Self Defense

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has just written a memoir in which he reportedly smears Anita Hill, the woman brought to the Senate in an attempt to disqualify him to serve on the court due to sexual harassment.

Why Thomas seeks to reopen the controversy from that time, now that he's been on the court for a decade and a half, in a position well-engineered to avoid such personal exposure, is beyond me. However, he's back at it, and the notably private Ms. Hill is making sure her voice is heard, in a New York Times op-ed:

Justice Thomas’s characterization of me is also hobbled by blatant inconsistencies. He claims, for instance, that I was a mediocre employee who had a job in the federal government only because he had “given it” to me. He ignores the reality: I was fully qualified to work in the government, having graduated from Yale Law School (his alma mater, which he calls one of the finest in the country), and passed the District of Columbia Bar exam, one of the toughest in the nation.

In 1981, when Mr. Thomas approached me about working for him, I was an associate in good standing at a Washington law firm. In 1991, the partner in charge of associate development informed Mr. Thomas’s mentor, Senator John Danforth of Missouri, that any assertions to the contrary were untrue. Yet, Mr. Thomas insists that I was “asked to leave” the firm.

It’s worth noting, too, that Mr. Thomas hired me not once, but twice while he was in the Reagan administration — first at the Department of Education and then at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. After two years of working directly for him, I left Washington and returned home to Oklahoma to begin my teaching career.

In a particularly nasty blow, Justice Thomas attacked my religious conviction, telling “60 Minutes” this weekend, “She was not the demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed.” Perhaps he conveniently forgot that he wrote a letter of recommendation for me to work at the law school at Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa.

Thanks to the GOP pushback and Thomas' own accusation of a "high-tech lynching," Thomas made it through the hearings and onto the Court. But he sure seemed like a liar back then as well, per Mark Kleiman:

I thought at the time, and still think, that Thomas gave clear evidence of deceit. Hill had testified that Thomas had regaled her with tales of a porn-movie character named "Long Dong Silver." Thomas denied ever having seen any such movie, which if true must have meant that Hill's claim was false. The Senate Judiciary Committee staff tried to get Thomas's video-rental records, which could easily have resolved the question. Thomas and his supporters immediately went into a hissy-fit about how it would be a horrible invasion of privacy for anyone to look at those records.

Thomas's concern that his porn-viewing habits might discredit him with his moralistic right-wing supporters was legitimate. But of course it would have been easy to ask the FBI to review the records for the sole purpose of determining whether the film in question was or was not among those Thomas had rented. Joe Biden, showing his usual competence and courage, immediately folded, and the video records were never reviewed.

A staunch, unwavering, rightwing Republican liar? Back then it didn't seem quite to commonplace, I guess.

So why is he bringing it all up again? Is there that big a chip on his shoulder, that much of an ax to grind? Trey Ellis, who's mother is also an African-American Yale law school graduate around the same era when Thomas got his degree, is particularly incensed:

The most odious part of Thomas's memoir is his continued insistence that his contentious confirmation hearings elevate him to the canon of tragic black heroes like Native Son's Bigger Thomas and To Kill a Mockingbird's Tom Robinson. As Jane Meyer and Jill Abramson clearly demonstrate in their book, Strange Justice, Anita Hill was only one of several and Thomas, now one of the nine highest judges in our nation, lied repeatedly during his confirmation hearings. The bitterness that seems to be eating away at him and spews out of this book might stem from the fact that he was the head of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission while he was sexually harassing Anita Hill and he is now sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America because he lied his ass off in the United States Senate.

And at 58 years old, young for a Justice, he could be with us for two or three decades more.

Remember that next time someone says something nice about the first President Bush.

Not so much.