The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every level of the legal system all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. Since last year, the Court has been conducting oral arguments via telephone. One byproduct of this change is that Justice Clarence Thomas has been a more active questioner than he has ever been since joining the Court. The New York Times reports: 

Justice Clarence Thomas, who once went a decade without asking a question from the Supreme Court bench, is about to complete a term in which he was an active participant in every single argument.

By now you've probably heard that South Carolina Senator Tim Scott knocked the Republican response to Joe Biden's first congressional address out of the park. One of the most poignant moments of the Senator's remarks came when he directly called out the left for their racist attacks against him:

“I’ve also experienced a different kind of intolerance. I get called Uncle Tom and the N-word by progressives, by liberals,” Scott said. “Just last week, a national newspaper suggested my family’s poverty was actually privileged because a relative owned land generations before my time.”

Unfortunately, leftists doubled down on their disgusting, racist attacks after the speech.

Amazon is at it again, "cancelling" viewpoints it doesn't agree with. Its latest target? "Created Equal," a documentary about U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. 

This morning, the Supreme Court dropped its much-anticipated opinion on faithless electors in Chiafalo v. Washington, which was consolidated with Colorado Department of State v. Baca.  Ruling unanimously, the Court held that a state may enforce an elector’s pledge to support their party’s nominee – and the state voters’ choice – for president in the Electoral College.

For many, the Court’s opinion puts to rest the argument that electors have the freedom to depart from the will of the voters to instead cast their vote as they please; however, the Court’s decision leaves open two methods by which electors can remain faithless – (1) when the state has no law in place to compel faithfulness, and (2) when the penalty is a monetary fine that the elector can pay in exchange for his unfaithfulness.

Today, the Supreme Court held in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue that, under the Free Exercise Clause, if a state has a program giving public dollars to citizens to use at private schools, it cannot tell those citizens that the money can only be used at non-religious private schools.  Montana had decided that its scholarship program funds could not be used at religious schools under the state's Blaine Amendment, a legacy of a failed anti-Catholic amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Many First Amendment advocates hope this opinion proves to be a fatal blow to the discriminatory anti-religious Blaine Amendments still found in many state constitutions.

Today’s decisions by the Supreme Court were a mixed bag.  First, any way you look at it, Chief Justice Robert’s decision in June Medical Services v. Russo is hard to reconcile with his dissent in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt. From SCOTUSblog:

Four years ago, by a vote of 5-3, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that (among other things) required doctors who perform abortions to have the right to admit patients at a nearby hospital. In that case, Justice Anthony Kennedy joined his four more liberal colleagues in holding that, although Texas has a genuine interest in protecting the health of pregnant women, there was no evidence that the law actually did anything to promote that interest – but it did make it more difficult for women to get an abortion. Kennedy is no longer on the court, but today it was Chief Justice John Roberts who joined the court’s four liberals in ruling in June Medical Services v. Russo that a similar law from Louisiana is unconstitutional – even as he maintained that he continues to believe that the Texas case was wrongly decided.

While the Democrats seem to continuously reward bad actors who falsely accuse, such as Rep. Adam Schiff, with leadership roles, it looks as if they know will award the original such bad actor with their party's Presidential nomination.  The original bad guy Chairman may have been presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden.  Biden was the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when the term “borking" was created after the travesty done to Judge Robert Bork.  As Webster’s defines "bork": “to attack or defeat (a nominee or candidate for public office) unfairly through an organized campaign of harsh public criticism or vilification.”

Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words is a great movie. I saw it this weekend and came away with three thoughts, none of which are on his legal philosophy, which is just touched on in the movie. But two of them are very relevant for today.

Set to be released in early 2020, Created Equal–Clarence Thomas in His Own Words is a two-hour documentary that allows viewers to get up-close and personal with Justice Clarence Thomas as he discusses firsthand the numerous hurdles he faced en route to the Supreme Court of the United States. The purpose of the documentary is to “tell the Clarence Thomas story truly and fully, without cover-ups or distortions.”

For being a black conservative, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been subjected to an entirely different set of standards in the criticism of his judicial leanings and his personal life, according to an upcoming documentary highlighting his career and path to the Supreme Court. 

“If you criticize a black person who’s more liberal, you’re a racist. Whereas you can do whatever to me, or to now [Housing and Urban Development Secretary] Ben Carson, and that’s fine, because you’re not really black because you’re not doing what we expect black people to do,” he added.'