More Toobin on Clarence Thomas

From same New Yorker article:



This omission becomes even more glaring when Thomas begins to discuss his judicial career. In 1989, he was hardly an obvious candidate for the court of appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is generally regarded as second in importance only to the Supreme Court. Just forty-one years old, Thomas had never tried a case, or argued an appeal, in any federal court, much less in the high-powered D.C. Circuit; the last time Thomas had appeared in any courtroom was when he was a junior attorney in Missouri; he had never produced any scholarly work; his tenure at the E.E.O.C., although respectable, did not mark him as a notable innovator in the federal bureaucracy. He was, in short, a black conservative in an Administration with very few of them. That’s why he got the job.