Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said this week that U.S. Supreme Court conservative Justice Clarence Thomas has been "a person of grievance" since she attended law school with him at Yale in the early 1970s.
"I went to law school with him," Clinton said in a CBS Mornings interview posted on Twitter by the network Tuesday. "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' [to the Supreme Court]."
Clinton and Thomas were at the school between 1969-74, according to their individual biographies.
Thomas is one of the majority of six conservative justices who voted last week to overturn 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal nationwide.
In the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health case decided last week, the court overturned the decision and sent the issue back to the states to decide.
In his separate concurrent opinion, Thomas said the court should revisit certain cases decided on the 14th Amendment’s due process clause because they were "demonstrably erroneous."
"Nothing in the court's opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion," Thomas wrote. "For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold [right of married people to obtain contraception], Lawrence [right to engage in consensual sexual acts], and Obergefell [right to same-sex marriage]."
Clinton said that this part of his concurrent opinion was "signaling" for lower courts and conservative states to bring a case regarding these previous rulings back in front of the court to be overruled.
"The people he is speaking to, which are the right-wing, very conservative judges, and justices, and state legislatures," Clinton said. "There's so many things about it that are deeply distressing, but women are going to die, women will die."
Thomas, who just turned 74, was appointed to the supreme court by President George H.W. Bush, taking his seat on Oct. 23, 1991, after contentious confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate.
Clinton lost to former Republican President Donald Trump in 2016, who went on to appoint three conservative justices top the high court that he said would overturn the Roe decision.
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