Clarence Thomas says Supreme Court leak has eroded trust in institution

The leak of a draft opinion regarding abortion has turned the Supreme Court into a place “where you look over your shoulder,” Justice Clarence Thomas said Friday night, and it may have irreparably sundered trust at the institution.“What happened at the court was tremendously bad,” Thomas said in a conversation with a former law clerk at a conference of conservative and libertarian thinkers in Dallas. We actually trusted — we might have been a dysfunctional family, but we were a family.”Just as Alito had done in a speech the night before at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University in Virginia, Thomas skipped past the usual bonhomie that justices express about their colleagues — that they disagree vigorously but respect and admire each other.Asked about that by a questioner, who wondered how a friendly respect for ideological differences could be fostered in Congress and other institutions, Thomas replied: “Well, I’m just worried about keeping it at the court now.”As he had the week before, he praised a previous court — one headed by Chief Justice William H. Thomas did not explain his vote in the court’s short order denying Trump’s emergency request, and Democrats in Congress have cited his participation as evidence of a need for a stringent ethics and recusal code at the Supreme Court.Thomas briefly recounted battles with the left, which he said tried to keep him off the court “because of abortion.” While saying at his confirmation hearing that he had never considered the correctness of Roe, Thomas joined an opinion just months later saying the precedent should be overturned.Thomas said conservatives have never employed the harsh tactics of the left.“You would never visit Supreme Court justices’ houses when things didn’t go our way,” Thomas said.