Justice Clarence Thomas, a conservative Supreme Court judge nominated to the court by George H.W. Bush in 1991, has long been a lightning rod for attacks by Democrats. His bitter confirmation hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee presided over by then-Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) and the conduct of the committee was described by the distinguished legal scholar as “a high tech lynching“, “a circus”, and “national disgrace”. Now Minnesota’s Attorney General, Keith Ellison, has joined in the long line of detractors of Justice Thomas and compared Thomas to a black elder house slave during his rant on how Thomas was an illegitimate judge.
This segment of Ellison’s rants was captured by Citizen Free Press.
WATCH:
Mr. Ellison, who is black, starts out by saying “Anybody who’s watched the movie Django, just watch Stephen and you see Clarence Thomas. Clarence Thomas…has decided that his best personal interests is siding with the powerful and the special interests regardless as to who they are going to hurt. He like I am gonna look out for me and I don’t care nothing about you but I am on the Supreme Court so it is my job to look out for you.”
Ellison said, “So he is abdicating his responsibility – he has abdicated it a long time ago. When he got in office he was this way. He is this way now. Maybe he is worse now.” The state attorney general then pivoted to calling for the impeachment of Justice Thomas. “Clarence Thomas needs to be impeached” declared Ellison. Why? Because Ellison claimed that “Clarence Thomas is illegitimate and has no basis in the job that he is in.”
Ellison said that this is “a lesson for us as African Americans. What is the lesson? We all thought well he is a black man raised in the Deep South, he knows what racism and segregation is, he knows what affirmative action is. He is going to come around one day [to affirmative action and race-based policies]. Understand it is not a matter of pigment, it is not what is on your skin. It is what is in your mind.”
The character Stephen from the movie Django Unchained directed and written by Quentin Tarantino is a black house slave who is a traitor by selling out to his white master through his betrayal of his fellow blacks. The provocation for Ellison’s rant against Justice Thomas was over his ruling that prohibited affirmative action in academic settings toward students. Affirmative action as practiced by American universities discriminated against Americans on the basis of race. Judge Thomas’s reasoning for deciding to join the decision to ban the practice was that it violated the colorblind Constitution and the principle that “that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.”