Justice Thomas hails US Constitution as common bedrock in divided America

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MIAMI (AP) — Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas urged Americans to celebrate the 250th anniversary of independence not with fireworks or empty platitudes, but by standing up for their deeply held beliefs, with the comforting knowledge that the U.S. Constitution protects free speech and serves as a common bedrock in a society otherwise beset by deep divisions.

“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. “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' remarks came in response to an interview with one of his former Supreme Court clerks, Kasdin Mitchell, who was nominated this month by President Donald Trump to serve on the federal bench in Dallas.

Thomas — who recently became the second longest-serving justice in Supreme Court history — looked back on his upbringing in the segregated South and his more than three decades on the high court.

But he gave no indication that, at age 77, he is looking to retire anytime soon and give President Trump the opportunity to further cement his influence on the Supreme Court and nominate his fourth justice, the most of any president in almost a century.

“Justice Marshall said you take a job for life, you do it for life,” referring to Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court's first African American justice, who Thomas replaced on the high court.

But he said his long tenure had given him a unique perspective on the cynicism that pervades so much of society and contributes to Americans' distrust in government.

He spoke about the example set by his grandfather, the son of a freed slave with barely any formal education, who nonetheless believed in America's promise of a more perfect union, to describe his judicial philosophy in a limited form of government.

“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," said Thomas. "If you look at Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln, they all speak in terms of these transcendent rights beyond the ability of man to take away even though man had the power to infringe upon them.”