MIAMI — Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas urged Americans on Wednesday to mark the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding by standing up for their deeply held convictions, arguing that the U.S. Constitution remains a common reference point for a society fractured along political and social lines.
“We can disagree on all sorts of things, but we’ve got to have something in common or we don’t have a country,” Thomas said at a judicial conference near Miami, according to the Associated Press. “These documents, our founding documents, our founding history, whether we think it’s perfect or it shouldn’t be amended, or we might disagree about how far it goes, but we can say this is something that we all treasure.”
Thomas delivered the remarks in conversation with Kasdin Mitchell, a former Supreme Court clerk whom President Donald Trump nominated this month for a federal district judgeship in Dallas. The setting — a Florida judicial conference — gave the justice a venue to reflect on his three-decade tenure and to offer a personal account of his understanding of the country’s founding principles.
Thomas, 77, recently became the second longest-serving justice in the history of the Supreme Court. Asked about his plans for the future, he gave no indication he intends to step down, citing the example of the justice he replaced on the bench.
“Justice Marshall said you take a job for life, you do it for life,” Thomas said, referring to Thurgood Marshall, the court’s first African American justice and the man whose seat Thomas has occupied since 1991.
The remark carries political weight. A retirement during Trump’s current term would allow the president to make a fourth appointment to the high court — the most by any president in nearly a century — and to further solidify the court’s conservative majority, which Thomas helped build over his 35-year tenure.
Thomas framed his judicial philosophy through the lens of his own biography, describing his grandfather, the son of a freed slave who received barely any formal schooling, as a man who nonetheless believed in the country’s capacity to move toward a more perfect union.
“One of the rods in this society versus so many of the others where the rights are parceled down by a government is that we were taught from the cradle that we were equal in God’s eyes, that was self-evident,” Thomas said. He cited Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., and Abraham Lincoln as figures who all spoke “in terms of these transcendent rights beyond the ability of man to take away even though man had the power to infringe upon them.”
Thomas also drew on his long service to diagnose a strain of cynicism that he said erodes public trust in governing institutions. He cast the Constitution not as a partisan instrument but as a procedural anchor — a document that sets the terms of the argument rather than settling every argument in advance.