Ted Cruz Decries The Left’s Treatment of Clarence Thomas

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) accused the political left of harboring a “real bigotry” toward Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, arguing that the longtime justice has faced a level of hostility that other conservative members of the court have not experienced.

Cruz made the accusation Sunday during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where host Kristen Welker questioned him about Thomas and a passage from Cruz’s book describing the justice’s ideological development.

Welker quoted Cruz’s account of Thomas during his years at Yale Law School, when the future Supreme Court justice was still wrestling with anger and had not yet embraced the conservative principles that would later become central to his judicial philosophy.

“It would take several more years before Thomas, still an angry young man dressed in army fatigues and out of the habit of good grooming, as he put it, would be able to purge his heart of anger and come to embrace the conservative principles that are today the bedrock of his jurisprudence,” Welker read from Cruz’s book.

She then turned the discussion toward affirmative action, an issue with which Thomas has had considerable personal and judicial history.

Thomas was part of the Supreme Court majority that declared race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina unconstitutional in 2023. In his concurring opinion, Thomas wrote extensively about his opposition to affirmative action and argued that racial preferences ultimately cause harm rather than remedy discrimination.

“It demeans us all,” Thomas wrote.

Welker pressed Cruz on what he would say to critics who contend that Thomas ultimately helped overturn legal principles and policies that assisted him earlier in his own life and career.

Cruz rejected the premise that Thomas should be expected to support such policies because of his race or personal history. Instead, the Texas Republican argued that much of the hostility directed toward Thomas comes from people who object to a Black justice holding deeply conservative views.

“Well, I would say that there is a bitterness that is directed to Justice Thomas that is profoundly unfair,” Cruz responded.

He then compared Thomas with the late Justice Antonin Scalia, another prominent conservative member of the Supreme Court.

“If you look at Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia was every bit as conservative as Justice Thomas, but yet Scalia didn’t have the scorn, the contempt, the derision,” Cruz said.

Cruz argued that the difference in treatment is connected to Thomas’s race.

“And the left, I think, has a real bigotry,” he continued. “They look at Clarence Thomas and they say, how dare a black man believe what he believes.”

Thomas has served on the Supreme Court since 1991, when President George H.W. Bush nominated him to replace retiring Justice Thurgood Marshall. Over more than three decades on the court, Thomas has established himself as one of its most consistently conservative members.

His views on race and affirmative action have also made him a frequent target of criticism from liberals, particularly because Thomas has written about experiencing segregation and racism while growing up in Georgia before later rejecting government policies that use racial classifications as a remedy.

For Cruz, that ideological journey is precisely why Thomas should not be treated as though his political or judicial beliefs must conform to expectations based on his race.

“Clarence Thomas is someone who is not going to be told what to believe,” Cruz said.