I subscribe to this newsletter, and read this issue through a couple of times. Clarence Thomas is no doubt a horrendous person to have sitting on the Supreme Court. The type of shithead we had no experience with prior to the Trump administration, and Klan Trump have now exceeded in every way. But... there are a lot of ways to read his opinion. If you read it without thinking about the author, it seems reasonable and logical. If you read it while thinking about who Clarence Thomas is, and his history on the bench, it is clearly(?) a coded message to legal teams in lower courts. The conservative wing of the Supreme Court has started advocating for the cases they want to overturn. Even in rulings where they deny the most conservative interpretation, they provide commentary that documents the process lower courts (and prosecutors) need to take to route around the Supreme Court's reason for denying this specific case. "Hey, we can't rule in your favor to eliminate women's rights because you didn't say these three words in the lower court's findings. Go back and run another case through the system that has those three words in it, and we will reverse the decision we made today, and you will win." BUT. This opinion came out of the blue. And not just out of the blue, but from a Supreme Court Justice that literally didn't say a word for three years, and when he did provide commentary, it was just plagiarized from the legal briefs he read about the case. This opinion came from a man who doesn't actually have any ideas or opinions of his own. So.... Who got to him? Who actually wrote this, and convinced him to submit it in his name, after a 29-year vow of silence? What leverage did they have on him (remember Anita Hill?) that forced him into action?
Part of the big problem with conservatives these days is that they completely lack any sort of ideological consistency. Walter Sobcheck had the famous, "Say what you want about National Socialism, at least it's an ethos," line, which was funny, but I guess what he meant was that you have something to be against (or for, I suppose). The problem is that the conservatives keep moving the goalpost every single time one of their ridiculous positions comes to a head with something else they don't like. So while I want to give CT the benefit of the doubt here and say that at least he's reading the text as a self-professed textualist should, I have to suspect there's an ulterior motive. When the text is inconvenient to him next time, it'll go right out the window again.
They're in a smaller box than even this guy is supposing, because Cruz and his minions were the same dipshits trying to argue back in the impeachment hearings that a Congressional subpoena is not an enforceable document in any way. What a piece of human garbage.