Recently decrying the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and rebuking Justice Clarence Thomas for the “tragic error,” President Biden himself reversed his own 1982 position when he cast a Senate vote to do exactly the same — a Senate Judiciary Committee constitutional amendment proposal to allow individual states to determine abortion rights.
Biden’s harsh criticism of Justice Thomas bears witness to dramatic personal and career contrasts between the two men that warrant long-neglected public attention.
Clarence Thomas was born in the tiny coastal town of Pin Point, Georgia, on June 23, 1948 where he lived in a one-room shack with dirt floors and no plumbing. His father walked out when he was 2 years old, and at the age of 7 he and his younger brother were sent to live with their grandparents in Savannah.
At age 16, Thomas’s grandfather sent him to an all-white Catholic boarding school staffed by nuns in Savannah, where he made excellent grades and played on the football team.
Following high school graduation in 1967, Thomas's grandfather next sent him to Immaculate Conception Seminary in northwestern Missouri.
A racist remark he overheard there about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. influenced him to decide not to become a priest.
Thomas left the seminary and enrolled at Holy Cross college in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he participated on the track team, did volunteer work in the community, and helped found the school’s Black Student Union.
Thanks to his excellent Holy Cross academic record, Thomas was approved for admission to law schools at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. He chose the latter — largely due to financial support it offered to him as part of its affirmative action policy — and continued to excel in his studies.
Upon graduating from Yale Law School in 1974, Clarence Thomas accepted a position on the staff of Missouri's Republican attorney general, “Jack” Danforth, who after becoming elected as U.S. Senator, appointed him his Washington, D.C. legislative assistant.
Thomas's conservative ideas soon caught the attention of the Ronald Reagan administration, which in 1981 appointed him assistant secretary for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education where he openly advocated that minority groups, like everyone, must succeed based upon merit.
President George H.W. Bush appointed Thomas to the Washington, D.C. circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1990; then soon nominated him to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall the following year.
Senate hearings to confirm Thomas’s nomination were savagely disrupted by televised show trial allegations of African-American Anita Hill, his former special assistant in the U.S. Department of Education civil rights office, who accused him of sexual harassment.
Nevertheless, Hill had continued to contact Thomas voluntarily even after he helped arrange for her subsequent appointment as a law professor at the University of Oklahoma.
Denying any wrongdoing, Thomas emotionally characterized the televised ordeal as a "high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas.”
Thomas added: “it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured, by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.”
That sad Senate spectacle was chaired by Joe Biden who then said: "Sexual harassment is a serious matter and, in my view, any person guilty of this offense is unsuited to serve not only on the nation's highest court but any position of responsibility, of higher responsibility in or out of government.”
That justice standard clearly didn’t apply during the 2020 presidential election campaign when Tara Reade, a former staffer in Joe Biden's U.S. Senate office, alleged that he sexually assaulted her in 1993 in a Capitol Hill office.
Although Reade had previously filed her charges in a formal police report at the time of the alleged incident, mainstream media showed no interest in her claim whatsoever.
Sen. Biden’s personal and public background diametrically contrasted from the man his Senate Judiciary hearings were purposefully maligning in a great many ways.
Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., the first of four siblings, was born on November 20, 1942, in blue-collar Scranton, Pennsylvania, moving with his family to the Wilmington, Delaware area at age 10 where his father found work as a car salesman.
Like Clarence Thomas, Joe attended Catholic schools, including Archmere Academy, an elite private preparatory high school. Unlike Thomas, however, Biden reportedly received mediocre grades.
Upon graduation from high school, Biden attended the University of Delaware (UD) where he double majored in political science and history, played on the freshman football team, and became the president of his freshman class.
In his autobiography “Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics,” Biden notes struggling academically at UD, a circumstance he attributed to being a “little too interested in football and meeting new girls.”
Despite lackluster grades, Joe managed to get accepted to Syracuse University College of Law where he graduated 76th out of a law school class of 85 with a "C" average, and had faced disciplinary action on a charge of plagiarizing part of a fellow student’s law school paper.
Bogus statements and gaffs have plagued Joe Biden’s entire political career.
Biden dropped out of his earlier 1988 presidential run after also being caught lifting unattributed quotations from speeches by other politicians, including Robert F. Kennedy, Hubert H. Humphrey, and British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock.
Campaigning as pro-civil rights presidential candidate in 1987, Biden blatantly lied to a New Hampshire audience about having “marched in the civil rights movement.”
In 2010, then-Sen. Biden eulogized his former Ku Klux Klan leader friend Sen. Robert Byrd whom he described as "fiercely devoted to his principles," a "friend," "mentor" and a "guide."
Ten years earlier, in 1977, Sen. Biden had fought bussing to desegregate schools, and worried that it would cause his children to “grow up in a racial jungle.”
The stark contrast between now Supreme Court Justice Thomas and President Biden continues.
Whereas Justice Thomas’s legal essays and written arguments supporting his opinions are clear, well researched, and consistent, Biden’s tele-prompted messaging follows and equivocates each most recent self-inflicted policy disaster.
America has chosen both wisely and foolishly.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design” (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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