Hillary Clinton: Clarence Thomas has always been a person of ‘resentment, grievance and anger’

Hillary Clinton said in a Tuesday morning interview that for as long as she has known Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, he has been filled with ‘resentment’ and ‘anger’ as she insisted the Roe v. Wade ruling will result in women dying.

‘I went to law school with [Justice Thomas],’ Clinton told CBS Mornings in a pre-recorded interview. ‘He’s been a person of grievance for as long as I’ve known him — resentment, grievance, anger.’

The failed 2016 Democratic presidential nominee said that Thomas has ‘signaled’ to lower courts and state legislatures that they need to ‘find cases, pass laws, gets them up’ to restrict abortion, contraception rights and same-sex marriage.

Clinton said that people who are ‘right wing’ and ‘very conservative’ are paying attention to Justice Thomas when it comes to these issues and the potential risk of their overturn.

Her response comes after the bombshell Friday Supreme Court ruling that ended 50-years of precedent set by the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade.

‘The thing that is – well there’s so many things about it that are deeply distressing – but women are going to die, Gayle,’ Clinton said.

She insisted: ‘Women will die.

Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been ‘a person of grievance for as long as I’ve known him — resentment, grievance, anger’

Clinton went to law school with Thomas and said his and other conservative Justices’ ruling overturning Roe v. Wade on Friday will lead to ‘women dying’

The case at hand in the Supreme Court was Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which sought to challenge a Mississippi law that banned abortion at 15 weeks. The law was upheld by the court in a conservative 6-3 majority opinion.

Thomas, one of the most conservative members of the Supreme Court, said in interviews published in a new book that he wasn’t sure why he was nominated for the Supreme Court – and ‘celebrated not being nominated’ when he thought President George H.W. Bush had passed him up.

‘I have no idea why or how I got nominated,’ Thomas said, according to the book Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, which came out earlier this month.

Thomas said in interviews published in a new book that he wasn’t sure why he was nominated for the Supreme Court and ‘celebrated not being nominated’ when he thought President George H.W. Bush passed him up. Created Equal was a companion project to a 2020 documentary with the same name

Thomas admitted that he ‘hadn’t thought about’ the abortion issue in the run-up to his 1991 confirmation hearings.

Thomas went one step further from his conservative cohorts on Friday by filing a concurring opinion suggesting that cases legalizing contraception and same-sex marriage should get another look from the court as well.

Created Equal was a companion project to a documentary on Thomas released in 2020 by filmmaker Michael Pack, who led the U.S. Agency for Global Media under former President Donald Trump, and Mark Paoletta, a lawyer who worked alongside Thomas during his confirmation.

Pack interviewed Thomas for more than 30 hours between November 2017 and March 2018, which became the basis for the film and then the book.

Thomas made clear to Pack that he wasn’t enthusiastic about being nominated to the court – and also hadn’t thought much about the abortion issue going into his confirmation hearings.

Since the ruling on Friday, pro- and anti-abortion demonstrators have been posted outside the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C.

Thirteen states had so-called ‘trigger laws’ that immediately made abortion illegal with the overturn of Roe v. Wade.