Root opens up against Toobin’s shoddy New Yorker piece, which I previously blogged about here.

 It’s nice to see that Toobin now recognizes Thomas’ importance as an intellectual force on the Court. That wasn’t always the case. In his 2007 bookThe Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, Toobin unflatteringly described Thomas as “a justice neither influenced by nor with influence upon his colleagues.” Now Toobin worries that “the implications of Thomas’s leadership for the Court, and for the country, are profound.” So that’s progress.

Oh, and Toobin fails to see the nexus between gun control and civil rights, saying they are “scarecely related.” Not quite, Root writes:

Anybody who really followed McDonaldand the battle over Second Amendment incorporation against the states would have learned at least that much legal history. If Toobin really thinks that gun rights are “scarcely related” to civil rights, that’s only because he wasn’t paying attention.