19 April—If it weren’t for his color, Clarence Thomas wouldn’t be an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. President George H.W. Bush nominated him in 1991 to fill the Negro seat created by President Lyndon Johnson for Thurgood Marshall in 1967 and made available by Marshall’s retirement at 83.

Rather, Thomas would probably still be sitting on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, for which Bush had nominated him a year-and-a-half earlier. To be fair to Clarence, Ronald Reagan had given him two federal jobs in the civil rights trade during his presidency. And Clarence’s pronounced conservative bias certainly didn’t hurt any of his appointments and nominations.

SCOTUS Negro seat? How dare I. But it’s like the SCOTUS Jewish seat, reserved for an abused minority. But not white. And back in those unwoke days people were allowed to be called Negroes and Indians, school teams were allowed to be named anything, and historical figures weren’t thrown under the bus merely for being of their times.

It must be noted that there has been more than one Jew allowed to sit among the Supremes at times. Once, anyway: Ruth Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan—three quarters of the recent liberal minority. Now Justice Kagan carries the flickering liberal candle with two other minority women. Funny that there are no male liberal Supremes at the moment.

No thanks to Connecticut’s own Senator Joe Lieberman (who had promised to support Clarence Thomas’s SCOTUS nomination among other lies) and that nonsense with Anita Hill (who was probably telling the truth and never accused Clarence of anything but being a guy anyway), Thomas is the Supreme Court’s senior justice by tenure as well as age. He’s been a justice for almost 32 years and is 74 years old.

So Justice Thomas should do the honorable thing and resign from the Supreme Court before he embarrasses it even more than he’s already managed to do. His wife hasn’t helped, by the way, but she doesn’t count. Problem is, given the incumbent president and Senate majority, he certainly can’t vacate a seat that’s pretty damn sure to be filled by a liberal. Lauren Boebert would shoot him dead if he did.

A couple of years before putting Thurgood Marshall in the SCOTUS Negro seat created for him, Lyndon Johnson had put his friend Abe Fortas, a brilliant lawyer and scholar, in the SCOTUS Jewish seat recently vacated by Arthur Goldberg. Johnson’s idea was to elevate Fortas to Chief Justice. But Abe ran into ethics problems kind of like Clarence’s.

That was just what Tricky Dicky Nixon, Johnson’s successor POTUS, was looking for to get rid of the fairly liberal Jew and replace him with a very conservative Christian. So Nixon’s good friend and corrupt Attorney General, John Mitchell (who later was sent up the river) prevailed on Justice Fortas to resign and return to his lucrative law practice.

Nixon’s first two nominees, Clement Haynsworth and Harrold Carswell, didn’t make it. For good reason. But conservative Harry Blackmun was confirmed 94-0. To conservatives’ dismay, however, he became quite the liberal and, among other things, wrote the opinion in Roe v. Wade. In the three years he was a Supreme alongside Thomas, incidentally, Blackmun wasn’t the newbie black man’s greatest fan—for reasons other than race, it must be added.

So that brings us back full-circle to Clarence Thomas. He should do the country he allegedly loves a favor and get the hell off the Supreme Court. To be sure, politics today isn’t as civil as it was in the sixties—and even back then it was rather less civil than the press led the public to believe—but the left and right could probably—make that must—fashion some sort of deal to put a less embarrassing justice in Thomas’s seat.

Since there’s a newly minted black justice already seated, the replacement can be any color at all. Come to think of it, isn’t it time for an Asian seat to be created?