Producing decisive rulings has been complicated by the fact that the court has been down one justice since conservative Antonin Scalia died in February, leaving it evenly split with four conservatives and four liberals.
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However, when it comes to the issue of racial preferences in university admissions (the focal point of Fisher v. University of Texas, which reached the Supreme Court a second time in December back when Scalia was around to make off-handedly racist commentary about the intellectual capacities of black students), SCOTUS will most likely produce a decisive ruling as only seven of its eight justices will be handling it.
She blasted the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard for penning the story, saying he ‘needs to find a phone in his life’.
According to the Washington Examiner court watchers are claiming that Thomas has been considering retiring for a while and he has never meant to remain on the court until he died.
In a sharply worded Facebook post, however, Thomas’ wife Ginny, however, rejected the report as “bogus”.
‘He likes to spend summers in his RV with his wife, ‘ the journalist noted.
‘And unnamed sources are worth as much as their transparency is, ‘ she added.
A amusing close friend wrote me: “Next we’ll hear that you and he have bought a small private island near Nevis, with a large satellite dish so that all the Nebraska college sports games won’t be missed, and a large Green Egg that can slow cook the indigenous wild boar”.
The court is now hampered by its lack of a ninth justice – Justice Antonin Scalia died in February, and Congress Republicans have declined to consider Obama’s proposed replacement, Merrick Garland.
United States Supreme Court [Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images] The largest controversy, which was recently detailed in an HBO special entitled Confirmation, began when a law professor at the University of Oklahoma named Anita Hill claimed that Thomas had sexually harassed her when he was her boss at two different government agencies. President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to fill the role, but the Republicans refused to allow a confirmation vote.
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The justices also are set to rule on whether to overturn Republican former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell’s 2014 corruption conviction, one of the 13 cases yet to be decided.
