With the Left’s continuing primal screams and desperation tactics, Steven Hayward, reckons that something more fundamental is going on: “the growing vindication of the constitutional originalism of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.”

Liberals have always dismissed Thomas as simply Scalia’s wingman, though no one who actually read with any care their separate opinions, concurrences, and dissents would think so. But the great thing about being a liberal is that you can just go with a cliché and skip the careful thinking part.

But now that the whole scene is in flux with the arrival of Justice Gorsuch—who, like Justice Thomas, believes that the natural law tradition in legal history stretching back to Roman times still has today what social scientists call “normative” value—the left is taking stock of things, and realizing that they are in a heap of trouble.

But now comes the fun part, Hayward notes:

Thomas waged a quiet war of ideas against twentieth century liberalism — and he won the hearts of a legion of conservative law students. Many of those former students are now old enough to be judges.

As of this writing, fully 20 percent of the judges Donald Trump appointed to the federal appellate bench are former Thomas clerks.