The Nation’s Mystal: Clarence Thomas a ‘Mutilated Version of a Black Justice’

During Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The ReidOut,” The Nation justice correspondent Elie Mystal took a couple of shots at Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas.

Mystal called Thomas a “mutilated version of a black justice,” adding that he was acting at the behest of his wife, Ginni Thomas.

“In Clarence Thomas’s concurrence in the affirmative action decision, first of all, he cites Plessy a lot,” host Joy Reid said. “I thought Plessy was like verboten like nobody wants to talk about Plessy v. Ferguson. He sure does. And at one point, make this make sense for me, please. You’re a lawyer. In his concurrence, he claims that the Freedmen’s Bureau Act, which created the Freedmen’s Bureau, you know, that was supposed to rematriculate former enslaved people, who all of whom, 100% of whom were black, back into society. He said oh, that was a colorblind statute. How could the Freedmen’s Bureau, Elie Mystal, be a colorblind statute? Make that make sense.”

“It’s colorblind if you’re like Clarence Thomas, and your whole ideological perspective involves gouging out your own eyes,” Mystal replied. “And that’s what Thomas is. Like he is such a mutilated version of a black justice that he is able to make these proclamations that, well, just fly in the face of law and facts, right? One of the other things you really realize when you read through his concurrence is just how angry he is at Ketanji Brown Jackson for having the temerity to be another black person on the Supreme Court. He apparently thought he got to be the only one. He thought that he had pulled up the ladder for everybody else, right?”

“And so he’s really like, he basically throws a tantrum at Jackson, and why?” he continued. “Because Jackson is making the actual originalist argument in the affirmative action case. She is the one pointing out that the 13th– 14th Amendment was done explicitly for racial restorative policies like affirmative action, which, as I said yesterday, the first time that happened in this country was during Reconstruction. So this is the history that Clarence Thomas ignores, and that’s why he’s so — and that’s why he’s so fabulist about all of the stuff that’s in his concurrence. He just—he’s just, like, plucked out his own eyes, and he doesn’t want to see anything that Ms. Ginni tells him he shouldn’t be able to see. That’s where he is in his head space right now.”

(h/t Newsbusters)

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