In the soon-to-be-released documentary about U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words,” the jurist has some harsh words about former vice president and current leading 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden. At the time of Thomas’s infamously raucous confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden, a Delaware Democrat, was the committee’s chairman.
Director Michael Pack, speaking this morning to Fox News host Steve Doocy on “Fox & Friends,” described the much-anticipated documentary as a chance for viewers to “hear [Thomas’s] whole story” from the famously reticent justice himself. Pack noted that Justice Thomas and his wife Ginni are the only two people directly interviewed in the film.
Thomas, a black man who grew up in extreme poverty in Jim Crow-era Georgia, endured an extraordinarily nasty Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing following his nomination to the nation’s highest court by then-President George H.W. Bush. Thomas famously described the efforts to derail his nomination, in the aftermath of the public airing of allegations of sexual harassment by Anita Hill, as a “high-tech lynching.” Thomas is seen in the film’s trailer telling the camera: “We know what this is all about. This is the ‘wrong black guy.’ Just say it.”
In December, The Daily Wire’s Amanda Prestigiacomo highlighted how, in the documentary, Thomas also claims that modern-day liberals have proved to be a bigger “impediment” for him throughout his meteoric rise than has the Ku Klux Klan itself:
“I felt as though, in my life, I had been looking at the wrong people as the people who would be problematic toward me,” Thomas reportedly says in the documentary, according to ABC News. “We were told that, ‘Oh, it’s gonna be the bigot in the pickup truck; it’s gonna be the Klansmen; it’s gonna be the rural sheriff.’”
“But it turned out that through all of that, ultimately the biggest impediment was the modern-day liberal,” the justice continued. “They were the ones who would discount all those things because they have one issue or because they have the power to caricature you.”
That Thomas excoriates Biden in the documentary has been previously reported. Earlier this month, The National Interest wrote that, “[a]t one juncture of the film, Thomas was asked about a colloquy with Biden over natural law philosophy and the Constitution. Though he did not cite Biden by name, Thomas lamented that lawmakers do not seem to have full command of the subject matter during judicial confirmation hearings.”
In a Daily Wire op-ed last March, I noted the leading role that Biden had similarly played in the vicious 1987 smearing of then-U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Robert Bork:
Biden simply has too much baggage, in the current environment. Who in their right mind thinks that coquettish creepy “Uncle Joe” is a good fit for the current #MeToo moment? Who in their right mind thinks that Biden’s formerly held views on race and crime won’t come back to destroy him in the minds of the increasingly dominant hard left faction of the Democratic base? Biden has simply been in the national spotlight for too long, and has too long a track record to cleanly avoid opposition research-driven scrutiny. And, amazingly, the man who once tag-teamed with Ted Kennedy to vilely savage Robert Bork’s judicial career is almost assuredly now too “moderate” for the batcrap crazy hard Left.