WASHINGTON — The leak of a draft opinion has done irreparable damage to the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas said at a conference in Dallas on Friday night, adding that it had destroyed trust among its members.

“What happened at the court is tremendously bad,” Justice Thomas said.

Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion, was “like kind of an infidelity,” Justice Thomas said.

“This is not the court of that era,” Justice Thomas said, adding: “We actually trusted each other.

Justice Thomas took part in an after-dinner conversation with one of his former law clerks, John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and answered questions from the audience.

Justice Thomas said the left had adopted tactics that conservatives would not employ.

“You would never visit Supreme Court justices’ houses when things didn’t go our way,” he said.

Garland, President Barack Obama’s third Supreme Court nominee, “did not get a hearing, but he was not trashed.”.

“You will not see the utter destruction of a single nominee,” Justice Thomas said.

Taking sides on a contested point, Justice Thomas said the Senate Republicans who blockaded Mr.

Justice Thomas, the longest-serving member of the current court, has been a fierce opponent of Roe.

On Friday, he said opposition to his nomination in 1991 was “by those people who were trying to keep me off the court over abortion.”.

At his confirmation hearings, however, he said, to the astonishment of many, that he had never discussed Roe, even though it was issued while he was a student at Yale Law School.

Wade is a landmark Supreme court decision that legalized abortion across the United States.

In the intervening decades, Justice Thomas frequently voiced opposition to constitutional protection for abortion.

Only Justice Thomas noted a dissent, giving no reasons

The Supreme Court refused to hear the case, without noted dissent

Justice Thomas, who went a decade without asking a question from the Supreme Court bench, has lately shed his reticence and is an active participant in oral arguments