Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas

The New York Times (NYT) has come out with a piece about Justice Clarence Thomas and how he almost never asks questions from the bench during oral arguments.  His explanations for this vary: first, he is ashamed of his Georgia accent; second, the cases have already been decided, and the oral arguments are just theater.  In reality, he has nothing to say, because he has already decided his opinion on the case (or has had his opinion handed to him by Antonin Scalia.)  He is arguably the worst Supreme Court Justice ever appointed (although there could be some other candidates) and his silence is justifiable on the grounds that he has nothing to say.

Here are some representative reader comments on the NYT story:

A decade and a half ago, I learned from a person at the Supreme Court in a position to know that Clarence Thomas had never ordered a single case from the library. Never to that point. It was clear too from his lack of requesting documents that he had never written an opinion that came out under his name; Scalia had written all of them. One may assume that the librarians play a different role now that so much information is in digital form, so perhaps we cannot so easily trace how little work Thomas is doing. Nonetheless, why should anything have changed? He’d already been on the bench well over a decade when that Supreme Court staff person outed him for doing absolutely nothing as a justice. You say that Thomas should talk, but what would he say? There is no indication that he has studied the cases, the laws that could shape them, or anything else but his marching orders from Scalia, ALEC, and the Koch brothers.