Politics & Power Quote by Clarence Thomas

Legitimacy is doing a lot of work here, and Clarence Thomas knows it. In a single, careful sentence, he draws a boundary line between two versions of the state: the sprawling, policy-making bureaucracy conservatives love to distrust, and the narrow, rights-enforcing apparatus that can be framed as neutral and necessary. Calling the EEOC "much more" legitimate isn’t a blanket endorsement of regulation; it’s an attempt to reclaim a certain kind of government action as compatible with a limited-government worldview.

The subtext is tactical: enforcement can be sold as restraint. The EEOC, at least in theory, doesn’t invent new social arrangements so much as police access to existing ones, especially the labor market. That lets Thomas signal seriousness about civil rights without signing on to the broader administrative state that conservatives often treat as constitutionally suspect. The qualifier "if properly run" is the escape hatch. It implies the agency’s credibility is contingent, not inherent: legitimate when it follows the law as written, illegitimate when it drifts into what critics would call mission creep.

Context matters because Thomas’s jurisprudential reputation is built on skepticism toward expansive federal power and a preference for clear constitutional authorization. This line reads like a bridge between that skepticism and the moral and political reality that discrimination isn’t abstract. It happens at work, in hiring, in firing, in pay. By elevating the EEOC’s legitimacy, Thomas is pointing to a conservative-friendly rationale for civil-rights enforcement: not social engineering, but rule-of-law maintenance.