In an interview aired Tuesday on CBS Mornings, failed Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton attacked Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in sharply personal words over his concurring opinion overturning Roe v. Wade last week. Clinton said she went to law school with Thomas, smearing him with racist stereotypes of the ‘angry Black man’: “He’s been a person of grievance for as long as I have known him. Resentment. Grievance. Anger…” Clinton received her Yale Law degree in 1973, Thomas in 1974.
Clinton’s defeat by Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election enabled Trump to appoint three originalist justices who comprised the decisive majority in the Dobbs decision overturning Roe.
CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King did not challenge Clinton on her use of a racist trope to attack Thomas.
CBS Mornings video clip, “Justice Thomas wrote that SCOTUS should reconsider cases that secure the rights for same-sex marriage and contraception. @HillaryClinton says he has “signaled” that he wants conservative judges and state legislatures to “Find cases. Pass laws.””
Transcript via Mediaite:
GAYLE KING: Justice Thomas just sort of floated that out there about contraceptive rights and contraception, and about same sex marriages. But other justices have pushed back to say, no, he’s really sort of on his own with that. You don’t believe that?
SEC. HILLARY CLINTON: Well, he may be on his own, but he’s signaling, as he often did, you know, people — I went to law school with him. He’s been a person of grievance for as long as I’ve known him. Resentment, grievance, anger. And he has signaled in the past to lower courts, to state legislatures, to find cases pass laws, get them up. I may not win the first or second or the third time, but we’re going to keep at it.
GAYLE KING: So you’re saying people, pay attention to this.
SEC. HILLARY CLINTON: To the people he is speaking to, which is the, you know, right-wing, very conservative judges and justices and state legislatures. And the thing that is well, there’s so many things about it that are deeply distressing. But women are going to die, Gayle. Women will die.
Full interview:
“We are only at the beginning of this terrible travesty that this Court has inflicted on us”: @HillaryClinton says she’s concerned that overturning Roe v. Wade is only the first step in the Supreme Court turning “back the clock on civil rights.”