You can call him a party hack but in reality Thomas on racial issues is a very interesting and unique justice. Especially when it comes to the VRA districts he has the least partisan decision making and a good idea on how it should be applied.
1) I will always call Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O'Connor, and William Rehnquist "party hacks" for what they did in
Bush v. Gore.
2) I'm far from clear what you mean about Thomas's views on VRA districts. Do you mean to refer to Thomas's view on how the VRA should be interpreted, or on his Equal Protection Clause interpretation as applied to minority-majority districts that were drawn during 1991-1992? Regarding the latter issue, ever since the 1990s, when I read
Shaw v. Reno and
Miller v. Johnson, I have been certain that Thomas, Kennedy, Scalia, O'Connor, and Rehqnuist were quite wrong and the opinions were completely unpersuasive. It was ridiculously unpersuasive that they would look at congressional districts like NC-12 and GA-11 (as drawn in 1991-1992) and claim that districts like those were more similar to the municipal boundary lines of Tuskegee, Alabama -- as drawn in 1957 -- which the Supreme Court had found to be unconstitutional in
Gomillion v. Lightfoot, than to the boundaries of certain New York state legislative districts that the Court found to be constitutionally permissible in
United Jewish Organization of Williamsburg v. Carey. The
Shaw and
Miller opinions repeatedly referred to racially "segregated" districts, when in fact there were no 100% white districts or 100% black districts in either North Carolina or Georgia. There were no laws that prohibited whites from moving into the black-majority districts or prohibit blacks from moving into the white-majority districts. So there was no "segregation" of voters. Also, the Court's opinions never explained who was being treated worse than whom else, or who was being harmed.
In sum, I agree with Clarence Thomas's views on affirmative action, in educational opportunities and employment opportunities, being unconstitutional, but I disagree with him about whether racial gerrymandering -- such as in NC-12, GA-11, LA-4, TX-30, and FL-03, as those districts had been drawn in 1991-1992 -- also being unconstitutional. So I can't say either FF or HP.
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