The Supreme Court begins a new term, and resumes its trashing of American legal traditions, the first Monday in October. That should remind us of the stakes in the upcoming election, but it’s also a time to recall how we got to our Clarence Thomas problem. He has been a Supreme Court justice for nearly 33 years, longer than the two dozen years of service from the man he was nominated to replace, Thurgood Marshall. The late justice Marshall was a pillar of judicial integrity, a champion for civil rights, and an accomplished jurist. Thomas does not measure up on those criteria—and over time has become what many of us feared at the time of his nomination, a bitter advocate for ill-informed retrograde policies and an embarrassment to the court.

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Thurgood Marshall’s rise to the Supreme Court is an American success story. As an attorney, he argued 32 civil rights cases before the Court, winning 29 of them. He was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals and authored 98 majority opinions, none overturned by the Supreme Court. He served briefly as U. S. Solicitor General before being nominated to the nation’s top court. Despite flak from some Southern Senators, he was confirmed by a Senate vote of 69 to 11, with 20 not voting.

As he retired, Marshall warned then President George Herbert Walker Bush about using skin color as an excuse to “pick the wrong Negro…There’s no difference between a white snake and a black snake; they’ll both bite.” Shortly thereafter, Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, and our nation has suffered from that poor choice.

Thomas did not get corporate law offers when he graduated Yale Law School, and his resentment for that is palpable. So, he took a political route, becoming a staff lawyer to Missouri’s Attorney General John Danforth, following him to Washington when Danforth became a U.S. Senator. Veteran filmmaker Michael Kirk, who produced a documentary for PBS’s Frontline about Thomas explained what happened next to the NPR program Fresh Air:

“And one person tells us that he tries to join the conservative Reagan revolution because the line is shorter for Black people on that side, on the Republican side. Over on the Democratic side, lots of Black people in line to get good jobs, but in the conservative Republican world, Clarence Thomas - if he joins that line, it's a very short line. And he does do that. And he is rewarded by the Reagan administration for his willingness to step up and defend Reagan. Whenever Reagan would be called racist or whenever a policy might be called racist, it is Clarence Thomas who they put forward performing the task of defender of Reagan's racial equality instincts.”

Thomas moved into an eight-year stint leading the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Kirk reports that while there he was something of an abusive bully, especially toward other black people. “The way they [EEOC staffers] tell the story,” said Kirk, “he's trying to appeal to the white Reagan staffers and conservatives by being the Black guy who's the first to tell a kind of racially tinted joke or use an unkind phrase, proving to them that he can be trusted.”

People remember the dramatic Anita Hill testimony about Thomas’ crude sexually abusive behavior. Two things that aren’t remembered as well are a damning similar account from uncalled witness Angela Wright (her account corroborated by another coworker), and the low opinion of Thomas from the American Bar Association.

The ABA ranks court nominees as: Well Qualified, Qualified, or Not Qualified. A review of the current Supreme Court members is quite instructive. The ABA’s Standing Committee on the Judiciary unanimously rated as Well Qualified the nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson, John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Elena Kagan. Samuel Alito scored Well Qualified with one recusal. Amy Coney Barrett received a majority voted for Well Qualified with a minority scoring Qualified. Clarence Thomas trails all of them with a majority giving a lackluster Qualified, and a minority of the panel scoring him Not Qualified, with one recusal.

The Senate failed its duty, approving Thomas 52 to 48.

Thomas spent much of his early time on the Court as a silent presence on the bench, routinely concurring in the opinions of Antonin Scalia. Thomas returned the favor from the elder President Bush by helping his son rise to the presidency courtesy of the infamous Bush v. Gore ruling. One comedian joked that the younger Bush won the election by getting 100% of the black vote (showing an image of Clarence Thomas).

The blatant politics and dubious reasoning of Bush v. Gore started the downward slide in public esteem for the Supreme Court. That slide grew to a plummet when Thomas was in the majority taking away a federally recognized constitutional right to an abortion.

Thomas wants to go even further. He has written about also revisiting marriage equality, protected access to contraception, and even the actual malice standard protecting journalists from libel suits designed to chill vibrant public debate.

Further damaging the reputation of the Court have been Thomas’ routine acceptance luxurious trips and other perks from wealthy benefactors. Other justices have had some lapses in this regard (and Alito’s bizarre flag flaps merit recusal), but Thomas excels at flaunting ethics rules. Pro Publica has exposed the Thomas excesses, and reports they likely tally into the millions of dollars.

Thus, we remain stuck with the kind of snake-like wrong choice that Thurgood Marshall feared.

Mark Harmon is a professor of journalism and media at the University of Tennessee.