Read: Clarence Thomas breaks his silence

So idiosyncratic is his approach that he often found himself at odds with the godfather of judicial originalism, the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia, it’s been reported, took a slap at Thomas in his famous statement that “I am an originalist, but I am not a nut.” The conservative legal movement, while praising Thomas on ceremonial occasions, tends to both quote and follow Scalia.

This lack of impact doesn’t—as some observers think—arise from disengagement. Anyone who watches Thomas on the bench day after day knows that, though he does not speak, he follows arguments intently, frequently sending a court page to fetch a case reporter or whispering busily to his bench neighbor, Justice Stephen G. Breyer. It also doesn’t come from any lack of popularity; within the building, from the cafeteria to the conference chamber, he is clearly among friends.

Nonetheless, Thomas has until recently attracted few votes for his favorite causes. (Justice Neil Gorsuch has begun concurring with him on some of his solo flights.*) For years he has pushed the Court to expand gun rights, for example. In District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago, the conservative majority did so—but not according to Thomas’s sweeping theory, which is that the Second Amendment’s “right to bear arms” should have precisely the same scope as the First Amendment’s “freedom of speech.” He has repeatedly called for overruling key precedents—arguing, for example, that the Court should invalidate federal economic regulation that reaches anything beyond the sale or purchase of goods across state lines, or that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause should not apply to the states. The majority has declined to oblige.

In one Church-state case, Thomas dismissed writings by James Madison, the father of both the Constitution and the Establishment Clause, as representing “extreme notions of the separation of church and state.” He added that “the views of one man do not establish the original understanding of the First Amendment.”

Read: The Clarence Thomas exception

That’s a remarkably telling statement. First, calling Madison an extremist takes a level of chutzpah few judges have hitherto been able to muster. Second, it takes self-delusion: Thomas believes that proposition about James Madison—but he rejects it about himself. Like Madison, he is only “one man;” but, unlike Madison or anyone else, he repeatedly finds that he alone has the insight, gleaned from direct access to the minds of the Framers, to establish single-handedly the “original understanding” of all parts of the Constitution.

And that’s my critique of Thomas on the bench, which I have made before. He’s in the wrong line of work. The “I know best about everything” attitude is excusable (though annoying) in a law professor, whose views cut no real-world ice with anyone, but they ill-become a judge.