There is a very long game being played here. Young people graduating from law school today have never lived in a world in which Clarence Thomas was not on the Supreme Court. The very fact of his position and his persistence makes opinions that would have been hooted out of the room a few decades ago look respectable in many eyes. In 1997, in Printz v. United States, he was the first modern justice to assert that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to own a gun, and to invite anyone interested to bring the right case to a Supreme Court newly open for Second Amendment business. It took a mere 11 years, and we were handed District of Columbia v. Heller.

Linda Greenhouse, “Is Clarence Thomas the Supreme Court’s Future?”