Clarence Thomas triumphs and his legal vision, too

This month, Clarence Thomas became the second-longest-serving justice in Supreme Court history.That milestone would be notable for any jurist.For Thomas, it marks something more: the vindication of a constitutional vision that, for decades, was caricatured as eccentric, angry or unserious — until the court, and the country, began catching up.The occasion comes just as Thomas has again demonstrated why his tenure matters.In this session’s Louisiana v. Callais, the court held that Louisiana’s race-driven congressional map could not be justified by a misconstrued Voting Rights Act.As my colleague Dan Morenoff has explained, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion was correct in tightening Section 2 doctrine so that it no longer forces states into racial sorting.But Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, concurred to say what he’s said for over 30 years: Section 2 doesn’t regulate districting at all.That’s Thomas in full — he joins the court when it moves toward the Constitution, but doesn’t trim his sails merely because a plurality of colleagues has stopped short of first principles.In Callais, he praised the court for ending a “disastrous misadventure” in voting-rights jurisprudence, but added that the statutory text — “voting qualification,” “prerequisite to voting,” or “standard, practice, or procedure” — doesn’t naturally encompass a state’s choice of district lines.In other words, Thomas follows the Constitution wherever it leads — even when that takes him beyond Alito, and even beyond the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia.Thomas has been the most radical originalist in the best sense: willing to reconsider not only Warren Court inventions but also Progressive Era assumptions, New Deal compromises and conservative half-measures.That explains his landmark Second Amendment opinion in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), which defined the standard by which courts are to evaluate state l...