Rewire News Group has granted the author anonymity because he signed a confidentiality agreement, and also because his law school classmates still think he still works there.

My name is Brad. I’m not going to give my last name. I clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, and I want to begin by saying it was the honor of my life. I need to say that. The Federalist Society is reading this.

I did not leave because of the quarter-million dollar RV loan that he never paid back. I did not leave because of Justice Thomas’ association with billionaire Harlan Crow—a man who seems to collect Nazi memorabilia the way other people collect stamps, which is to say with enthusiasm and apparent purpose. 

I left because of a citation. One citation I pulled on a Tuesday afternoon that I was not asked to pull, and which has been haunting me ever since.

But first some background.

I applied to clerk for Justice Thomas because I believed originalism was a theory with rules. You start with the Constitution’s text. If the text is unclear, you ask what the words meant to the people who ratified the text—dictionaries, newspapers, floor debates, the Congressional Globe (the official transcript of congressional debates in the 1860s), that sort of thing. If that’s inconclusive, you consult history and tradition. 

I confess I was relieved when I remembered New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, the big “history and tradition” gun rights case from 2022. Finally, I thought, a clear test. We simply ask what our nation’s history and tradition tell us. That’s how I, just eight months post-graduation, ended up reading 18th century public-carry rules like they contained the meaning of life, just to see if a modern gun law can exist. That’s also how we killed the constitutional rights to abortion in Dobbs. (Great job, that.)

Rules are rules. No matter the outcome—and no matter how much it pissed off the liberal ladies down the hall—the method always decides the case. Not the judge. I really believed that.  

Then I was assigned to edit the draft dissent in Trump v. Barbara.

And that’s when panic started to set in.

The draft dissent argued that the Citizenship Clause doesn’t cover children born here to parents who aren’t permanently “domiciled” in the United States. Fine. I tried to make originalism work for that statement. I pulled the Congressional Globe and found the drafting history of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the first law to establish citizenship and equal rights under the law. 

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 said people born here are citizens—as long as they weren’t subject to a foreign power, and as long as they weren’t “Indians not taxed,” which was its own whole thing. Then the 14th Amendment made the........

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