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The secret formula that helped Clarence Thomas win over the Supreme Court

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An important new book by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, “Going Further,” calls attention anew to the life and career of the single greatest living American, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

For many years after Thomas arrived on the court in the early 1990s, his conservative, originalist views were relegated to dissenting opinions.

Three and a half decades later, Thomas, now the second-longest-serving justice in the court’s history, regularly finds himself in the majority.

Thomas, in short, has won the long game. But how?

Thirty-five years ago, mainstream legal training and judicial practice suggested the proper way to interpret a legal document is to probe for nebulous concepts such as legislative history and legislative intent.

It’s now hard to believe, but the commonsense notion that one should begin the interpretive exercise with a document’s text and plain meaning was pretty much unheard of.

Thomas, along with his then-colleagues Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William Rehnquist, galvanized an intellectual revolution in American legal and judicial practice.

Today, law schools instruct students to begin the interpretive exercise with the text.

In fact, this is hardly controversial: As the liberal Justice Elena Kagan put it in a 2015 Harvard Law School lecture, “We’re all textualists now.”

A big part of the reason for this success is simple: sheer........

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