"I must see Marini!!!" My boss, Clarence Thomas, then chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, wrote that command in bold script across the first page of an essay by John Marini on how the deterioration of Congress led to the administrative state. The future Supreme Court justice was reading his work because he had asked me to recruit some additional staff, and I presented him with a sheaf of Marini's publications.
When Thomas discussed Marini and me in his memoir, My Grandfather's Son, he maintained that having hired us political theorists as speechwriters who functioned more as fellow seminar participants was a critical part of his constitutional education. Decades later, Justice Thomas would issue critical opinions on the administrative state.
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