Senator Reid's Foot in Mouth Problem

Senator Harry Reid, the incoming Senator minority leader, caught a lot of flak for saying that Clarence Thomas' legal opinions are poorly written and that he was "an embarrassment to the court." Some of that flak came from me, in a post where I pointed out that while I am on the opposite side of most issues with Justice Thomas, Reid's claim was unjustifed and beneath the dignity of a Senate leader. Alas, Reid is not quite done making himself look like an ass. James Taranto, writing in the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web, quotes Reid's response when asked on CNN to provide an example of a poorly written opinion by Thomas:

Oh sure, that's easy to do. You take the Hillside Dairy case. In that case you had a dissent written by Scalia and a dissent written by Thomas. There--it's like looking at an eighth-grade dissertation compared to somebody who just graduated from Harvard.

Scalia's is well reasoned. He doesn't want to turn stare decisis precedent on its head. That's what Thomas wants to do. So yes, I think he has written a very poor opinion there and he's written other opinions that are not very good.

Open mouth, insert other foot. The problem here, as Taranto points out, is that Justice Scalia didn't even write an opinion in the Hillside Dairy case. And Thomas' written opinion, which Reid claimed sounds like an "eighth-grade dissertation"? Here is the entire opinion, in all its boring glory:

I join Parts I and III of the Court's opinion and respectfully dissent from Part II, which holds that §144 of the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996, 7 U.S.C. §7254, "does not clearly express an intent to insulate California's pricing and pooling laws from a Commerce Clause challenge." Ante, at 6-7. Although I agree that the Court of Appeals erred in its statutory analysis, I nevertheless would affirm its judgment on this claim because "[t]he negative Commerce Clause has no basis in the text of the Constitution, makes little sense, and has proved virtually unworkable in application," Camps Newfound/Owatonna, Inc. v. Town of Harrison, 520 U.S. 564, 610 (1997) (Thomas, J., dissenting), and, consequently, cannot serve as a basis for striking down a state statute.

Taranto also points out that, despite Reid's assertion that Scalia would not overturn a longstanding precedent in this case while Thomas would, the opinion that Thomas references here in the Camps Newfound/Owatonna case was joined by Scalia as well. How many ways could he be wrong on the same issue simultaneously? I think there's someone here who is proving to be an embarrassment, Senator, and I think it's you.

P.S. Stephen Presser and Samuel Marcosson are having an online debate at Legal Affairs over Clarence Thomas' record and whether he should be nominated as Chief Justice. In contrast to the Senator, the two debaters appear to have at least read some of Thomas' opinions before opining about them. And David at Blue Mass Group has a post up that says pretty much what I've been saying.