Justice Sotomayor Praises Clarence Thomas: ‘He Cares About People’

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the Court’s most strident liberals, praised her conservative colleague, Justice Clarence Thomas, in a lecture at Roosevelt University in Chicago on Thursday evening, noting his unique compassion for others.

Sotomayor was quoted by CNN national political writer Eric Bradner as saying:

I have disagreed with [Thomas] more than with any other justice. Which means we don’t come together on many cases. And yet I can tell you that I spend time with him, understanding that he is one of the few justices who knows practically everybody in our building. He knows their name, he knows the things about their life, what their family is suffering. He’ll tell me, you know that person’s wife is sick right now, or that person’s child is having difficulty.

There’s no other justice who does that. I try, but he does it better. He cares about people. Now, he cares on legal interests differently. And he sees those legal issues much differently than I do. I tell people, you know Clarence believes, just like him, because he grew up very, very poor, that everyone is capable of picking themselves up by their bootstraps. I understand that some people can’t reach their bootstraps. That’s a fundamental difference in how we view what the law can or should or does do for people. But I can appreciate him.

Thomas was noted for his friendship with the late liberal icon, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Some Democrats are trying to have him impeached over his wife’s alleged support for efforts to challenge the result of the 2020 presidential election, for which she has been interviewed by the January 6 Committee.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.