We overuse the term “unhinged” in our political discourse, often attributing it to any passionate expression with which we disagree. However, one can hardly find a better descriptor of Michael Tomasky’s screed this week against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas . His New Republic article amounted to a string of enraged condemnations and insults against the long-serving justice .

Tomasky has a plan for the attacks, about which he is quite open. He understands that recent, overwrought accusations against Thomas’s private life will go nowhere. So, he now calls on others to try and ruin the justice’s reputation as a jurist — though the reader will search high and low in the column for any substantive engagement with Thomas’s jurisprudence. Tomasky considers his void volley “a preemptive strike against [Thomas’s] lionization” by conservatives when the justice leaves the nation’s highest bench.

Tomasky’s effort will fail. It should fail, not just because Tomasky levies invectives without support, but because he is dead wrong about Thomas.

As a jurist, Thomas is a bold, thoughtful, and articulate defender of the Constitution. He deserves lionization, not just in the future but right now. To begin, we should laud Thomas’s approach to constitutional interpretation. He is both a textualist and an originalist in the best sense of both terms. He understands better than most that the role of judges is to interpret and apply the law to decide cases before them.

The law comprises words. Thus, it should be obvious that a judge begins with the law’s text, parsing it for meaning applicable to the litigation at hand. When the words themselves don’t answer every question, a judge should turn to the context in which the words were composed, seeking thereby to understand them as the original lawmakers would have understood them. Thomas is meticulous in his focus on the words (textualism) and their context (originalism), modeling an approach essential to judicial power as opposed to the judicial supremacy other judges seek.

Beyond his general approach, Thomas has provided needed correctives to the interpretation of particular constitutional clauses. The first concerns the commerce clause, which limits the national government only to regulate economic interactions with other countries, between states, or with American Indians. During the 20th century, it became among the most ignored and abused clauses in the Constitution, a tool for the massive expansion of national power. When other justices sought merely to limit additional infringement, Thomas argued for a full return to its careful distinction between state and national boundaries.

Second, Thomas has dedicated much of his work to laying down the true meaning of the establishment clause. It was not to create a complete separation of religion from public life, as many have argued. The framers intended it to keep the national government from creating a national church, though that is starkly different from denying any place for religious language or arguments in the public square. The clause was also intended to protect state expressions of religion from national meddling. Thus, the establishment clause, under Thomas’s reading, still leaves plenty of room for America’s religious soul to find public expression as seen throughout our past.

Third, on matters of race, Thomas has been the leading voice for a “color-blind” reading of the Constitution. He has fought for understanding the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause as forcing state governments to view all persons as humans, not according to the color of their skin. He thereby has ably defended the principles of the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal,” and articulated how the Constitution embodies and realizes that noble truth.

This is not to say that I concur with every vote and opinion of his. I could give substantive critiques of his understanding of the American Union, on the dormant commerce clause, and the extent to which he sees students as having constitutional rights. No justice is perfect. But those cases are the exceptions to the rule.

Contrary to what Tomasky demands in his unhinged assault, we should be grateful for Thomas’s ascent to the Supreme Court. His efforts there have reaped much good fruit. We should hope he continues in that good work for years to come. And we should praise that work, seeking its emulation in future judges for generations to come.

Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.