If the plumber that I hired to fix the shower came into the house with a scowl on his face and reeked of enough seething anger to melt the paint off the wall, I would think twice before hiring him again. Same goes for the automobile mechanic and the dog groomer. So why isn't anyone shocked that the angriest man on Earth is one of nine people authorized to interpret and give meaning to the United States Constitution?

I'm talking about Clarence Thomas, who came out of hiding this month with the release of his autobiography. His media blitz (to conservative talk show hosts who asked him softball questions and commiserated with him) revealed a profoundly angry man who is still seething over the racism he experienced as a young man and the sexual harassment allegations which nearly destroyed his Supreme Court candidacy in 1991. Anger may be a good motivator, but not all the time. It's time to get this man to a shrink.

Clarence Thomas testified before the U.S. Senate in 1991 when the first President Bush nominated him to the Supreme Court. Thomas is now whining that it was racist for people to question his qualifications at the time, since no one ever asks that question of white nominees. But how many white nominees are only 43 years old with minimal judicial experience before serving on the Supreme Court, authorized to issue binding opinions on civil rights and liberties for the next 30 years? Thomas has said that his critics unfairly judged him and that they are no better than the Ku Klux Klan which terrorized black people in the south when Thomas was growing up. But no one in his right mind would disagree with the following proposition: the only reason he was appointed to the Supreme Court was because of his race. Many, many judges in this country had more experience than Thomas, and dozens of law professors and practicing lawyers certainly had a more scholarly background.

At the time, people said that Thomas would find his voice and remember his roots. I knew that would never happen. You don't sell out by working for the reactionary Reagan administration and then turn around and stab your political benefactors in the back. Thomas has turned into the most conservative and reactionary Supreme Court Justice in my lifetime. Anyone who disagrees with this is simply not paying attention.

As usual, media coverage of Thomas's media blitz has been more superficial than substantive. I hear nothing but his belated complaints about the despicable men in the U.S. Senate who advanced a racist stereotype and believed Anita Hill's testimony that Thomas sexually harassed her. But I hear nothing about the appalling record that Thomas has complied on the Court. Let's review his record.

Leaving aside Thomas's terrible rulings in which other members of the Court agreed with him -- such as his unprecedented decision to stop the recount in the 2000 presidential election and other rulings which have scaled back the cause of civil rights and racial justice -- a review of Thomas's viewpoints shows the following:

1. When he testified before the U.S. Senate on his confirmation, he said that he used to watch prisoners being shackled into the Courthouse over the years, and he thought to himself, "There but for the grace of God go I." But only a few months later, as a Justice, he ruled that inmates who get the shit kicked out of them cannot sue the prison guards under the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Constitution. The legal community was appalled at this judgment. But by then, it was too late. He was on the Court and just beginning the sharpen up his repertoire.

2. In June 2007, issuing a separate ruling in a free speech case involving a high school student, Thomas decided that public school students should have no rights whatsoever under the First Amendment. The reasoning was that when the Constitution was created in 1787, the prevailing view at the time was that students should be seen and not heard and that viewpoint must govern how we interpret the First Amendment over 200 years later. This is called "originalist" thinking, i.e., interpreting the Constitution as if it's frozen in time so that the world view in 1787 is the only way to understand the Constitution in the modern era. This is like the fundamentalist Bible scholars who take that document literally and remain rigid and arrogant to the core.

3. When the Supreme Court took up the Pledge of Allegience case a few years ago, he actually disagreed with the other conservatives on the Court and decided instead that the Pledge violates the constitutional separation of church and state because the Pledge refers to "under God." But he only felt that way because Supreme Court precedent, in his view, went so far as to restrict a religious reference in a daily schoolhouse ritual. But, Thomas said, all those cases have been wrongly decided and should be overturned right away. That would throw out decades and decades of case law precedent in order to, once again, bring the religious separation clause back to 1787. He then said something else that very, very few scholars agree with or even gave much thought to: he thinks that the provisions in the Constitution mandating separation of church and state do not in any way restrict the States from joining church and state. He said this clause only affects Federal government decisionmaking. So, the much-respected separation of church and state, according to Thomas, does not apply to the great majority of government decisionmaking. This is nuts.

This is the tip of the iceberg. No one anticipated that Thomas was this reactionary when he was nominated to the Supreme Court. He did not tell us that he saw the world this way. As a Supreme Court Justice, no one else on the Court agreed with Thomas on the outrageous legal views outlined above. He was a lone dissenter as the other conservative Justices politely declined to sign onto his wild opinions. Legally, Thomas' influence on these issues is no different from writing them onto a paper airplane and flying it out the window. But Supreme Court Justices write these lone opinions in the belief that someday a more enlightened Court will see the light and adopt these views as the law of the land. It has happened before. Thomas hopes it will happen again. What would Clarence Thomas' United States look like? I don't even want to know.