Thomas Clarence Biography
Clarence Thomas is an American jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President George H. W. Bush to succeed Thurgood Marshall and has served since 1991. On October 30, 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, following Robert Bork’s departure.
Thomas Clarence Age
He was born in 23rd June, 1948, Pin Point, Georgia, U.S.
Thomas Clarence Height
He stand at a height of 1.75 metres tall.
Thomas Clarence Family
Thomas was born in Pin Point, Georgia. After his father abandoned the family, he was raised by his grandfather in a poor Gullah community in Savannah.
In 1971, Thomas married Kathy Grace Ambush. The couple had one child, Jamal Adeen (born in 1973, New Haven, Connecticut), Thomas’s sole offspring. Thomas and his first wife separated in 1981 and divorced in 1984. In 1987, Thomas married Virginia Lamp, a lobbyist and aide to Republican Congressman Dick Armey. In 1997, they took in Thomas’s six-year-old great-nephew, Mark Martin Jr, who had lived with his mother in Savannah public housing. Since 1999, Thomas and his wife have traveled across the U.S. in a motorcoach between Court terms.
Thomas Clarence Education
Thomas attended the predominantly black St. Pius X High School for two years before transferring to St. John Vianney’s Minor Seminary on the Isle of Hope.
He also briefly attended Conception Seminary College, a Roman Catholic seminary in Missouri.
Thomas enrolled at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, as a sophomore transfer student.
After graduating from Holy Cross, Thomas attended Yale Law School, graduating in 1974 with a Juris Doctor degree ranked in the middle of his class.
Thomas Clarence Wife
In 1971, Thomas married Kathy Grace Ambush. The couple had one child, Jamal Adeen (born in 1973, New Haven, Connecticut), Thomas’s sole offspring. Thomas and his first wife separated in 1981 and divorced in 1984. In 1987, Thomas married Virginia Lamp, a lobbyist and aide to Republican Congressman Dick Armey. In 1997, they took in Thomas’s six-year-old great-nephew, Mark Martin Jr, who had lived with his mother in Savannah public housing. Since 1999, Thomas and his wife have traveled across the U.S. in a motorcoach between Court terms.
Thomas Clarence Children
In 1971, Thomas married Kathy Grace Ambush. The couple had one child, Jamal Adeen (born in 1973, New Haven, Connecticut), Thomas’s sole offspring. Thomas and his first wife separated in 1981 and divorced in 1984.
Thomas Clarence Career
After graduation, Thomas studied for the Missouri bar at Saint Louis University School of Law. He was admitted to the Missouri bar on September 13, 1974. From 1974 to 1977, he was an assistant attorney general of Missouri under state Attorney General John Danforth, a fellow Yale alumnus.
When Danforth was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976, Thomas left to become an attorney with Monsanto chemical company in St. Louis.
Thomas moved to Washington, D.C., and again worked for Danforth from 1979 to 1981 as a legislative assistant handling energy issues for the Senate Commerce Committee.
On October 30, 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, following Robert Bork’s departure.
When Associate Justice William Brennan retired from the Supreme Court in July 1990, Thomas was Bush’s favorite among the five candidates on his shortlist for the position. But after consulting his advisors, Bush nominated David Souter of the First Circuit Court of Appeals. A year later, Justice Thurgood Marshall, the only African American justice on the Court, announced his retirement, and Bush nominated Thomas to replace him. In announcing his selection on July 1, 1991, Bush called Thomas “best qualified at this time.
Thomas Clarence Public Perception
Thomas is associated with the Court’s conservative wing. He has rarely given media interviews during his time on the Court. In 2007, he said, “One of the reasons I don’t do media interviews is, in the past, the media often has its own script.” That same year, Thomas received a $1.5 million advance for his memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, which became a bestseller. He was the subject of the 2020 documentary film Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in his Own Words.
Thomas Clarence Abortion and family planning
Thomas has contended that the Constitution does not address abortion. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Court reaffirmed Roe v. Wade. Thomas and Justice Byron White joined the dissenting opinions of Rehnquist and Scalia. Rehnquist wrote, “we believe Roe was wrongly decided, and that it can and should be overruled consistently with our traditional approach to stare decisis in constitutional cases.” Scalia’s opinion concluded that the right to obtain an abortion is not “a liberty protected by the Constitution of the United States.” ” The Constitution says absolutely nothing about it,” Scalia wrote, “and the longstanding traditions of American society have permitted it to be legally proscribed.”
In Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), the Court struck down a state ban on partial-birth abortion, concluding that it failed Casey’s “undue burden” test. Thomas dissented, writing, “Although a State may permit abortion, nothing in the Constitution dictates that a State must do so.” He went on to criticize the reasoning of the Casey and Stenberg majorities: “The majority’s insistence on a health exception is a fig leaf barely covering its hostility to any abortion regulation by the States—a hostility that Casey purported to reject.”
In Gonzales v. Carhart (2007), the Court rejected a facial challenge to a federal ban on partial-birth abortion. Concurring, Thomas asserted that the court’s abortion jurisprudence had no basis in the Constitution but that the court had accurately applied that jurisprudence in rejecting the challenge. He added that the Court was not deciding the question of whether Congress had the power to outlaw partial-birth abortions: ” Whether the Act constitutes a permissible exercise of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause is not before the Court [in this case] … the parties did not raise or brief that issue; it is outside the question presented; and the lower courts did not address it.”
In December 2018, Thomas dissented when the Court voted not to hear cases brought by Louisiana and Kansas to deny Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood. Alito and Gorsuch joined Thomas’s dissent, arguing that the Court was “abdicating its judicial duty.”
In February 2019, Thomas joined three of the Court’s other conservative justices in voting to reject a stay to temporarily block a law restricting abortion in Louisiana. The law that the court temporarily stayed, in a 5–4 decision, would have required that doctors performing abortions have admitting privileges in a hospital.
In Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Inc. (2019), a per curiam decision upholding the provision of Indiana’s abortion restriction regarding fetal remains disposal on rational basis scrutiny and upholding the lower court rulings striking down the provision banning race, sex, and disability, Thomas wrote a concurring opinion comparing abortion and birth control to eugenics, which was practiced in the U.S. in the early 20th century and by the Nazi government in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, and comparing Box to Buck v. Bell (1927), which upheld a forced sterilization law regarding people with mental disabilities. In his opinion, Thomas quoted Margaret Sanger’s support for contraception as a form of personal reproductive control that she considered superior to “the horrors of abortion and infanticide” (Sanger’s words). His opinion referred several times to historian/journalist Adam Cohen’s book Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck; shortly afterward, Cohen published a sharply worded criticism saying that Thomas had misinterpreted his book and misunderstood the history of the eugenics movement. In Box, only Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ginsburg publicly registered their votes. Ginsburg and Sotomayor concurred in part and dissented in part, stating they would have upheld the lower court decision on striking down the race, sex, and disability ban as well as the lower court decision striking down the fetal remains disposal provision.
In a concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), Thomas wrote that “any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous'”, and argued that the Supreme Court should go beyond Roe vs. Wade and reconsider other substantive due process precedents, including those established in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). The overturning of these previous decisions would enable states to limit access to contraception, criminalize sodomy, and criminalize same-sex marriage, respectively.
Thomas Clarence LGBTQ rights
In Jacobson v. United States (1992), Thomas agreed with the majority that the federal government had unlawfully entrapped a gay man when it enticed him into buying a magazine with nude pictures of underage boys.
In Romer v. Evans (1996), Thomas joined Scalia’s dissenting opinion arguing that Amendment Two to the Colorado State Constitution did not violate the Equal Protection Clause. The Colorado amendment forbade any judicial, legislative, or executive action designed to protect persons from discrimination based on “homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual orientation, conduct, practices or relationships.”
In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Thomas issued a one-page dissent in which he called the Texas statute prohibiting sodomy “uncommonly silly”, a phrase originally used by Justice Potter Stewart. He then said that if he were a member of the Texas legislature he would vote to repeal the law, as it was not a worthwhile use of “law enforcement resources” to police private sexual behavior. But Thomas opined that the Constitution does not contain a right to privacy and therefore did not vote to strike the statute down. He saw the issue as a matter for states to decide for themselves.
In Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia (2020), Thomas joined Alito and Kavanaugh in dissenting from the decision that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. (Thomas and Alito wrote a dissent together, and Kavanaugh wrote separately.) The 6–3 ruling’s majority consisted of two Republican-appointed justices, Roberts and Gorsuch, along with four Democratic-appointed justices: Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan.
In October 2020, Thomas joined the other justices in denying an appeal from Kim Davis, a county clerk who refused to give marriage licenses to same-sex couples, but wrote a separate opinion reiterating his dissent from Obergefell v. Hodges and expressing his belief that it was wrongly decided. In July 2021, he was one of three justices, with Gorsuch and Alito, who voted to hear an appeal from a Washington florist who had refused service to a same-sex couple based on her religious beliefs against same-sex marriage. In November 2021, Thomas dissented from the majority of justices in a 6-3 vote to reject an appeal from Mercy San Juan Medical Center, a hospital affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church, which had sought to deny a hysterectomy to a transgender patient on religious grounds. Alito and Gorsuch also dissented, and the vote to reject the appeal left in place a lower court ruling in the patient’s favor.
Thomas Clarence Salary
His annual salary as a Supreme Court justice is $220,000.
Thomas Clarence Networth
According to Clarence’s latest financial report, his minimum net worth is $600,000 and his maximum net worth is $1 million.
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