Justice Thomas asks questions in court, 1st time in 10 years

SCOTUSYesterday, when Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas spoke during oral argument for the first time in a decade, it was to raise an issue that even defenders of the right to armed self-defense often ignore: Under what circumstances can someone lose that right?

The last time Thomas had asked a question in court was on February 22, 2006, according to the Washington Post.

In the Voisine case pending before the court, Assistant to the Solicitor General Ilana Eisenstein was defending an expansive application of a federal law that imposes a lifetime ban on one’s right to keep and bear arms upon conviction of a misdemeanor crime.

The Hill suggests that these first questions “could signal that he intends to take a more prominent role on the court following [Justice Antonin] Scalia’s death“. “It suspends a constitutional right”.

“Let’s say that a publisher is reckless about the use of children, and what could be considered indecent displays and that that triggers a violation of, say, a hypothetical law against the use of children in these ads”, he said.

“It is possible that Thomas was asking a question that he thought Scalia might have brought up”, said Severino. The two men who are challenging that interpretation of the law, Stephen Voisine and William Armstrong, were convicted under ME assault provisions that cover an offender who “recklessly causes bodily injury or offensive physical contact”.

“Roughly five million Americans own AR-style semiautomatic rifles, ” Justice Thomas wrote, referring, he said, to “modern sporting rifles.”.

Scalia was no fan of eulogies, and his funeral Mass contained few stories about a larger-than-life personality who served on the court for almost 30 years.

“Can you give me another area where a misdemeanor violation suspends a constitutional right?” he asked.

The barrage of sharp, pointed questions continued, with Justice Thomas seeming to have the better of several of the exchanges.

In Monday’s second argument, on judicial recusals, Thomas was quiet again.

This past Monday’s business was briefly interrupted by the specter of BREAKING NEWS on the office television, featuring a photograph of Justice Clarence Thomas.

Justice Thomas also complained about the difficulty of getting a word in edgewise on a bench whose members interrupt the lawyers before them, and each other, all the time.

The 67-year-old judge has put forward various reasons for his silence over the years, once stating that asking too many questions is “not helpful” for deciding cases because lawyers do most of the work in the legal briefs they file with the court.