I wrote this book because I think in this time of division and anger, young people need role models. They need heroes. They need people to emulate, and I think it would be very difficult to do better than to read and learn Justice Thomas’s path. . . . His story needs to be known, and it needs to be told because he really is an American hero.
— Senator Ted Cruz
On Tuesday I sat down with Senator Ted Cruz to talk about his new book, Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas, which landed in stores this week. We discussed the nine and a half hours Cruz spent one-on-one with the justice in his chambers, Thomas’s improbable path out of poverty in segregated Georgia, his friendships with Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Scalia, the vindication of his jurisprudence, the ugly playbook that connects the Thomas and Kavanaugh confirmations, and the stories the senator most wants readers to remember about the man behind the caricature.
The year I clerked at the Court was the same year Justice Thomas’s own memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, came out—a book that, as good as it is, ends the moment he is confirmed to the Court, leaving more than three decades of jurisprudence untouched. Senator Cruz told me that he wrote this book not just to introduce a new generation to who Clarence Thomas is, but “to explain his jurisprudence in a way that is real, in a way that is accessible.” He said, “I try to do very much what Justice Thomas does in his opinions, which is make it readable and understandable and make it make sense.”
Much of the book’s power comes from the origin story most Americans have never heard: born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, raised without indoor plumbing by a mother who eventually could no longer care for him, and rescued by his grandfather, Myers Anderson, whose observation—“If it don’t make no damn sense, then it don’t make no damn sense”—became, in Cruz’s telling, “commonsense wisdom that flows through Clarence Thomas’s jurisprudence.” Cruz doesn’t flinch from the young man who nearly became a priest, dropped out of seminary in disillusionment, and spent his Yale years as a “left-wing radical” with a Malcolm X poster on his wall.
A number of valuable observations come from Cruz’s own vantage point as a Rehnquist clerk, watching the chief justice—whom the senator calls “one of the three greatest chief justices ever to serve on the Court”—take the young Thomas under his wing. There’s real warmth in these pages: the chief quietly encouraging his newest colleague; Thomas’s deep, room-filling laugh that every clerk and janitor on the building’s staff can recognize; and Thomas’s explanation, when Justice Scalia kept inviting him to the opera, for why he’d rather spend his summers in an RV in a Walmart parking lot: “I like opera, Nino. I don’t like people who like opera.”
The Scalia friendship gets its own texture, too, including Scalia’s gentle ribbing that Thomas was “tilting at windmills” by pressing originalism further than precedent-minded colleagues were comfortable going—which is where the book’s title comes from. “[T]here has never been a justice on the Court who is more willing to go further, to go back to the original Constitution, to go back to the original understanding of the Constitution, and if a precedent is wrong, overrule it,” Cruz said, pointing to Thomas’s dissent in Kelo v. City of New London (2005)—the case that let Connecticut condemn Susette Kelo’s home so that Pfizer could build a parking lot—as a prominent example. Cruz, who was Texas solicitor general when Kelo came down, recalled telling celebrating fellow state SGs, “Just because you can wear a jackboot, doesn’t mean you should.” Although he was in dissent in that case, Thomas’s view was “so powerful that state legislatures across the country, including in my home state of Texas, have adopted that, have required now that takings must be for public use.” The senator adds that if an appropriate case arose, the current Court might agree and overturn Kelo.
We also talked about the throughline Cruz sees between Thomas’s 1991 confirmation—where the Anita Hill allegations were leaked to the press after the hearing had concluded—and the 2018 fight over Brett Kavanaugh, where Cruz recalled sitting with fellow Senate Republicans as they debated how to respond to the Christine Blasey Ford allegations after Democrats had sat on them for weeks. His advice to colleagues, drawn straight from what he’d learned watching Thomas: Let the country see both witnesses and make its own judgment.
Cruz also shared some of the little-known details about the man we both know—how “every employee of the Court, every janitor, every electrician, every person that works in the lunchroom, they all adore Justice Thomas. He knows their names. He knows their kids’ names.” But by his own account, the justice “didn’t suffer fools lightly.” No wonder the senator found the book to be “a labor of love.” It is a great read for all ages, and as Senator Cruz recognizes, the subject is an American hero.
You can watch the interview below and read the full transcript of it here.
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