Justice Thomas Defends Overturning Precedent-Setting Cases
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas pushed back against critics of the Court’s willingness to revisit and overturn past rulings, reminding law students at Catholic University on Thursday that precedent is not “gospel” and must always be measured against the Constitution.
Thomas, now in his 34th year on the bench after being appointed by President George H.W. Bush, said justices cannot “turn off their brains” when evaluating precedent, likening the principle of stare decisis to a train endlessly adding new cars without checking who is in control.
“It’s not some sort of automatic deal where you can just say, ‘Stare decisis,’ and then turn off the brain,” Thomas said, according to the Washington Times. “We never go to the front to see who’s driving the train or where it is going, and you could go up there to the engine room and find out it’s an orangutan.”
Thomas stressed that prior rulings deserve respect only if they are rooted in America’s legal traditions, not in political activism.
“I don’t think that I have the gospel, that any of these cases that have been decided are the gospel, and I do give perspective to the precedent,” he explained. “But it should. The precedent should be respectful of our legal tradition and our country and our laws, and be based on something, not just something somebody dreamt up and others went along with.”
The justice’s comments come as the Court continues to dismantle decades of left-wing judicial policymaking. In 2022, the Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, restoring abortion law to the states where it had resided since the Founding. Since then, more than a dozen Republican-led states have enacted pro-life protections.
The Court has also struck down affirmative action in college admissions, ending the race-based system of preferences long championed by progressives, and dismantled the Chevron doctrine, which had empowered unelected bureaucrats to dictate policy through agency rulemaking.
Looking ahead, the justices are preparing to revisit Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), a New Deal-era precedent that limited a president’s ability to fire officials at so-called “independent” agencies. The Court’s conservative majority has already allowed President Trump to dismiss officials from the FTC, NLRB, MSPB, and Consumer Product Safety Commission—signaling an openness to restoring constitutional accountability within the executive branch.
This week, however, the Court temporarily blocked President Trump from firing Democratic Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, allowing her to remain in her seat until oral arguments in January 2026.
Trump had removed Cook in August after staff raised evidence she committed mortgage fraud by claiming two different properties as her primary residence to secure favorable financing. Federal housing regulators have since filed criminal referrals over the discrepancies.
CNN’s own legal analyst Elie Honig admitted Friday that the allegations were “really problematic” for Cook, the Daily Caller reported. Bill Pulte, head of the U.S. Federal Housing Agency, confirmed that a second criminal referral has now been filed. He accused Cook of misrepresenting a Cambridge, Massachusetts condo as a “second home” on a 2021 mortgage application, then labeling it an “investment/rental property” on a federal ethics form eight months later.
For Justice Thomas, the controversy underscores why the Court cannot blindly adhere to precedent and must ensure rulings reflect the Constitution—not the whims of political elites.