inspired me. Actually, shortly after it came out, I was at home. And as it so happened, a... young African-American boy, he was probably 15, 16 years old, came by the house, and I think he was selling magazines or something, knocked on the door, and I struck up a conversation with him. I went and grabbed the book and gave it to him and said, look, you should read this. You may not have heard Justice Thomas' story and journey, but I hope this will inspire you. And I think for a lot of the folks who listen to the podcast or watch the podcast, and some people listen to it on their phones, others watch it on YouTube or Facebook, they know who you are, but they don't know your actual story. And it is, as I mentioned at the beginning, it is unlike any other justices on the court. So maybe we can just start with, tell us about growing up. You grew up in Pinpoint, Georgia. What was it like growing up?
00:04:29
Speaker 3: Well, I was born in Pinpoint, but most of my growing up, I've been fortunate. I think the misfortunes you have, can lead to different things. And the house in Pinpoint burned down when I was six in the first grade. Then we lived in a tenement with my mother in one room in Savannah for about a year and eventually wound up living with our grandparents, moving there when I was seven. And that was probably, well, actually was the best thing that could have ever happened to me because that was life-changing.
00:05:07
Speaker 2: You describe in your book, and I recount in my book, when you were in that tenement and that it did not have indoor plumbing, and so you used a chamber pot, and you describe walking down the stairs carrying a chamber pot.
00:05:21
Speaker 3: Oh, I fell down. Yeah.
00:05:22
Speaker 2: It ended up being coated in urine. I mean, that's– it's a pretty.
00:05:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it was– you know, it's sort of what I think of people saying they're having a bad day. Yeah. and you're seven years old, and that happens, and you don't have a shower or the kind of a bathroom that people would normally have, you realize, I mean, to me, it defined a bad day. But then things that happened after that outweigh that. There's a wonderful song by a black minister that you hear, from time to time, if you go to a funeral with small southern black churches, and I won't complain. And, you know, you can have all these bad things, this litany of bad things happen, and you can say, I won't complain, because it's outweighed by all the good things that have happened. And that's pretty much my life. And those good things began with my grandparents and My grandfather was a Catholic convert, which was an oddity. Catholics were an oddity in Savannah. Black Catholics were really an oddity. And it was because of that we were educated at parochial schools with my Irish nuns. And those in combination, my grandparents, the neighborhood I grew up in, the nuns, Catholicism forged a foundation that I've benefited from.
00:07:08
Speaker 2: Well, and your deep faith is integral to who you are, who you are as a man, I think who you are as a justice to your journey. Many people don't know you almost became a priest, and for a long time you thought that's what you wanted to do.
00:07:23
Speaker 3: Well, I think I would have been a priest had the bishops at the time or the leadership in the church been as firm and had the resolve of the nuns during segregation and desegregation and civil rights movement, etc. My nuns were immovable as far as their propagation of the faith, their belief in us. they were the ones who planted the seed that in God's eyes, and you heard it at home too, we're all equal. That God made us, we were made in his image and likeness.
00:08:05
Speaker 2: So were the nuns more willing to speak out about civil rights?
00:08:08
Speaker 3: They were in their way. Of course, they had a vow of chastity and poverty and obedience. So there's only so much, but they were adamant. And they were adamant outwardly to the world and inwardly to us. So we couldn't use race or some of the other things as excuses. And it's hard to put it in context, but when I was in the second and third grade, this is again post-Brown, and the Georgia legislature was in the midst of drafting legislation that was reasserting segregation.
00:08:51
Speaker 2: And for our listeners, Brown is Brown versus Board of Education, which was a seminal Supreme Court decision in 1954 that overturned Plessy versus Ferguson. Plessy versus Ferguson, I think, is one of the most– in fact, almost everyone thinks is one of the most disgraceful decisions the courts has ever decided.
00:09:09
Speaker 3: Where it.
00:09:13
Speaker 2: Embraced the doctrine of separate but equal. And Brown overturned it in order that schools be desegregated. And you were a student when this, I mean, this impacted your life.
00:09:23
Speaker 3: Well, I started first grade in 1954. Yeah. But still, schools were still segregated.
00:09:31
Speaker 2: Do you remember as a little kid, like being a first grader, were you aware of Brown at the time?
00:09:36
Speaker 3: Well, no. Brown had almost, I mean, you're a kid.
00:09:39
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:09:40
Speaker 3: And school meant you got like a new pair of pants and. It was the first time I'd been to school. I went with my cousins to a little school called Haven Home School. But then when the house burned down, I moved in. There's a big difference between urban poverty and rural poverty. And rural, we were with relatives. it was, we were always together. You could run around barefooted and everybody knew you.
00:10:05
Speaker 2: It was sort of an enclave. And you didn't grow up with English as your first language.
00:10:09
Speaker 3: Well, it was a version. We, people know it now, they celebrate it back then. They used to make fun of us. In Georgia, there's a dialect called Geechee. Mm-hmm. And in South Carolina, they call it Gullah. But it's just, it's a patois that for people who were not, who did not assimilate in the culture or who were not a part of the culture, we were isolated near the water. So you kept that language. And that's the way I, until I moved to Savannah, that was all I knew. They called us, back then they said we were bad talkin'. Today they celebrate it as a cultural thing. But when I moved to Savannah, you were in urban poverty, which was quite different. And I'm not going to go into all the details. But then when I went to live with my grandparents, even though the schools were segregated, they were parochial schools. And that was different from the public schools because there was quite a bit of order. You wore a uniform. The bell rang a certain time. You said the Pledge of Allegiance in the schoolyard before you marched in. You had a catechism class. It was a first class. It was every unison, good morning, sister. There was a lot of order, and that's what my grandfather wanted.
00:11:37
Speaker 2: Now, I think anyone understanding your life has to start by understanding your grandfather. You were... raised by your grandparents principally, and your grandfather, Myers Anderson, I think you would say was the most important man in your life. And tell us about your grandfather.
00:11:56
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, he was not only the most important, I think he's the greatest man I've known, and my grandmother is the greatest woman. They were, and that's what I mean when I say, look, you can look at the negative side of things, but the blessings are enormous. I mean, to be, just think of the idea of living with those two people and being raised by them. And you can, after all these years, say that they are the two greatest people you've ever known.
00:12:25
Speaker 2: Well, and he instilled a lot of discipline in you. He was, I think, a hard man and a strong man.
00:12:31
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, you're from Texas. When you live a hard life, you have to be hard or you collapse. I mean, today we are inundated with fragile people. you are not permitted. And when you live in poverty and you have to figure things out, and he had a total of nine months of education. My grandmother had six years, and those weren't six full years, six, nine months. They knew how to make do with life. They knew how to make a way in the world without no education. So things that we have today, like education, freedom, etc. They prized, they dreamt about. They wanted us to have a chance to have those things.
00:13:22
Speaker 2: Well, and your grandparents prioritized education with you and reading in particular. That became an outlet for you as a boy.
00:13:29
Speaker 3: Well, they were absolute about education. But the other thing was work. He didn't believe in sports. That was foolishness. We didn't have time for that. We delivered fuel oil in the winter and we farmed in the summer.
00:13:44
Speaker 2: You know, one story you told that stood out to me is that when you were delivering fuel oil, and there were times when it was really cold, your grandfather wouldn't let you wear gloves.
00:13:52
Speaker 3: No. He lost a finger on his right hand working, and he never really got too much into the details of it. But it must have involved a glove because he would not, I mean, he got caught in a chain or a winch or something, and it ripped it off about right. above the first knuckle or below the first knuckle. And so he would make us work with no gloves. And for us, cold would be 40 degrees in Georgia. You felt like you were freezing. But he believed. It was a way not to be harsh or anything like that. It was, he thought, safety. It was safer not to have gloves on.
00:14:44
Speaker 2: Now, you tell a story about being in Catholic high school and one of the boys passing you a note about Martin Luther King. Tell us that story and how it impacted you.
00:14:58
Speaker 3: Well, that was only one student out of dozens, and there was one bad apple, and he wasn't there very long, but it was my first year in the seminary, and There were two of us, two blacks in the seminary. I was the only one in my class. I was a sophomore. There was a young man behind me in the ninth grade. And the note was, I mean, it was offensive, but it wasn't debilitating. And you say, you consider the sender. And it just said on the outside something like, I like you. Martin Luther King, and then you open it up and it said dead on the inside, something like that. And it was, you know, again, this is 1964, 65, a lot going on. And, you know, I knew who it was. I know who it is. I'm not going to say who it was. But he left after a year or so. And that was that. But the rest of my classmates were and have been just phenomenal. You know, I was treated better there in the minor seminary. Because remember, we're at the beginning of desegregation. This is 1964. The next two years after my first year, I'd be the only black in that school. And I was treated very well. I was a really good student. I was treated fairly. The great thing about it was if you got a 95 in physics, you got a 95 in physics. Right. Latin was the nemesis of most kids. I did very, very well at St. John Vianney Minor Seminaries. And I have zero complaints. It was, again, one of the benefits that I received in Savannah. I was treated, and I like to say this for obvious reasons, I was treated better there than I was at Yale.
00:17:00
Speaker 2: Well, and your time at Yale.
00:17:05
Speaker 2: In fact, you draw an analogy between two kinds of snakes, which I think is revealing.
00:17:11
Speaker 3: Well, I think most people who live in rural areas know the difference. My grandfather always used this analogy. And the difference between a rattlesnake and a moccasin, which we had both, and they were pretty big in Georgia, in South Georgia. A rattlesnake always warned you. And if you gave it time, it'll get out of your way. You leave me alone, I'll leave you alone. A moccasin basically wouldn't warn you. And its attitude was, look, I was here first, and you're going to have a bad day. And I'm not moving. But his point was about the warning, that you had some people in Georgia who didn't like blacks, and they were bigots, and they were openly so.
00:17:55
Speaker 2: And what you said is the Southern... The southern racists were like rattlesnakes.
00:17:59
Speaker 3: They were like rattlesnakes.
00:18:00
Speaker 2: You knew who they were. They made noise, and they were visible. But when you went to the north and the northeast, they were like moccasins. They were hidden until they'd strike.
00:18:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the attitude. That was sort of one of the things that surprised me. We were told basically that the north was the Holy Grail. So it was shocking to see in New England the kind of, ethnic divisions, the bigotry toward minorities, etc.
00:18:31
Speaker 2: Now, what is it that attracted you to being a priest? Because that's what you thought you wanted to spend your life doing.
00:18:36
Speaker 3: Well, I'm Catholic. I was an altar boy. I loved being an altar boy. I loved, we used to get these magazines, marrying old priests and serving, you know, kids who were, had disease or were poor or were, having difficulties, and you begin to feel that that would be a good way to spend your life. And then it becomes an issue when you enter the minor seminary. It's really a time of discernment and to see whether you have the capabilities. And I like the idea of being called to serve to do that. When you When you have a vocation, you're asking yourself, what is God calling me to do? Right. And that became actually, again, but for the weakness of the bishops, I think I'd be a priest today. Or not specific bishops, but the church itself seemed to be vacillating on the issue of race. And to me, the big, the major wrong in the country, the major major contradiction in this country was the race issue that you treat you can place the importance of equality at the center of your founding document and then you have this issue of slavery and It's offshoots.
00:20:11
Speaker 2: Well, and the church was slow to recognize that. One point that I make many times is you look at Dr. King's letter from a Birmingham jail, and people forget to whom it is addressed. It's addressed to the clergy of America. He's writing to the leaders of the church saying, wake up and speak up. And my favorite portion of that letter was there's a group of senators, bipartisan senators, who regularly read that letter on the floor of the Senate. It's really powerful to read the words out loud. And there's a portion in it where he says the church should be a thermostat and not a thermometer, that it should be changing society and not just reacting to what's around. And that's ultimately what– led you to leave the seminary and say that you were not going to go down the path of being a priest?
00:21:06
Speaker 3: Well, I think it was an overreaction. I think I was 19 years old.
00:21:10
Speaker 2: And when Dr. King was assassinated, that was a pivotal moment. That was a pivotal moment. I was in my first year in college in the seminary. I would love to, I loved the Benedictines. I was there in Magna Conception Seminary in Missouri. I loved being there. The people, it was wonderful. Um, But it was not there that things were difficult. It was the world around me. It was the church generally. I thought that as a sort of a moral beacon, we should talk about the court, that we should have taken a leadership role in the church. Unquestionably. And it's been a long and difficult journey for our country. Now, you went... from the seminary to Holy Cross and then Yale Law School. A lot of people listening, I mean, they know you were one of the greatest conservative leaders to have ever lived. But as a young man, you were not in any way, shape or form a conservative. Tell folks what your worldview was as a 19, 20, 21 year.
00:22:24
Speaker 3: Well, I think when you're 19 and you're angry, you're confused for the most part. I came from a very traditional background. In fact, as I went through that period when I quit the seminary and returned home, my grandfather invited me to leave his house immediately. And so I've basically been on my own since then. And, of course, as you're 19— And that was a hard moment for you. Oh, it was more than hard. Hard is an understatement. Yeah. And it was in that vein or in that posture that I wound up going to New England in sort of a negative posture. And I think we react to our circumstances in certain ways. And I was reacting to the church's sort of... not doing what it should be doing. I overreacted. I reacted as a 19-year-old, emotionally.
00:23:24
Speaker 2: And you were angry at the time. You were angry at God. You stopped going to Mass.
00:23:28
Speaker 3: Well, I left the church completely. And I think if I had to do over, I would not have left the church. And I think it's a matter of, and this is a point my grandfather was making at the time. He said, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. That it is people not living up to what is right. That's the problem, not the underlying principles. So the church, the belief, the tenets of the church are not wrong. It's that the people are failing in living up to that. But at any rate, when you're young, you don't make those fine distinctions. So I think an easy way to deal with that or a quick way or a to sort of respond when you're that age is to find these sort of radical movements you participate in, you protest, you sort of let off steam and you're angry and you feel empowered by that anger. But then as time goes on, you take a step back and you start thinking about what you're doing. You know, my grandfather asked me a question, and I've said this before, I would come return home and he would be upset with me. And he would say, after all his sacrifices, this is what I've become. And he would challenge me because I'd say the country's racist and we need to destroy it and all that sort of thing. And he said, and when you destroy it, where are you going to go? That was always the unanswerable question. Yeah. What country is better than this country with all its problems? To which I had no answer. So I think that's planted the seed of doubt from this. And as I grew older and more mature and thought about things, in fact, about the time I was at Yale and had participated in enough sort of demonstrations.
00:25:40
Speaker 2: Well, and you had You took part in a protest that became a riot in Harvard Square.
00:25:47
Speaker 3: At your alma mater. Yeah, I did. See, I could have saved you trouble. That was sort of, I think that was the road to Damascus moment. That's the moment where you look into the abyss and it looks back.
00:26:06
Speaker 2: Well, you realized that it could have gone much worse for you. You could have been thrown in jail. You could have been expelled from school.
00:26:11
Speaker 3: Well, I couldn't answer why I was doing it. You know, again, it goes back when you ask the hard question, why? Why did I just do what I just did? Right. To spend all night doing something I don't quite understand. But that return, it was... April 16, 1970. So I returned to Holy Cross from Cambridge.
00:26:39
Speaker 2: Right.
00:26:41
Speaker 3: And walked in front of the chapel because I was exhausted but couldn't sleep. Walked in front of the chapel. And again, I'm not attending or anything, but I'm still deeply Catholic. And I face it, the Blessed Sacrament, and I ask God to take hate out of my heart. And I said, if you take hate out of my heart, I will never hate again. And that was the moment when you began to, for me, when I began to move in a more positive direction. When you begin to offload, it was like lancing a boil. And it was long, erratic. There was not a straight line. But it was away from the thing that it consumed to me. Well, and even.
00:27:28
Speaker 2: when you were a left-wing radical, you could see glimmers of the man that Clarence Thomas would become. That in many ways, I think, was the wisdom your grandfather and your grandmother had imparted to you, but you could see the individualist. You have never liked to conform.
00:27:48
Speaker 3: Well, I don't like being told what to do. I just think when you, the nuns made it clear that when God created us. It was mind, soul, and body. And you don't just liberate the body. And you were responsible. You committed a sin. It wasn't because the devil didn't make you do it. You did it. You gave in. You made the decision. And you were responsible. And you didn't do your homework. You were responsible. Excuses didn't count. And my grandfather was that way. You were accountable. And that's similarly when you made— it was my life. And I wasn't—I'm not talking about being a libertine or anything like that. It's more libertarian. Right. That you believe in liberty, and that means you have to take responsibility for it. And I really didn't like people saying, you have to do this, you have to do that. we had this saying that there are only two things I have to do, stay black and die. And that was a retort to people who had these sort of requirements for us, these mandates for us because of our skin color. And the thing that's really kind of interesting, it wasn't until later on that people began to say that when I came to this town, one of the greatest difficulties, if you think about it, was that There were those who thought that I should think a certain way. And the difficulty has been that they said, oh, you're confused. Well, I'm not confused. You're confused. You confuse me with someone who's been in indentured servitude. or something. But at any rate, they think that here's the way you're supposed to think. Again, here's your skin color. There's this kind of deterministic view that you're supposed to think this because we say so. And I, of course, declined that invitation to And so now that means that something, that I'm a walking contradiction because I've deviated from their perception of what I should think. Explain to me how that is different. Here's what I've asked people. I said, when I was a kid, the Savannah Public Library was segregated. I said, do you think it was right that the Savannah Public Library was segregated? Oh, no, you should have been able to go in. I said, what if they allowed me in but said I couldn't go to certain floors? That would be wrong. I said, what if they said you couldn't go to certain stacks? Well, that would be wrong. What if they had certain books marked that were off limits to me? That would be wrong. Then my question is, why is it then that you have a problem with me embracing certain ideas in certain books? What's the difference? Of course, that's unanswerable. In fact, I would prefer not to go in the building to not being able to embrace the ideas that I find that I agree with or that are important.
00:31:06
Speaker 2: By any measure, one of your greatest legacies in the court, and there are many, but has been on race. And you have been a clarion voice in your entire tenure on the court for the principle that the Constitution... does not allow racial distinctions, does not allow racial discrimination. The Constitution is colorblind and protects everyone. It's interesting as you tell the story or the analogy of the library and then the stacks and the books that you might not be allowed to read. One story you have told is as a young man, I think in law school, somebody gave you a copy of a book by Thomas Sowell. you started to read it and threw it in the trash and said, if I remember right, that no black man can think this way.
00:31:51
Speaker 3: That was Black Education, Myths and Tragedies, I think, one of his early books, and he laughs about it. Then, of course, he sent me a copy just to make sure I had it. But then, in the after law school, I was working in Jeff City. It's one of those Hobson's choices. That's how I wound up there. The only job offer I had, but It's the best job I've ever had.
00:32:17
Speaker 2: But all the fancy law firms wouldn't give you an offer. You came out of Yale Law School, did really well in law school.
00:32:22
Speaker 3: It didn't matter. And I always tell them now when I see them, they're the reason I'm on the court. Because but for them, I'd be a tax lawyer someplace. And they woke now, but they were fast asleep when I got out of school. So anyway, God works in mysterious ways. I wind up in Jeff City.
00:32:42
Speaker 2: So you're working for Jack Danforth, who is the attorney general in Missouri.
00:32:47
Speaker 3: Absolutely wonderful man.
00:32:48
Speaker 2: And your classmates were asking, what are you doing going to work for a Republican?
00:32:53
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:32:53
Speaker 2: He was the only one who would give you a job.
00:32:55
Speaker 3: He was the only one who gave me a job. I mean, I had trouble with that. I mean, I was dying. Remember, I just voted for McGovern. Yeah. You know, and I thought he was too conservative. So you can see ideologically where I was. But I go to work for him. Best job I've ever had.
00:33:10
Speaker 2: Well, and you said when you came in, you said, look, I don't want to work on matters of race. I don't want to be treated differently than anyone else. And you joked that he took you very seriously.
00:33:21
Speaker 3: He ignored all of us. But you loved that job. I loved it. It was the best job I've ever had. $ 11, 000 a year. And he promised. He said, I can give you more work for less money than anybody in the country. And that turned out to be a blessing. But at any rate, that office, the way that he ran that office was just wonderful, even-handed. One of the people I met who became a very dear friend was a quadriplegic from West Point, Nebraska. And went to University of Missouri Law School, graduated, ordered the co-wife, but had suffered from polio and was a quadriplegic. Just a very, very, very dear friend. He calls me up one day and he said, Clarence, there's another black guy out here like you. And his name is Thomas Sowell. And it was Thomas Sowell. And it was a book review in the Wall Street Journal. And it was on race and economics. And I obtained copies of that. And it became just sort of the beginning of the long, intellectual walk back of thinking about these things. And I met him at Washington University on a panel with Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she was a professor in the late 70s. And then when I came here in 79, I think I met him again either in 79 or 80 when he was making the rounds with Hill staffers. And we've been friends since the early 1980s.
00:35:04
Speaker 2: By the way, for what it's worth, I'm urging the White House to award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I hope they do so. I've publicly called for that. I'm trying to make that happen because I think that would be very appropriate.
00:35:16
Speaker 3: Well, I think it would be deserved. He is a great, great man and one of the great thinkers.
00:35:27
Speaker 2: I've never met him, but I've admired him. He's brilliant and courageous.
00:35:30
Speaker 3: Well, he's courageous. He and I met him. I met Walter Williams back then when I got here.
00:35:37
Speaker 2: I met Walter Williams when I was in high school.
00:35:39
Speaker 3: Is that right?
00:35:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was inspiring even when I was a kid.
00:35:43
Speaker 3: Brash, but he's... And there was another gentleman that you don't know that's also passed away, like Walter, who's... Dunn was also very quiet, but a libertarian and was very, very helpful. But anyway, the whole point is that in Jefferson City, again, I go back to what I said at the very beginning, that things that initially seem like a negative, you know, you can't get a job, so you wind up in Jefferson City, turn out to be a blessing. And what I say in retrospect is that God closed all the doors that I should not have gone through and left one door open, my Hobson's choice, and turned out to be the best job I've ever had.
00:36:35
Speaker 2: Well, and ultimately you're in the AG's office. You go get a job in corporate America at Monsanto, which paid you a good chunk of money but was not rewarding and you were not happy with corporate America. And then Jack Danforth has gone to the Senate and you go work for him in the Senate. and you're a Capitol Hill staffer, and you go to a conference with Thomas Sowell.
00:37:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, he invited me personally to that in San Francisco.
00:37:04
Speaker 2: And at the time, you're a Republican staffer, but you're on the journey. One of the things I try to do in the book is chronicle the intellectual journey and awakening from an angry left-wing radical to a principled conservative. That's a pretty big shift. And reading was an important part of it. Questioning was an important part of it. But you've described how you're sitting at lunch table with Juan Williams, the reporter, having what you thought was a conversation. And it was one of your first interactions with the press.
00:37:45
Speaker 3: And it ended up.
00:37:47
Speaker 2: Having a big feature article in the Washington post describing you as the black conservative, which, which was a pretty startling thing for you.
00:37:56
Speaker 3: Well, I'd never called myself conservative. I, I've, you know, the, um, that was a way of character. They called us black conservatives in order to dispose of us. Uh, they called Tom. So that, um, the Walter Williams, Jay Parker, who was another dear friend has passed away. Um, But I was shocked. Remember now, I'm 32 years old. I'm a Hill staffer. I've never been in the press. I had just made my first trip to California.
00:38:28
Speaker 2: You got the inkling that there was going to be something on you when they sent a photographer.
00:38:32
Speaker 3: To take a picture. I was sharing an office with three other staffers, and this photographer shows up from the post. And December 16, 1980, there's my smiling face on the op-ed page. And then my whole life. changed and the attacks the negativity.
00:38:51
Speaker 2: And there is a nastiness as a black conservative that I don't think anyone else experiences you get some of it as an Hispanic who's a conservative because I'm not supposed to be a conservative but you're really not supposed to be a conservative and there's part of the reason I wanted to write the book is the vitriol that has been directed at you is different look Justice Scalia You knew him extremely well. He was brilliant, extraordinarily principled. He never had the kind of hate directed to him that you did. And the left, they view you... a black man is not allowed to think that way. You're a traitor. And that, there's an ugliness to that.
00:39:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I mean, that's, you know, I grew up, again, I've been fortunate to have had misfortunes. And one of the things you learned during segregation is there was this idea that, boy, don't you know your place. And that's the same thing. I mean, these are the same, some of the worst people that you would meet, like the progressives. That's why I mentioned people like Woodrow Wilson, one of the early progressives.
00:40:06
Speaker 2: Who was a vicious racist.
00:40:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, but see, underneath that, and Paul Johnson makes the point that you scratch the surface of things like the Marxists and the socialists. That's what you find because they have to categorize people. So I understand that. But I crossed that bridge in my early 30s that I accepted that this is the way they were going to treat me. This is what was going to happen. This is what would happen, and who knew where it would leave, but God would take care of that part. But the fact that they have all this vitriol, to me, is a white flag that they have no argument. When you start calling.
00:40:52
Speaker 2: If they think you're wrong, persuade you.
00:40:54
Speaker 3: Look, I'm open to reason, but I will not be told what to do. No one cajoles me, no one makes me do anything. Slavery is over. But there's this sense that don't you know what you're supposed to think? And that is with me, that is the wrong argument.
00:41:16
Speaker 2: Well, and related to that, one of the things that you have really powerfully written and spoken about is with affirmative action and racial quotas, it brings with it a stigma. You rather famously put a sticker of 15 cents on your Yale law degree from a cigar box because, and you talked about coming out of Yale, but not being able to get a job. And look, I went to school at a different time than you did, but I'll tell you, as an Hispanic, I still remember this one supercilious liberal in law school explaining that everyone who wasn't a white man, was on the law review because of affirmative action. That was the only reason anyone could possibly do well is because they were giving us this gift. And it was infuriating.
00:42:10
Speaker 3: You know, I've heard, I've been, there are many, many slights along the way. But it doesn't make you wrong. These are little bumps in the road. And what I compare it to, again, I compare it to what My grandparents went through. Like, just take my grandfather. Yeah. If I'm going to complain, right, I have to look at him, at a man who didn't complain. He never knew his father. His mother dies when he's six or seven, maybe eight. And then he goes to live with his grandmother, who's a freed slave who lives on a part of the plantation that they're from.
00:42:57
Speaker 2: Just pause for a second and think about the marvel of America, that your grandfather who raised you was raised by his grandmother who was a freed slave. And now you are the second longest serving Supreme Court justice in American history and in a couple of years will be the longest serving. That is– it's one of the things– Look, those who point to the flaws in our nation's history, they're not wrong. Our racial history in particular has been a history of injustice, and slavery was grotesque. But I agree with Dr. King that the arc of history is long, and it bends towards justice. And that journey was possible because of the principles America was built on, even if it took us decades and even centuries to begin living up to it.
00:43:55
Speaker 3: Well, you know, he always, my grandfather would talk about don't throw out the Ten Commandments because people don't obey them. There's nothing wrong with the Ten Commandments. It's just we have weaknesses or for whatever reasons we don't comply. And I think sometimes when you're angry and you see suffering and difficulties, you are willing to throw everything out, the baby with the bathwater. And as you get older, you can be more discerning. And one of the things I think that's unfortunate is that the people who should know better haven't stood up and defended those principles and asserted them and then tried to live up to them and not be hypocritical and not to sacrifice the principles for a share of the power or for a share of the loot that they're getting from the country or whatever. And so one of the things that I tried to do when I was teasing out the speech at the University of Texas is to make this point. Two things that I wanted to talk about was the fact that here you had uneducated people who believed that God made them equal. And you had Irish nuns, immigrants, that believed strongly that in God's eyes, we're all equal. And this was not to be debated. No matter what the laws around us said, this was not debatable. So now that means if there are Irish immigrants and uneducated people who have no formal education believe this, my point was simply that it must be self-evident. Otherwise, how else would they know? The other part of it that I was interested in is there are a lot of nice words in the Declaration, for example. But what do they pledge? Their lives, their fortune, and their sacred honor. And this is after what the king says, I'm going to hang all of you.
00:46:11
Speaker 2: And that was not theoretical.
00:46:12
Speaker 3: No, I know it. He was not happy. But at any rate, my point is if you end it by saying, I'm willing to die for this. Now, that gives value to what you just said. In your wedding vows, you say, I do, and you mean it. Right. You said you've been married, what, 29 years?
00:46:31
Speaker 2: 25.
00:46:32
Speaker 3: 25 years. So that gives content to your wedding vows. Yeah. When I said, I do, to my wife, that gives content. Otherwise, it's just nice words. And I think one of the things, and this goes back to my point about leaving the seminary, do you really mean it? Do you really believe as a church what you said you believe? And it was the gap between that, what you said, the church said, and what the leadership seemed to a 19-year-old to believe. And I think in this country now, think about it. When last have you had a leader that made– that said something that is the equivalent of, I pledge my life, my property, my fortune, and my sacred honor.
00:47:23
Speaker 2: So you referenced the speech you gave at University of Texas. I want to commend all the listeners here. Go and listen to that speech. It really was an extraordinary speech. I'm proud of UT. I spent a couple of years on the faculty as an adjunct law professor there. And look, Most law schools are so left-wing. I'm proud of UT for inviting you there. The president, Jim Davis, is a good friend, had you there. But it really is an important speech and conversation, and if folks haven't listened to it, they should. What I want to do in the interest of time, there are additional chapters in your life from being a Hill staffer to an assistant secretary of the Department of Education to the chairman of the EOC and the Reagan administration. to a court of appeals judge on the D.C. Circuit, to going through one of, if not the most brutal confirmation hearing of any justice. You and Brett Kavanaugh can arm wrestle for who had the rougher time, but in many ways, and I talk about this in the book, how what Justice Kavanaugh went through was a replay of the playbook that you were subjected to. I want to skip over all of those periods, although... I recount them in detail in the book. And I want to go to after you are confirmed and you're sworn in and you're in your early 40s and suddenly you're a Supreme Court justice. And your autobiography ends with your being a justice. So it tells your life story but then does not cover your jurisprudence. I want to start with just a human thing.
00:49:04
Speaker 3: What's it like?
00:49:06
Speaker 2: The first day you're a justice, you walk in, like just what's day one of being a Supreme Court justice?
00:49:13
Speaker 3: Well, you feel a little small. And, like, what the heck am I doing here? Which is still a question. But this is, you know, the, as I said, just Lord grant me the wisdom to know what's right and the courage to do it. That has been a constant plea of mine. Um, and it is what brought me back to the church being stopping at first St. Nicholas, then sometimes St. Mary's and sometimes St. Joe, uh, to just ask for the wisdom and to know what is right and the courage to do it. But you know, you, it is just the, you pledge to, uh, I gave President Bush my promise. I took an oath. He said, can you call him as you see him? He asked me that in Kennebunkport, July 1, 1991. I said, I can. And that's what I've lived up to. My grandfather, when I asked him when I was being attacked in the early 80s, 1982, I said, what should I do? He said, boy, you got to stand up for what you believe in. It's pretty simple. And I must say, I'm on the other side of that spectrum now. But I was treated royally, fabulously by my new colleagues. Your old boss, Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice Scalia, Stevens, O'Connor, a great woman who doesn't get the credit she deserves, Justice Kennedy. And now I'm on the other side of it where I have newer colleagues, wonderful and brilliant young people like Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, you mentioned. We have Amy Barrett. And then Sam Alito and I were at Yale together. Just a wonderful, wonderful group.
00:51:19
Speaker 2: You were classmates at Yale.
00:51:21
Speaker 3: He was a year behind me.
00:51:22
Speaker 2: He was a year behind you, but you didn't know each other.
00:51:24
Speaker 3: He's a funny guy. He's brilliant. He was always nerdy. Princeton guy like you, right? And so I said, Sam, how come we were there two years together? Why weren't we friends? Clarence, you were scary. I'm so glad they didn't have these phones where you could take a lot of pictures. I wore bib overalls throughout law school and combat boots. It was awful. But, you know, you have just the chief has been a good friend. But my point is simply this, that, you know, I was embraced there. It was a different generation. It's the World War II. Byron White. They were just wonderful people. They were very kind to me. You know, the courts changed a bit now since the Dobbs League. Back then, there was a trust. Yes. There was an honor. Even as you disagreed, there were lines you did not cross, and I like that. These people were the age of my... My mother and older. And so it was a different era. And now we're in, it's a different generation now. But the point is that you have equally good people who are there. I mean, I loved, I knew some of them as law clerks. They've become very dear friends. And I hope to be a model to them as the older members of the court who were there when I arrived were to me.
00:53:08
Speaker 2: So of all the justices who have served on the court, I think you are the most willing to reconsider precedent and to think of an issue anew, which is in some ways to think about it as it was– in fact, in many ways to think of it as it was originally understood. And that– your opinion writing– is you write straightforward opinions in ordinary English. You don't tend to use fancy highfalutin words, but your opinions are written so that the regular person can read them and understand what you're saying. And I think there's a workmanship quality to your opinions. I analogize it to a farmer or someone building a home. And you draw that same analogy. Why do you think it is that you are the most willing to reconsider precedent?
00:54:11
Speaker 3: You know, I start with something you and I, I think, have talked about over the years, and that is that I start with something that has to make sense.
00:54:21
Speaker 2: The quote from your grandfather, if it don't make no damn sense, it don't make no damn sense.
00:54:26
Speaker 3: And I keep that in my office because you can– He would call some of these professors fast talking.
00:54:36
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:54:38
Speaker 3: And you think about it. You know, we have had throughout history court intellectuals who can make all sorts of justifications for things and theories and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I've been blessed because I can sort through theories and I read lots and lots and lots of books. Yeah. And I've been at it a long time. And I have young people who have that energy, and they say, we're going to go find the answer. Now, it may not be what we want, but we're going to go look for it. And what we find in many instances is it's been a theory. So you can have deductive reasoning, you have a theory and you work down, or you can have inductive, which any rancher or farmer uses, which is, You do something, and it's experience, and you keep generalizing up to something more general. And that's the world I grew up. The latter is the world I grew up in. I cannot explain it to that guy on the ranch. Yep. And if he says, boy, that don't make no sense. You know, he should be a hero. When I go out to ordinary people, they should be able to understand their constitution.
00:55:51
Speaker 2: And by the way, ordinary people, one thing people may not know, you do that a lot. You and Jenny go out in your RV, like in the summertime, you head across the country and are in Walmart parking lots just hanging out with regular people.
00:56:05
Speaker 3: Well, I'm Bucky's now. All right, now as.
00:56:07
Speaker 2: A Texan, that makes me happy. Bucky's is a destination.
00:56:12
Speaker 3: But, you know, I love, I grew up with, as my granddad said, po-folks. And that's the world I like. I like people who work with their hands. I like people who are regular people. That's my preferred world. And, you know, I was, my wife laughs at me because I was, our motor home is, motor coach is 35 years old. So I like the old buses. And so you hang out with the guys who do work on old buses. And I got to spend time with one of them this in the December and we're like, we take all the wheels off and you're up. So I said, that was happy as I could be because you're under the air. You got all the shocks, all the airbags, you know, the lines he's, he's showing you all these things, the valves. And it was just, I could not, I wish I could spend two weeks there instead of two days. But, The point is, it's their constitution. It's that truck driver's constitution. It's that school teacher's constitution. It's not the preserve of court intellectuals and law professors. And we've turned it into that. We've over-intellectualized it. This is a point that Murray Rothbard makes in his book, Conceived in Liberty. We've taken something that was passionately achieved and that was believed in passionately, and we turned it into this thing that you need an oracle. to explain.
00:57:42
Speaker 2: The Federalist Papers were newspaper editorials.
00:57:45
Speaker 3: And they were only in New York, by the way. Those were basically Hamilton and those guys. There's a big difference between Hamilton and some of the more radical guys, like a Sam Adams, which is more than a beer, by the way.
00:58:03
Speaker 2: I will admit there was an amusing exchange of one commentator on the left who was on TV saying, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, can you imagine those people overthrowing the government? And I couldn't help but respond, yes, yes, I can.
00:58:25
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
00:58:27
Speaker 2: It kind of happened. One of the things you have been really eloquent on, and I think profoundly... influential on is is the look the constitution is is the foundational document that that created our government uh... but but you have focused a great deal on the declaration of independence and and and why is the declaration so important and and what what is the relevance that that that people should know.
00:59:00
Speaker 3: About well the the constitution sets up the government the form of the government but what precedes that? What does it mean? What defines you, your rights? How do they view your rights? Where do they come from? And where does the government come from? And it sets the order right. Just take it simple. It says your rights come from God, basically, from nature's God. And then from that, you give up some of those God-given natural rights in order to be governed. And what does that lead to? That leads to the Constitution. I was pointing out to my clerks the other day, because you get these Second Amendment cases, and I said, you know, Why do we keep saying there's a Second Amendment right? The Second Amendment says the right to bear arms shall not be infringed. It assumes a right. It doesn't grant a right. So you can go First Amendment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Where does that come from? And that's what I was interested in, that what establishes this whole notion of liberty. What establishes this order of rights? And so it matters if you think the government is the primary giver of, grantor of rights, and you receive rights and benefits from the government versus you have the rights and the government receives its authority from you. And I think that that order... being able to establish that in each case is important. And if you go back, and that explains Justice Scalia's writings on the structure of the Constitution being the safeguard of these rights that you have that are antecedent and that are transcended. So I focus on that to always get the order right. When you farm, every farmer knows, like when you plant, or when you plow, I don't know if you've ever plowed.
01:01:21
Speaker 2: I'm a city boy, so I've watched it on TV.
01:01:24
Speaker 3: So my granddaddy said, boy, he would always say, and he put a little cuss word in there from time to time, he said, and those rows better be straight. So you have to take your first row, and it has to be absolutely straight. Then you put your tire in a groove where the plows, especially if you're using a dish plow, and they go different ways, You go and you follow that. So now every subsequent row is straight. Well, going back to your point about precedent, what if that first row is crooked? Will you keep going, pretending that it's straight, or do you go back and make it straight? That's why you say, well, I'm not accepting precedent. If something doesn't make any sense, what am I going to do? Am I a fool for following that or not questioning it? And I taught a course on stare decisis just for this point. It makes sense when you have this unwritten laws and when you have traditions and when barons are like ruling on cases in these rural areas in England. But when you have positive law, when it's written down and you can see the deviation, who's the fool? You follow something that's absurd. Why would you follow something that's absurd?
01:02:41
Speaker 2: Well, look, a great example of that, in a case I talk about quite a bit in the book, is the Kelo case, where Kelo involved a city that was condemning a woman's home.
01:02:54
Speaker 3: That they had for 100 years. Yes. This tiny house, regular person's house, not a mansion, and for a public purpose, not a public use. And that started in southwest D.C., by the way, the precedent for that. And the court was willing to say that the public purpose was the equivalent of public use. Well, a public purpose could be to increase your tax base.
01:03:22
Speaker 2: Well, and actually, as I was driving over here to do this, I wanted to look. I pulled up the language of the Fifth Amendment. And the relevant prohibition at the end of it is, nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation. So that's the actual language. And Kelo, unfortunately, it was 5-4, the majority said that the city of New London, Connecticut could take her home, not for a highway or a road or a city building, but for a parking lot for a planned Pfizer.
01:04:04
Speaker 3: Building.
01:04:05
Speaker 2: And you dissented, you dissented, and it focused on the words public use versus purpose. And explain that distinction to us.
01:04:13
Speaker 3: Well, purpose is a very broad term.
01:04:17
Speaker 2: And the court and its precedent had basically turned use into purpose.
01:04:21
Speaker 3: But there's another thing. principle or that we have followed for years, which is you don't take, the government doesn't take property, private property from person A and give it to private person B. Right. That's not a public use. So, but going back to your point that the, a public use would be a park, it'd be a hospital, it'd be a highway, et cetera. Something that the public uses. A public purpose doesn't necessarily, is much, much broader. So just imagine you have a somewhat blighted area. But suddenly it's attractive to people with lots of money. And a city decides, well, we'd like to increase our tax base. Well, there are all these young people with lots of money who want to build these McMansions or these high-end $ 2 or $ 3 million structures. Well, the public purpose would be to increase that tax base, but that's not a public use. And now you've given people who have authority to take your property a much broader way and much more power to take an individual's property. Now, why is the issue? I took quite a bit of property at Yale for this reason. If you go back to Georgia, if you go back to the South, you go to places like South Carolina, There was all this land that blacks owned in the way that my family received land over the years. It was called heirs' property. Everybody owns it. Nobody's really in charge. Well, a lot of that land, there were aggressive efforts to use that land for developments. It could be for resorts in Hilton Head. It could be for strategic purposes in Harris Neck, Georgia. It could be for conservation in places where blacks were subsistence farmers, like in McIntosh, Georgia. So my only point is simply this, that the word, if you want to protect the property, you have to stick to the words in the Constitution, or it sort of spreads out. to broader powers that were not intended, and public purpose allows it. Plus that word appears in no place in the Constitution.
01:06:53
Speaker 2: Well, I will say, even though you were in dissent, you did not command the majority in the court, I think over time the view you articulated has prevailed, and it's persuaded Texas and many other states have enacted laws to prevent the taking of public property for public purposes, and it was inspired by inspired by your very, you know, Justice O'Connor used an effective analogy in dissent in that case where she said under this reasoning, the government could condemn every Motel 6 and to build a Ritz-Carlton.
01:07:30
Speaker 3: Yeah. And she's right. And she and I, and remember she comes from, a rancher.
01:07:37
Speaker 2: Yeah.
01:07:39
Speaker 3: I think the, just think about it, hand in hand with liberty. Uh, you had, they, they were traveling companion, Liberty and property. Okay. Wherever you see it, if you look at the new process clock, what does it protect?
01:07:55
Speaker 2: Life, Liberty and property.
01:07:57
Speaker 3: Okay. Wherever you see it. And that was my grandfather. What did he say? These were PO. He said a little bit of land. You get to raise crops. You get to build a little place to live. Uh, you get to raise some animals. Okay. The property was a part of your way to take care of yourself. So liberty and property, it was the fruit of your labor. So you worked in the cornfield, you planted it, you took care of it, you harvested it. It's yours. And the land is yours. You earned it. And I think you see throughout the founding, all those things, those were always paired, liberty and property. And we treat it as though it's a benefit from the government rather than a right that transcends the government and is to be protected from the government.
01:08:53
Speaker 2: One thing you did there just a minute ago that is really powerful and that is a consistent thing. of your jurisprudence is you understand the rights protected in the Constitution with an understanding of the context of history. So when you're talking about condemning land or property for public purpose rather than use, you quickly brought it to when government power is used, historically it has been used over and over by the rich and powerful against the more vulnerable in society, often against African-Americans or Hispanics or people who don't necessarily have the ability to defend themselves against government power. That's something also that you've powerfully done in the Second Amendment context. And one of the things that you've said, you and I, when we were sitting down doing interviews, you talked about the importance of Reconstruction. That if you're going to understand American history and the Constitution, you've got to understand Reconstruction. Tell us about that.
01:10:02
Speaker 3: Well, it's everything. I mean, it's, you know, the, I think, Reconstruction. Why did you have Reconstruction? I mean, because you had the Civil War. You had slaves that were freed. You had the South that was not going to do what it should do. And so you basically had the military in the South. And after Reconstruction, of course, you got the Redeemers. You got the Redeemers. You have the former Confederates who've been disempowered, disenfranchised, and they start forming these vigilante groups. And who are they going after? Are they going after the Republicans in the South, they're going after particularly the freedmen. And what's the argument? If you just take a look at it, you'd see they would maraud. They would intimidate. They would lynch. And there was a big difference. But the 14th Amendment is passed. And the whole point is to now make these slave citizens. But there's something further going on. If you look at the debates in the 14th Amendment, the argument is these people have a right to defend themselves. Now, the radical Republicans felt that with these rights, privileges or immunities, also brings the right to bear arms. They have a right to defend themselves from these marauders. And anyone who lives in a rural area, who lives in the South, It could be in Texas, in rural Texas. Everybody is armed for a variety of reasons. To defend themselves, to hunt, etc. And if you live in rural Georgia, I didn't know anybody who didn't have at least one weapon. And you could have a mad dog. You could have a big six-foot rattlesnake. You could have a moccasin. You could have all sorts of things. And you could have an opportunity to kill an animal for food. But my point is that the radical Republicans understood that without that right to defend themselves.
01:12:18
Speaker 2: And fundamentally, it's a right to life, a right to protect your life, your kids' life, your family.
01:12:22
Speaker 3: Well, that was the point. That was the Freedmen Bureau. If you look at the reports, they're getting killed down here with the Knights of Camellia, the Ku Klux Klan, etc., And so you get the 14th Amendment. Right. And defining them, of course, answering Taney and responding to his notion that blacks cannot be citizens. But this also brings in the privileges or immunities clause.
01:12:51
Speaker 2: And Taney was the author of Dred Scott, which if there's a decision that is more disgraceful than Plessy versus Ferguson, it was Dred Scott.
01:13:00
Speaker 3: Well, it is.
01:13:03
Speaker 3: For a lot of different reasons. I've spent a lot of time on Dred Scott and the history around Dred Scott. But the whole point is that here's a man who's trying to figure out a way to say that no way blacks could ever be citizens of this country, just by their very nature. And, of course, we revisit that old notion in the birthright case last term. Yep. in a different way and for different reasons. But the 14th Amendment in this country is critical because it's basically the second founding. And so you have to understand that. So what I think I owe my fellow citizens is not just to read the words of the Constitution, but to try to understand not just the 14th Amendment, but the revolution, leading up to the revolution, the history of England, the things that influence it. The Civil War, the post-Civil War, the Reconstruction era. And you may have to read people you don't necessarily agree with. Sure. For example, I read and reread Eric Foner on Reconstruction. Now, he's a revisionist historian, but he's fine. He does a great job of explaining Reconstruction and a lot of these problems. And I admire the work that he's done. And at the same time, you may not agree. with the revolutionary period with Murray Rothbard because he's a libertarian. But he's written a couple of thousand pages on this and conceived in liberty. And it's worth reading because it gives you that sort of granular understanding of the revolutionary period.
01:14:44
Speaker 2: But you told me a story about Justice Breyer when he was robbed. And if you just share that story.
01:14:57
Speaker 3: Poor Steve Breyer. He's such a good man. So, Steve, this is a joke, and I hope I don't offend Steve. He's a very decent man. We spent a lot of years sitting next to each other. What a fun time. But at any rate, so Steve Breyer, he'd been robbed, and he didn't want it to be public. He didn't want the attention. And Nevis, where they have little property there. And he said, so he's telling the story to a number of us, a number of others as I walk in the room, that he turns to me because I wasn't there at the beginning. He said, Clarence, I had a question for you. You're on your porch. You're playing bridge with another couple, you and your wife, and a guy walks up with a machete. What would you do? And I said, I don't play bridge. He said, okay, okay, you're playing poker. And the guy walks over to the machete, and he says he demands money. What would you do? He said, I don't play poker. I don't play cards, Steve. He said, what would you be doing on your porch? I said, cleaning my guns. And I said, do you want some ketchup with that? But at any rate, he is such– I hope that doesn't offend him. He is the nicest man. You know, I– And that goes back. I just, let me just say a word. You ask about, you know, the, the court and the work, et cetera. It's a human institution. And I've been blessed because I get along with the members of the court. Uh, we have a different set of colleagues now. Um, but they're wonderful. You've got, uh, Neil and Louise Gorsuch, the delightful, just wonderful couple. Um, And, you know, it takes a few years to get your legs, and he's done that. Brett Kavanaugh was just the nicest person. He and his wife, Ashley, she's a Texan. You've got the Alitos, Martha Ann and Sam. Again, and the Chief and Jane. I mean, it's a wonderful group of people. And it was when I came on the court. It's different now because I'm the oldest member as opposed to They're the youngest. As the New York Times said, the youngest and the cruelest. But, you know, it's just I've just changed perspective. But still, it's a human institution with decent people on board.
01:17:30
Speaker 2: So I saw Brett and Ashley at Lindsey Graham's funeral. And they've been friends. I've known them for 30 years. Ashley was on the. 2000 George W. Bush campaign with Heidi and me. So we were all young staffers on that campaign. So I saw the two of them at Lindsey's funeral. I actually told Brett at the funeral a story during his confirmation hearing when Lindsey Graham went off. And I think it's his– Lindsey was a dear friend of mine and it was his finest moment I believe as a senator where he unloaded on the unfairness of what was happening and My mother had not previously been a fan of Lindsey Graham's. And in the hearing, she texts me and she says, okay, I now love Lindsey Graham. And she goes online and gives him 40 bucks. And so I walk over to Lindsey, I pull out my phone and I show him the text from my mom and Lindsey is cracking up laughing.
01:18:32
Speaker 3: Well, you know, it is really interesting. And that goes to our country. People like people who stand up for what's right. And as I said to you from the beginning, I do not understand a lot about this town. I don't know who has the time for all this anima. toward other people. I don't spend any of my day on that sort of thing. But the lying that takes place, the attacks on financial disclosure, which was, it was laughable in one way, but just painful to just the lies.
01:19:06
Speaker 2: Yeah.
01:19:07
Speaker 3: But you and Mike Lee and the others who stood up are dearly appreciated because we could not believe the inundation of just misstatements and falsehoods. And we don't have the capacity at the court to defend ourselves. We don't have a bully pulpit or anything like that. Most of us just simply are doing our jobs. And we can disagree, you know, in the old days, I first became aware of the court when they're riding along US 17 between Savannah and the farm. There were these impeach Earl Warren signs after Brown v. Board of Education. And so I understand that people have different ways of reacting to to the work that we do, but this current environment that we're in is quite, excuse me, quite different from signs saying impeach Earl Warren.
01:20:14
Speaker 2: Well, Justice, let me say thank you. Thank you for, you've been incredibly generous with your time. Thank you for joining us on this podcast. Thank you for spending the time in the interviews to write this book. And look, I've said this before, but you are a true American hero. And I want to say to the folks listening, if you're a young person, there are a lot of young people that listen to this podcast. If you are a young person and you're looking for someone to admire, someone to emulate, someone to walk along a path and be inspired by, you would be very hard pressed to find a better role model than Clarence Thomas. And that's why I wrote this book, because I think you are an incredibly historic significant human being and leader with courage and principle, and I am grateful. You can order the book, goingfurther.com, pre-order the book, buy it for your family. I think you'll like it. I think you'll learn. I hope in this podcast you've seen why I admire Justice Thomas so much and why I think you should as well. And thank you very much, and we'll see you on the next podcast. Thank you, Justice.
01:21:28
Speaker 3: Thank you.