Representative James Clyburn has been in office for 33 years. He recently compared the current Supreme Court to the Dred Scott court, called for Congress to act against it, said he hopes Justice Clarence Thomas will follow the underpinnings of the Warren Court — and said he now regrets his own 1991 testimony in favor of Thomas’s confirmation.
Marien Richardson’s response to the Dred Scott comparison is direct: the Dred Scott court ruled that Black people could not be citizens. Today there are two Black justices on that court. She wants to know what rights, specifically, anyone believes have been taken.
Her central argument is the line John stops the show to make her repeat.
If the Democrat Party loses racism, they lose the entire Black vote. Her framing is that grievance is the product and the base is the customer — and a party that has delivered little else has to keep the customer coming back for something.
She’s blunt about what she thinks Clyburn is actually asking for: would he be satisfied if all four of the Republican-appointed justices resigned tomorrow? Because I hope Clarence Thomas will follow isn’t a legal argument. It’s a wish for a different court.
On the reversal itself, she doesn’t think it’s really about Thomas. She points to when Clyburn’s generation of Democratic politicians came up — around the Million Man March era, when the party’s platform was equal voting rights for American citizens. Her argument is that the platform moved and he moved with it, because that’s what staying in office for three decades requires.
Also in this conversation:
Why she says white supremacy today mostly means white people living rent-free in Black minds, and what her own father — a Duke graduate — has to say about it. Whether Clyburn’s position is an isolated statement or a precedent, and what she says happens once a precedent exists. Why she thinks the push to expand the courts should alarm anyone who cares about elections, regardless of party.
And the closing case, which is the sharpest part of the hour. Clyburn’s signature legislative achievement is the 10-20-30 formula, written specifically to direct federal dollars into persistently poor counties — including his own district. Thirty-three years and seventeen consecutive terms later, the numbers in that district haven’t moved. If the goal was to eradicate poverty, it wasn’t accomplished. So why is he still in the seat?
Marien’s answer: that’s not how a socialist model fails. That’s how it works. Throwing money at a problem doesn’t fix it, and there’s no incentive to solve a problem your position depends on.
Her prescription is one nobody in either party wants to hear: term limits, and the same expectation every other industry has. There is something called retirement.
John closes on where the show started — that the men and women held up as heroes in the Black community had it immeasurably harder than anyone complaining today, and every one of them decided something about themselves before anything around them changed.
