“In the first case to reach the Supreme Court arising from the blitz of actions taken in the early weeks of the new administration, lawyers for President Trump asked the justices on Sunday to let him fire a government lawyer who leads a watchdog agency.” — New York Times
Look, I get it. You’re stressed. Trump’s executive orders are coming in fast and furious. Birthright citizenship? On the chopping block. Federal agencies? Slashed to bits. A ketamine-addled billionaire demolishing social security? Yeah, not great.
Things are pretty stressful right now, but don’t freak out. Our democracy was built for this.
Remember what you learned in civics class about checks and balances? The three equal branches of government? The separation of powers? The restraints on executive overreach?
Fear not. When all these shoddy legal cases start making their way up to the Supreme Court, we’ve got the right person on the job: Justice Clarence Thomas, a man of unimpeachable character, standing as our final, solemn guardian of American law.
Justice Thomas is a proud originalist, which means he knows exactly what the Founding Fathers intended when they wrote the Constitution. He understands what Madison really meant when he said, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
So better luck next time, Tyranny—this is the moment Clarence Thomas has been waiting for his entire life.
Thomas’s journey from Yale Law graduate to Supreme Court Justice is a monument to his morality. When he graduated, he struggled to find a job at a prestigious law firm, and was convinced employers viewed him as less capable due to affirmative action. Rather than challenge the prejudices of those firms or the broader inequities that shaped such perceptions, Thomas reached a far more constitutionally faithful conclusion: The real issue was affirmative action itself. By using his career to dismantle it entirely, Thomas reasoned, he could restore dignity to all.
Taking on Trump and his team during this perilous moment in American democracy requires endurance and consistency—hasn’t Justice Thomas been the embodiment of both qualities?
When a decades-long campaign to gut abortion rights came to fruition with Dobbs, did Justice Thomas rest on his laurels? No. Thomas put pen to paper and boldly signaled his appetite to reassess same-sex marriage and contraception, demonstrating that the true mark of judicial excellence is the ability to revisit settled law with the enthusiasm of someone discovering it for the first time.
A common and superficial critique of Justice Thomas is that he’s in the pocket of billionaires. But, as we know, all those private jet rides, luxury vacations, and cash payments pale in significance when weighed against the true character of the man who is graciously accepting them.
Case in point: Who better to safeguard our republic than the guy who was willing to smear his own sister as a welfare queen? That kind of commitment to the text—even if it means actively harming your family—is what we need on the bench right now. Sure, his sister might have been working two minimum-wage jobs while caring for an elderly relative, but Thomas knows that honoring the letter of the law requires the courage to rise above empathy.
So please, everyone, chill out a bit. Remember that every executive order signed by President Trump—every stroke of his Sharpie that slashes through the fabric of what it means to be American—is simply another chance for Justice Thomas to shine.
And isn’t that thrilling, in a way? To know that no matter how reckless these orders may seem today, they’ll soon be subjected to the kind of strict scrutiny the Founding Fathers originally intended.
I say let the executive orders come. Let them pile up. We all know that this justice will prevail.