After almost a decade on the court, Thomas had grown frustrated with his financial situation, according to friends. He had recently started raising his young grandnephew, and Thomas’ wife was soliciting advice on how to handle the new expenses. The month before, the justice had borrowed $267,000 from a friend to buy a high-end RV.
At the resort, Thomas gave a speech at an off-the-record conservative conference. He found himself seated next to a Republican member of Congress on the flight home. The two men talked, and the lawmaker left the conversation worried that Thomas might resign.
Congress should give Supreme Court justices a pay raise, Thomas told him. If lawmakers didn’t act, “one or more justices will leave soon” — maybe in the next year.
At the time, Thomas’ salary was $173,600, equivalent to over $300,000 today. But he was one of the least wealthy members of the court, and on multiple occasions in that period, he pushed for ways to make more money. In other private conversations, Thomas repeatedly talked about removing a ban on justices giving paid speeches.
From the moment he graduated from Yale Law, he’s had a chip on his shoulder about deserving to be rich. It’s understandable. Many of his white classmates got high paying jobs, he struggled. He blamed it on affirmative action, believing that his degree wasn’t taken seriously because they thought he didn’t get where he did on merit. (Worth noting that before Yale Law he attended the College of the Holy Cross as one of the first black students there… but see he deserved that, it wasn’t affirmative action.)
His whole “philosophy” is pretty interesting, not in that it makes any sense, just in that you can see how his experiences warped his world view.
He doesn’t believe in any government program that could help black people. Partially, that’s because he thinks that the world will only believe that black people are where they are on merit if they’re never given a hand up. Partially it’s because he was influenced by black separatist movements and thinks black people should stay angry with whites, and not ever feel they are allies.
Being so against affirmative action got him the attention of Reagan, and so he started moving in Republican political circles. His party trick was shitting all over social programs that helped black people, while having black skin. The GOP loved him for it. He was appointed chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, while hating everything it stood for. Basically, a typical GOP ploy of assigning someone who wanted to destroy something to run it.
Once he was enmeshed in GOP politics, he became the perfect supreme court nominee. A guy with black skin (meaning it was going to be hard to get the democrats to vote against his confirmation) but who hated every government program that helped black people (meaning the GOP was going to love him).
But, even though he got the power of the Supreme Court, he never got the payout he thought he deserved. The guy who loaned him the money to buy the half-million dollar tour bus had worked as a congressional staffer at the same time as Thomas. But, instead of staying in politics, he’d spun off into business and gotten rich. Thomas got the power, but he didn’t get the money, and he’s been chasing the payout he thinks he deserves ever since his Yale graduation in 1974.