Going Further

Ted Cruz, a U.S. senator from Texas and former Supreme Court litigator, presents a biographical account of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, drawing on more than nine hours of interviews conducted in 2025. Cruz, who first met Thomas in 1995 as a law clerk, frames the book as a corrective to what he sees as decades of hostility toward a justice whose extraordinary life, he argues, would be celebrated if Thomas were politically liberal.

Thomas was born into poverty in Pin Point, Georgia, in the late 1940s. His father abandoned the family shortly after his birth, and his mother raised Thomas and his younger brother in destitute conditions. Around age seven, the boys went to live with their maternal grandfather, Myers Anderson, and grandmother, known as "Aunt Teenie." Anderson, orphaned by age nine and largely self-taught, was a fisherman, farmer, and fuel-oil deliveryman who imposed strict discipline, requiring the boys to work alongside him and attend school without exception. Thomas became a voracious reader, finishing nearly every book in the local library by age nine. Anderson's community spoke Geechee, a creole dialect blending West African languages with English, and Thomas later credited this linguistic awareness as the source of his commitment to writing plainspoken judicial opinions.

Anderson enrolled the boys at a Catholic school, where Thomas thrived despite being mocked for his accent. He decided to become a priest and entered seminary in Savannah, one of only two Black students, where he faced persistent racism. He excelled academically but grew disillusioned with the Catholic Church's silence on civil rights. On April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, a fellow seminarian shouted his approval. Thomas left the priesthood. Anderson, furious at the broken promise, kicked him out. Thomas returned to his mother's apartment, began reading Karl Marx and Black writers including Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, and described himself as "an angry Black man" (39).

Thomas enrolled at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, where he embraced left-wing politics and joined the Black Student Union. On April 15, 1970, he participated in a protest that devolved into a riot in Harvard Square. The next morning, filled with shame, he knelt outside a campus chapel and prayed for God to purge his heart of anger. He gradually broke with radical politics and began thinking independently. A classmate later described him as "the Great Dissenter" (52), a label Cruz connects to Thomas's willingness to write lone dissents on the Supreme Court. Thomas declined admission to Harvard Law School and enrolled at Yale Law School.

At Yale, Thomas struggled with the suspicion that classmates viewed him as an affirmative action admittee. He befriended his neighbor John Bolton, a conservative who challenged Thomas's assumptions by asking why a Black man would want to give the government more power over his life. Professors taught the "living Constitution" theory, the view that constitutional meaning evolves with modern conditions, and never assigned the Constitution's actual text. Thomas began reading founding documents on his own, discovering the Founders' view that government exists to protect pre-existing rights rather than grant them.

After Yale, Thomas was rejected by dozens of law firms and accepted a position as an assistant attorney general in Missouri under John "Jack" Danforth, a Republican. Working in criminal appeals, he read case files that complicated his prior assumptions about Black incarceration. His marriage to Kathy Ambush deteriorated. When Danforth won election to the U.S. Senate, Thomas joined his staff in Washington, D.C.

At a 1981 conference, Thomas spoke candidly beside Washington Post columnist Juan Williams, not realizing Williams was recording his remarks. The resulting article labeled him a "Black conservative" and thrust him into national prominence. President Reagan appointed Thomas assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education and later nominated him to lead the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency enforcing workplace anti-discrimination laws. Among his appointees was Anita Hill, a Yale Law graduate whom Thomas considered an underperformer.

At the EEOC, Thomas settled major lawsuits, gave up alcohol, and reconciled with his grandfather shortly before Anderson's death in 1983. He shifted the agency toward prosecuting individual discrimination claims, married Virginia Bess Lamp, known as "Ginni," in 1986, and recommended Hill for an academic position elsewhere, noting performance issues. During his second term, Thomas undertook intensive self-education, enlisting political scientists John Marini and Ken Masugi to assemble reading lists that included The Federalist Papers and Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Originalism, the belief that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its original public meaning, became his guiding philosophy. He studied the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, particularly the 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, in which Justice William O. Douglas invented a "right to privacy" by finding "penumbras, formed by emanations" from the Bill of Rights (148).

In 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. When Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice, retired in June 1991, Bush nominated Thomas to the Supreme Court. Senator Joe Biden broke a promise to open the hearings with softball questions, instead quoting a Thomas speech out of context. After five days of testimony focused on abortion, the Judiciary Committee split 7-7. Someone then leaked a confidential statement from Anita Hill alleging Thomas had sexually harassed her at the EEOC. Thomas emphatically denied every allegation and delivered a rebuttal calling the proceedings "a high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves" (181). Polls showed Americans believing Thomas over Hill by two-to-one margins. He was confirmed 52-48 on October 15, 1991.

Cruz describes Thomas's early years on the Court as defined by a willingness to stand alone. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter secretly crafted a joint opinion reaffirming Roe v. Wade, blindsiding colleagues who believed they had a majority to overturn it. Thomas joined fellow Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent. While Scalia's appetite for overturning precedents eventually diminished, Thomas remained willing to challenge virtually every precedent built on substantive due process, the doctrine that reads unenumerated rights into the Due Process Clause. Thomas also became known for his near-total silence during oral arguments between 1991 and 2020, which Cruz attributes to Thomas's preference for listening to advocates rather than questioning them.

Over subsequent decades, Thomas built warm relationships across the ideological spectrum while writing ambitious opinions urging the Court to rethink settled law. In Kelo v. City of New London (2005), he dissented from a ruling allowing cities to seize private homes for economic redevelopment, arguing the Court had erased the Fifth Amendment's "public use" requirement. In McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), he argued the Second Amendment should be incorporated through the Privileges or Immunities Clause, a Fourteenth Amendment provision protecting citizens' fundamental rights from state infringement. He traced the clause's history to Reconstruction, when Southern states disarmed freed slaves and the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted to protect their rights. In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), he dissented from a decision upholding race-conscious admissions, writing that "the Constitution means the same thing today as it will in 300 months" (258). Twenty years later, his reasoning undergirded Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC (2023), which struck down race-based admissions.

Cruz devotes the final chapters to threats against the Court and a media campaign against Thomas. In June 2022, Nicholas Roske, a twenty-six-year-old radicalized by left-wing outrage over the leaked Dobbs draft opinion, traveled to Justice Brett Kavanaugh's home armed with a pistol and other weapons, intending to kill multiple justices. After the Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), Thomas's concurrence urged reconsideration of all substantive due process precedents while suggesting these rights might be better protected through the Privileges or Immunities Clause. Beginning in 2023, ProPublica and The New York Times published stories about trips Thomas took with his friend Harlan Crow and tuition Crow paid for Thomas's grandnephew, whom Thomas and Ginni had taken in to raise. Cruz argues that Thomas was not required to disclose these matters under rules then in effect and frames the campaign as an effort to erode trust in the judiciary and build support for expanding the Court.

Cruz closes by noting Thomas is on track to surpass Justice William O. Douglas's record as the longest-serving justice on May 19, 2028. He urges readers to follow Thomas's example of principled thinking and intellectual courage, ending with Anderson's maxim: "Boy, if it don't make no damn sense, it don't make no damn sense" (288).