South Carolina Medicaid patients lost access to Planned Parenthood this summer. Cancer screenings, STI testing, contraception—all gone. Not because of abortion politics, but because Justice Clarence Thomas convinced the Supreme Court to rewrite how civil rights law works in America.
Table of Contents
The June Ruling That Started Everything
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic handed states new power to block healthcare access. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
Thomas went further. His concurring opinion called for dismantling Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871—the law Americans use to sue police for brutality, challenge discrimination, and fight constitutional violations.
“Given the remarkable gap between the original understanding of §1983 and its current role, a more fundamental reexamination of our §1983 jurisprudence is in order,” Thomas wrote.
Those two sentences could reshape how 330 million Americans protect their constitutional rights.
Why Section 1983 Matters Right Now
Section 1983 lets you sue state and local officials who violate your constitutional rights. Without it, you have almost no recourse when:
- Police use excessive force
- Officials discriminate based on race or religion
- Government retaliates against whistleblowers
- Agencies deny due process
Originally passed as part of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, the law now handles thousands of civil rights cases annually. Citizens have used it to challenge everything from prison conditions to voting restrictions, from school segregation to police shootings.
Thomas believes modern courts have stretched the law beyond recognition. He argues litigants “invoke §1983 to challenge myriad ‘state actions that have little or nothing to do with’ civil rights.”
Thomas’s Three-Decade Campaign Takes Shape
His first major move came in 1994’s Holder v. Hall. Thomas’s concurrence attacked the concept of “vote dilution,” arguing Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act only protects physical ballot access, not group voting power.
He called majority-minority districts “political apartheid” leading to “racial balkanization of the Nation.” Federal judges, he argued, lack “judicially manageable standards” for determining fair representation.
Nearly two decades later, Shelby County v. Holder gave Thomas another opening. While the majority struck down the VRA’s coverage formula, Thomas argued Section 5’s preclearance requirement itself was unconstitutional. His reasoning: The “systematic campaign to deny black citizens access to the ballot through intimidation and violence” had ended. Without those extreme circumstances, Congress lacked authority to maintain federal oversight of state elections.
By 2023, Thomas had refined his approach further. His concurrence in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard traced the Fourteenth Amendment’s history to reach a stark conclusion: “All citizens of the United States, regardless of skin color, are equal before the law.”
He sees no constitutional difference between segregation and affirmative action. Both classify by race. Both violate his reading of the Constitution.
The Yale Experience That Shaped Everything
Thomas’s Yale Law School experience fundamentally shapes his jurisprudence. He felt the school’s race-conscious admissions devalued his degree. Employers, he believed, assumed he wasn’t qualified.
This personal history emerges in his legal writing. His Grutter v. Bollinger dissent revealed frustration beyond racial preferences. He criticized legacy admissions and standardized testing too. The “entire process is poisoned by numerous exceptions to ‘merit,'” he wrote.
During Court deliberations, Thomas has drawn on his unique perspective: “I am the only one at this table who attended a segregated school.”
His grandfather’s story reinforces his worldview. The man built a fuel and ice delivery business in the segregated South “without any ‘handouts from the state.'” This model of self-reliance without government assistance became Thomas’s philosophical foundation.
Jackson Directly Challenges Thomas’s History
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson confronted Thomas’s Section 1983 interpretation head-on in Medina. The lack of early civil rights lawsuits doesn’t prove narrow intent, she argued.
“Filing civil rights lawsuits during the Jim Crow era could be quite perilous, especially for the people whom the statute was originally meant to benefit,” Jackson wrote.
She dismantled his historical claims, noting Thomas based his argument on “a handful of late-19th-century cases, mostly about government pensions and employment.” Jackson demanded a “broader—and more inclusive—survey of historical sources.”
This clash between two Black justices over civil rights history adds layers to an already complex debate. Both claim the mantle of historical accuracy. Both invoke the experiences of Black Americans. Yet they reach opposite conclusions about protecting constitutional rights.
Healthcare Access Disappears Overnight
Laurie Sobel from KFF broke down the new reality for Newsweek. The Court now requires the word “right” to appear explicitly in statutes for Section 1983 enforcement.
“The title of the section is not enough and that the intent of Congress is not enough, just the plain reading of the statute is not enough,” Sobel explained. Without that “magic word,” citizens lose their ability to challenge violations.
South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster celebrated: “The legality of my executive order prohibiting taxpayer dollars from being used to fund abortion providers like Planned Parenthood has been affirmed by the highest court in the land.”
Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson saw it differently: “The Supreme Court once again sided with politicians who believe they know better than you, who want to block you from seeing your trusted health care provider.”
Thomas Laid His Foundation Stone by Stone
The June 2025 opinion didn’t emerge from nowhere. Thomas had been constructing his argument methodically across multiple cases.
In 2020, he challenged qualified immunity, writing that Section 1983’s “qualified immunity doctrine appears to stray from the statutory text.” He argued that while Section 1983 “makes no mention of defenses or immunities,” its text provides individuals the right to sue and “applies categorically to the deprivation of constitutional rights under color of state law.”
Come 2023, he penned a 36-page solo dissent when the Court reaffirmed private plaintiffs could enforce spending clause enactments under Section 1983. Page after page, he built his case that modern interpretations had wandered far from original meaning.
By February 2025, just months before Medina, Thomas argued in an Alabama unemployment case: “States have unfettered discretion over whether to provide a forum for §1983 claims in their courts.” He added: “Alabama’s exhaustion rule does not transgress the limitations that our precedents have recognized.”
Each opinion reinforced his central thesis: Section 1983 has expanded far beyond its original purpose. His February dissent particularly emphasized state sovereignty—”As a matter of first principles,” he wrote—setting up his June argument perfectly.
The Bedrock Beliefs Driving His Mission
Thomas’s jurisprudence flows from deeply held convictions about law and liberty. His originalism demands that laws mean what they meant when written. “We turn first, as always, to the text of the statute,” appears throughout his opinions. Words must carry their “ordinary, contemporary, common meaning” from the time of enactment.
His reading of the Fourteenth Amendment proves especially crucial. It contains “no textual reference to race whatsoever.” For Thomas, this absence speaks volumes—the Constitution prohibits all racial classifications, whether Jim Crow or affirmative action. The Amendment’s framers, he argues, deliberately chose race-neutral language to establish “universal principle of equal citizenship for all Americans, regardless of their skin color.”
Religious conviction underlies this entire framework. Raised believing “all of our rights as human beings came from God, not man,” Thomas views constitutional rights through this lens. The Reconstruction Amendments, in his interpretation, fulfilled the Declaration’s promise that “all men are created equal.” This fusion of natural law philosophy with textual interpretation creates what scholars call “liberal originalism”—connecting the Constitution to Jeffersonian principles of individual liberty.
Scholars Split on Thomas’s Methods
Joel Goldstein questions Thomas’s consistency. In race cases, where are the “deep dives into historical dictionaries, ratification debates, or the writings of the Framers” found in his other opinions? Goldstein sees “moral, consequentialist, and policy-oriented arguments” instead of pure originalism.
Other academics place Thomas within Black conservative tradition. They emphasize his focus on “economic self-reliance, skepticism of government dependency, and profound distrust of the paternalism of white liberals.” Some hear echoes of “Malcolm X,” whom scholars identify as one of “Thomas’s personal heroes.”
Both camps recognize the same reality: Thomas’s approach to race differs from his other legal work. Critics call this inconsistency. Supporters see it as bringing lived experience to constitutional interpretation.
Organizations Draw Battle Lines
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund opposed Thomas’s 1991 confirmation. They warned his philosophy was “inimical to the interests of African Americans” and would “jeopardize the constitutional guarantees” they had “fought for half a century to secure.”
The ACLU documents how his opinions consistently narrow remedies for constitutional violations, particularly affecting marginalized communities seeking justice in federal courts.
The Heritage Foundation takes the opposite view, calling him a “great justice for the Constitution” who “courageously applies its original principles” despite political attacks. The Federalist Society champions his textualist methodology, arguing he restores civil rights to their “proper foundation in individual liberty and equal opportunity.”
Americans Face New Legal Reality
If Thomas’s vision for Section 1983 prevails, fundamental changes follow:
- Police misconduct becomes nearly impossible to challenge in federal court
- Discrimination claims face insurmountable procedural barriers
- Federal judges lose authority to issue systemic reforms
- States gain near-total immunity from civil rights lawsuits
The same power dynamics appear when government agencies detain immigrants without due process. The case of Maria Bonilla, an Atlanta mother caught in ICE detention despite following legal procedures, shows how federal authority can overwhelm individual rights—precisely the imbalance Section 1983 was designed to correct. When citizens cannot challenge government overreach in court, stories like Bonilla’s become more common.
The Paradox at the Heart of It All
Section 1983 emerged from the Ku Klux Klan Act, legislation specifically designed to protect newly freed slaves from state-sanctioned violence and terror. Now America’s second Black Supreme Court Justice leads efforts to limit its reach.
Thomas frames this as restoration of original meaning. Critics see abandonment of the law’s protective purpose. The irony runs deeper: a law created to combat racial violence after the Civil War now faces restriction from a justice who attended segregated schools in Georgia.
The Conservative Majority Changes Everything
With six conservative justices, Thomas’s influence peaks. His “persistent calls for a ‘systematic reassessment’ of the Voting Rights Act and a ‘fundamental re-examination’ of § 1983 are no longer lonely cries from the wilderness,” legal scholars observe.
His ideas follow a clear pattern. Solo dissents that once seemed radical gradually gain acceptance among conservative legal circles. Eventually, they become Supreme Court precedent. What seemed impossible in 1994 becomes inevitable in 2025.
“The ‘Great Reexamination’ is no longer a theoretical project or a subject of academic debate. It is an ongoing and transformative reality,” the academic analysis concludes.
Core Contradictions Emerge
Legal scholars identify fundamental tensions in Thomas’s work:
His originalism “appears most forcefully in non-race cases and recedes in favor of moral and consequentialist reasoning in cases about race.”
The “unprecedented fusion of legal analysis with personal biography” makes his jurisprudence “uniquely powerful but also uniquely subject to questions of authenticity.”
His individual liberty framework conflicts with “the vision that has dominated American law for over half a century, based on remedying systemic, group-based inequality.”
These tensions reveal the complexity of Thomas’s project. Is he applying neutral principles or pursuing predetermined outcomes? Does personal experience enhance or compromise judicial reasoning? Can individual rights philosophy address collective injustice?
The Road Ahead Looks Clear
Thomas’s influence extends beyond single cases. His project targets “long-standing doctrines like the libel standard from New York Times v. Sullivan, the vote dilution theory under the Voting Rights Act, and the modern scope of § 1983 civil rights lawsuits.”
Each term brings new opportunities. Each case builds on previous foundations. The conservative majority provides votes. Thomas provides intellectual framework.
“The full consequences of this restorationist project are only now beginning to unfold, promising to reshape the legal landscape of American civil rights for generations to come.”
The Central Question Remains
When government violates your constitutional rights, who protects you? For 150 years, Section 1983 provided that protection. It gave ordinary Americans power to challenge government abuse in federal court.
Thomas argues the statute has grown beyond its intended boundaries. He wants to return it to what he sees as its original, limited purpose. But Jackson and other critics ask whether that original purpose can even be determined—and whether limiting the law serves justice or enables oppression.
The answer will determine whether Americans can still hold their government accountable when it violates the Constitution. Thomas says that depends entirely on what the word “rights” meant in 1871.
For the South Carolina patients who lost their healthcare access this summer, that philosophical debate has already produced real consequences.
