Politics - News Analysis

Clarence Thomas Says January 6th Was No Big Deal and Legal Scholars Are Repulsed

Most people know that Supreme Court arguments are not classic arguments in the sense that an attorney stands and makes an impassioned speech on the law.

No, generally speaking, an attorney can expect to get maybe five minutes into their argument and then will spend the rest of their next 30-45 minutes getting peppered with questions by some of the smartest legal minds in the country.

But there is one Justice who was famously quiet, never asking a question. Justice Clarence Thomas once went an entire DECADE without asking a question. He started getting talkative in 2021 when COVID made arguments over the phone. Unfortunately, returning to court hasn’t shut him up.

Today, he might wish he had kept his mouth shut, though, when he heard oral argument over whether Donald Trump should have presidential immunity over January 6th. I leave the actual question to Newsweek, and will then make an extremely impassioned argument myself. then get to the tweets that really nail him.

At one point during the hearing, Justice Thomas asked a lawyer representing the Department of Justice if the federal government has ever charged any other individuals in the past with obstruction of an official proceeding.

“There have been many violent protests that have interfered with proceedings,” Thomas said during the hearing. “Has the government applied this provision to other protests in the past?”

First of all, Justice Thomas should NOT in any way be hearing this case. He should have recused himself based on the fact that his wife encouraged the people to attack the capital. She was there on January 6th.

Second, and one doesn’t need to go to law school to know this, his question isn’t that much different than asking: “There have been many murders in the past, but has the government ever prosecuted a president who murdered someone?

The issue before the court is whether Trump was doing official government business on January 6th and whether Trump acted intentionally to stop Congress’s business – that’s it, those are the only issues to presidential immunity.

Asking about whether the government has ever prosecuted someone during “other protests” is a question for… selective prosecution. Clearly, Thomas thinks that January 6th was just a normal protest and the president can’t be charged for telling people to just protest.

It certainly upset the net:

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Jason Miciak is Executive Editor of Political Flare and an Editor at Large for Occupy Democrats. He can be reached at [email protected]

meet the author

Jason Miciak is a political writer, features writer, author, and attorney. He is originally from Canada but grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He now enjoys life as a single dad raising a ridiculously-loved young girl on the beaches of the Gulf Coast. He is very much the dreamy mystic, a day without learning is a day not lived. He is passionate about his flower pots and studies philosophical science, religion, and non-mathematical principles of theoretical physics. Dogs, pizza, and love are proof that God exists. "Above all else, love one another."

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