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Associate Justice of the Supreme Court
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Clarence Thomas is the senior Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, nominated by President George H.W. Bush in 1991. He is the second African American to serve on the Court (succeeding Thurgood Marshall) and its longest-serving current member. A staunch originalist and textualist, Thomas spent decades writing solitary, highly conservative dissents. However, with the establishment of the 6-3 conservative supermajority, Thomas has reached the absolute apex of his jurisprudential influence, seeing many of his fringe constitutional theories become the law of the land. Thomas is the intellectual godfather of the modern conservative legal movement. He authored the monumental 2022 *NYSRPA v. Bruen* decision, radically expanding Second Amendment gun rights. Despite his monumental legal legacy, his tenure has been eclipsed in recent years by unprecedented ethics scandals. As of 2026, he remains under relentless attack from congressional Democrats regarding his undisclosed financial ties to conservative billionaires, yet he steadfastly refuses to resign, operating as the uncompromising anchor of the Court’s right wing.
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Longest-serving member of the current Supreme Court (1991–Present) and the intellectual leader of its originalist wing
Authored the landmark *New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen* (2022), which established that gun regulations must align with the nation's 'historical tradition of firearm regulation'
Consistently the most prolific author of opinions (including concurrences and dissents) on the Court, laying the groundwork for future conservative litigation
Engulfed in a massive, multi-year ethics scandal exposed by ProPublica, revealing he accepted decades of undisclosed luxury travel, private jet flights, superyacht vacations, and real estate transactions from conservative billionaire mega-donor Harlan Crow
Refused intense calls to recuse himself from cases involving the 2020 election and the January 6 Capitol attack, despite his wife, conservative activist Ginni Thomas, being directly involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results
His 1991 Senate confirmation hearings were deeply traumatic and polarizing following sexual harassment allegations by Anita Hill, an event Thomas famously decried as a 'high-tech lynching for uppity blacks'
