Imagine that the case before you is one large, ugly dandelion growing in your otherwise perfectly manicured lawn. You can either: apply a specific herbicide that targets only certain kinds of broad-leaved weeds, or you can bust out the Roundup and kill the whole damn lawn, deciding the dandelion case in the process.

Either method will work inasmuch as dispatching the ugly weed that has been brought before the court.

For decades, the right wing has touted the concept of “judicial restraint” in the wake of the court’s Great Pro-Constitutional Heyday of the 1960s through 1990.

The concept of judicial restraint is not without merit in itself. One of its tenets is to issue a narrowly written ruling when the case before the court can be addressed by such a ruling.

By that definition, the right wing’s most exalted example of conservative judicial restraint, the late Antonin Scalia, was in fact a rampaging judicial activist. But some of us already knew that.

A pivotal case that showcases Scalia’s far right lack of judicial restraint is the 1990 Supreme Court case Oregon Employment Division v. Smith.

Under the philosophy of judicial restraint, the facts of that case called for a narrow ruling that would address situations of the same or similar nature as the sacramental use of an illegal drug in religious rites. But Scalia, ever the anti-liberty right wing judicial activist, chose instead to author a sweeping ruling that all but knocked out the First Amendment’s Free Exercise clause entirely. To settle the issue of members of their Native American Church utilizing an illegal weed in their rites, Antonin Scalia emptied the whole bottle of Roundup onto the lawn and garden of the Free Exercise Clause.

Though Scalia’s separate concurrence in the 2000 Supreme Court First Amendment case Erie v. Pap’s AM did not become part of the majority opinion, Scalia revealed his stash of Roundup once again, arguing that “The traditional power of government to foster good morals (bonos mores), and the acceptability of the traditional judgment (if Erie wishes to endorse it) that nude public dancing itself is immoral, have not been repealed by the First Amendment.”

If Scalia’s view had been the majority opinion, then someone’s mere arbitrary decree that something is “immoral” would override the First Amendment. To heck with the sedge-specific herbicide to eradicate the strip club’s freedom of expression; just pour the whole gallon of Roundup on the Free Speech and Freedom of the Press clauses.

Another case of intentionally overbroad eradication of liberty was the infamous Dobbs v. Jackson decision, which eradicated any right to an abortion whatsoever.

Chief Justice Roberts’ judicial restraint approach would have upheld Mississippi’s 15-weeks ban due to the fact that the Mississippi ban amounted to a challenge to the viability standard beyond which Roe v. Wade already did not guarantee a right to abortion. Roberts argued, correctly in my opinion, that the Mississippi ban could have been upheld without significantly disturbing Roe v. Wade itself. That’s how judicial restraint works.

But no, that wasn’t good enough for the MAGA activist judges on the court. They saw an opportunity to uphold Mississippi’s ban by eradicating the right to an abortion in its entirety, and they took it.

But even Alito’s activist ruling appears restrained compared to uncle Clarence Thomas’ openly stated desire to aggressively go after other established rights that weren’t even before the court, arrogantly claiming “As I have previously explained, “substantive due process” is an oxymoron that “lack[s] any basis in the Constitution.”” His entire concurrence is a spitting, venomous diatribe against many of our core liberties and the very legal mechanism that protects them.

Do you see the MAGA arrogance? He thinks that he can simply decree out of existence one of the key principles that make the Constitution work in a manner that common sense would expect. I got news for ya, buster; your “originalism” doesn’t have any basis in the Constitution. His highly unprofessional and intensely biased judicial temperament already disqualifies him from serving on the highest court in the land.

It’s no surprise that uncle Thomas is the Supreme Court “justice” most closely associated to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection by way of his activist wife and his ongoing catering to Donald Trump. His extreme activism takes place on the bench, for the aid of his wife’s activism off of the bench.

And that brings us to the Trump immunity case.

When a person’s bias, bigotry and hatreds are intense enough, their arguments often short-circuit into glaring self-contradictions in very short order, and uncle Thomas’ concurrence delivers a case study in close-range self-contradiction caused by intense bigotry: “The limitation on the President’s power to create offices grew out of the Founders’ experience with the English monarchy. The King could wield significant power by both creating and filling offices as he saw fit. He was “emphatically and truly styled the fountain of honor. He not only appoint[ed] to all offices, but [could] create offices.” The Federalist No. 69, p. 421 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961); see also 1 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 271 (T. Cooley ed. 1871) (“[A]s the king may create new titles, so may he create new offices”). That ability to create offices raised many “concerns about the King’s ability to amass too much power”; the King could both create a multitude of offices and then fill them with his supporters.”

Looks terrific, right? Good, sound reasoning. The trouble is that Thomas produced that thoughtful reasoning to challenge the legitimacy of Special Counsel Jack Smith, not the idea of vast executive powers.

There’s the problem, unc: You are WORKING OVERTIME to PROTECT A KING! Geez, man, can’t you see it? (Yeah, we know you do.)

Trump plans to enact a “Schedule F” that would do EXACTLY WHAT YOU WARN AGAINST, unc! Project 2025 aims to turn the FBI and the DOJ into the King’s Men! Yet you’re protecting this king because you want him in power no matter what!!! Good grief! Everyone suffers from compartmentalized thinking to some extent, but right wing compartmentalized thinking looks like the inside of a beehive.

Thomas supports and actively works toward the realization of the “unitary executive” theory.

That, Clarence Thomas, you turncoat, IS PRECISELY THE KING THAT YOU JUST “WARNED” ABOUT, and YOU’RE WORKING TOWARD IT.