Judge Thomas said the left has adopted tactics conservatives wouldn’t use.
“You would never visit the homes of Supreme Court justices if things weren’t going well,” he said. “We didn’t have any tantrums. It is our duty to always act appropriately, not to dot the i’s and t’s.”
He added that conservatives have “never vandalized a Supreme Court nominee.” He acknowledged that Merrick B. Garland, President Barack Obama’s third Supreme Court nominee, “wasn’t heard, but he wasn’t thrown out.”
“You won’t see the utter destruction of a single nominee,” he said. “You also won’t see people going into other people’s houses, attacking them at dinner in a restaurant, throwing things at them.”
He said Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh had been the victim of particular abuse, but he made only cursory reference to his own brutal hearings, in which he angrily denied allegations of sexual harassment.
Judge Thomas sided on a contentious point, saying Senate Republicans who blocked Garland’s nomination were following a rule proposed by President Biden, then a senator, “and that you don’t get a hearing in the last year of a government.”
Judge Thomas, the longest-serving member of the current court, was a fierce opponent of Roe.
On Friday, he said the opposition to his 1991 nomination was “of those people who tried to keep me off court because of abortion”.
During his hearings, however, he said, much to the surprise of many, that he had never spoken of Roe, even though it was promulgated when he was a student at Yale Law School.
