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.