Sen.Ted Cruz, R-Texas, defended Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' affirmative action stance on Wednesday as he faced questioning from the co-hosts of "The View" about his new book."Clarence Thomas, he stated that affirmative action diminishes achievements because it allowed people to believe he had not earned his place at Yale and I think we can all agree that affirmative action was put in place to provide opportunities to qualified Black students, like Thomas, because those institutions historically would not give them the opportunities to go," co-host Sunny Hostin said during the interview about Cruz's new book, "The Incomparable Clarence Thomas.""So what I don’t understand how you handle in the book is, why is the lesson from his experience that we should eliminate the remedy rather than eliminate the racism that made the remedy necessary? I don’t understand that," Hostin asked Cruz.Thomas sided with the 6-3 majority ruling in 2023 on affirmative action, saying the court's decision "sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes."Supreme Court Justice wrote a blistering dissent on Feb.
20, 2026 after the Supreme Court found President Trump's tariffs are illegal.(Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)JUSTICE THOMAS RECALLS WHY HE WASN'T FRIENDS WITH ALITO IN LAW SCHOOL: 'CLARENCE, YOU WERE SCARY'Hostin said, "I mean, I genuinely don't understand the framing in the book about that."Cruz said that affirmative action "encompasses a lot of things" before describing Thomas' viewpoint."If you're talking about removing barriers, if you're talking about expanding access, then I'm for that, he's for that, everyone is for that.
If you're talking about quotas and discriminating based on race, then Justice Thomas has been the clearest defender of the principle that the Constitution prohibits the government discriminating based on race," he began, before Hos...