May 04, 2020 · Updated 3:10 PM ET, Mon May 4, 2020. Washington (CNN) Justice Clarence Thomas broke a year-long silence on the bench during the Supreme Court's first remote oral arguments on Monday, posing a ...
They heard Thomas ask 17 questions that day -- nearly six times as many as the famously silent justice asked in public arguments over all the last 14 years, according to an ABC News analysis ...
Mar 20, 2019 · The question Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas asked on Wednesday – one of his exceptionally rare queries – involved race. But as has happened before, there was a twist. Thomas, only the ...
May 04, 2020 · Famously quiet Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Monday asked questions during the court's remote oral arguments, marking just his third time speaking during the sessions in over a decade....
Feb 29, 2016 · Thomas, who hadn't asked a question since Feb. 22, 2006, drew gasps from people at the Supreme Court when he questioned a lawyer during oral arguments Monday.
Thomas is often described as an originalist and as a textualist. He is also often described as the Court's most conservative member, though others gave Justice Antonin Scalia that designation while they served on the Court together.
Thurgood MarshallThurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993) was an American lawyer and civil rights activist who served as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from October 1967 until October 1991. Marshall was the Court's first African American justice.
Jamal Adeen ThomasClarence Thomas / Children
73 years (June 23, 1948)Clarence Thomas / Age
Story was the youngest justice appointed to the Supreme Court; he was 32 when commissioned to the court in 1811. Story was one of two justices nominated to the Supreme Court by President Madison.
Sandra Day O'Connor'sDuring the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan promised to nominate the first woman to the U.S. Supreme Court. He made good on that promise in 1981, when he announced Sandra Day O'Connor's nomination. O'Connor's confirmation Hearings were the first to be broadcast live on television, and she was confirmed 99-0.
65 years (February 23, 1957)Virginia Thomas / Age
Clarence ThomasKathy Ambush / Spouse (m. 1971–1984)
Jamal Adeen ThomasClarence Thomas / Son
Patrick G. JacksonKetanji Brown Jackson / Husband (m. 1996)
There are currently 32 judges (including the chief justice of India) who comprise the Supreme Court of India, the highest court in the country. The maximum possible strength is 34. As per the country's Constitution, judges of the Supreme Court retire at age of 65.
The longest serving Chief Justice was John Marshall, with a tenure of 12,570 days (34 years, 152 days)....List of United States Supreme Court justices by time in office.Longest Supreme Court tenureChief justiceAssociate justiceJohn Marshall 12,570 days (1801–1835)William O. Douglas 13,358 days (1939–1975)
From when he joined the Court in 1991 through the end of the 2019 term, Thomas had written 693 opinions, not including opinions relating to orders or the "shadow docket". These 693 opinions consist of 223 majority opinions, 226 concurrences, 214 dissents, and 30 "split" opinions.
In 1990, President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He served in that role for 16 months before filling Marshall's seat on the Supreme Court.
After asking a question during a death penalty case on February 22, 2006, Thomas did not ask another question from the bench for more than 10 years, until February 29, 2016, about a response to a question regarding whether persons convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence should be barred permanently from firearm possession. He also had a nearly seven-year streak of not speaking at all during oral arguments, finally breaking that silence on January 14, 2013, when he, a Yale Law graduate, was understood to have joked either that a law degree from Yale or from Harvard may be proof of incompetence. Thomas took a more active role in questioning when the Supreme Court shifted to holding teleconferenced arguments in May 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic; before that, he spoke in 32 of the roughly 2,400 arguments since 1991.
Thomas has consistently supported narrowing the court's interpretation of the constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause (often simply called the "Commerce Clause") to limit federal power , though he has broadly interpreted states' sovereign immunity from lawsuits under the clause.
In all, Thomas received the votes of 41 Republicans and 11 Democrats, while 46 Democrats and two Republicans voted to reject his nomination.
Thomas has argued that the executive branch has broad authority under the Constitution and federal statutes. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, he was the only justice to agree with the Fourth Circuit that Congress had the power to authorize the president's detention of U.S. citizens who are enemy combatants. Thomas granted the federal government the "strongest presumptions" and said " due process requires nothing more than a good-faith executive determination" to justify the imprisonment of a U.S. citizen.
Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, a small, predominantly black community near Savannah founded by freedmen after the Civil War. He was the second of three children born to M. C. Thomas, a farm worker, and Leola "Pigeon" Williams, a domestic worker. They were descendants of American slaves, and the family spoke Gullah as a first language. Thomas's earliest known ancestors were slaves named Sandy and Peggy, who were born in the late 18th century and owned by wealthy planter Josiah Wilson of Liberty County, Georgia. Thomas's father left the family when Thomas was two years old. Though Thomas's mother worked hard, she was sometimes paid only pennies per day and struggled to earn enough money to feed the family, and was sometimes forced to rely on charity. After a house fire left them homeless, Thomas and his younger brother Myers were taken to live in Savannah with his maternal grandparents, Myers and Christine ( née Hargrove) Anderson.
US Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, speaks at her weekly press briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on July 22, 2021. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images) Now playing. 01:21.
US President Joe Biden waves as he participates in a CNN Town Hall hosted by Don Lemon at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, Ohio, July 21, 2021. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images) Now playing. 02:17.
US Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of Califor nia, speaks at her weekly press briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on July 22, 2021.
Thomas employs a distinct conservative approach that puts him on the far right of the generally conservative Supreme Court and in the exact opposite place of the man he succeeded in 1991, Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American justice. He opposes governmental racial remedies across the board.