Intro: "Leave it to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to argue that the Constitution does not, in fact, bar sex discrimination."
File photo, US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, 09/08/10. (photo: AP)
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She would first need to ask his permission.
I chuckled at your dismissal of original intent followed by your comment on the Citizens United case: "there is considerable evidence that the founders were worried about corporate influence." If the Constitution is a "living document," why bother with anything the founders thought?
Scalia concurred in Bush on the ground that the Florida decision violated the constitutional delegation of electoral matters to the Florida legislature.
Because the argument made on the part of conservatives has to do with "original intent". That makes what the founders thought relevent. It's absurd and stretches reason to the point of snapping to think that the forward thinking that we attribute to our founders would have a gaping hole when it came to the simple realization that the world would look different 1 to 200+ years later. In his book, "The Rights of Man" Thomas Paine said this:
"The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated."
violated Constitutional delegation of electoral matters to Florida Legislation???
Sammy Davis Jr., in Porgy and Bess..
It Ain't necessarily so, the things that you are liable to read in that 'BIBLE" Sacred Constitution?? well it Ain't necessarily SO!
To paraphrase Hunter S Thompson... Scalia 'looks like a potato with mange'.
Scalia is like that with the Constitution. The Constitution is for the High Priests of the Court to interpret what the original intent of the founders was. And of course, he must be closer to God than the women on the court since Jesus was a man.
It's the same arguments used for keeping women out of the priesthood and in their place as mere producers of new Catholics and as 'occasions of sin.'
Very few people ever willingly give up power. Scalia is never going to admit that anyone but a select few can divine the meaning of God's word or the Constitution.
Scalia wants what he wants and the rest of us be damned. He is not in the SCOTUS to do what is right for the nation. He is there to have his way and to protect his wealthy supporters and personal friends.
To date I have seen no instances of ethical, moral or personal integrity stances by any conservative justices. It runs counter to Scalia's catholicism to be on the side of the masses. The masses may be provided with lip service but scant else.
Scalia went back to his argument that the Constitution had to be interpreted according to the reality of the time it was written and no further. To do otherwise would in effect be a re-writing of the document.
Breyer answered with: if I followed your logic I would have to limit the Second Amendment to muskets.
But what bothers me most about Scalia and the other right-wingers on the court is their inconsistency. They make very clear their judicial reasoning and then stray very far from it when it suits them in an actual case.
Lee Nason
New Bedford, Massachusetts
Do you really want to go back to arguments over slavery and not recognizing Indians as having any rights at all? There is a reason they left powers to a third branch as the last arbitor of the document itself. They were wise enough to know times and mores change and the Constitution had to set a framework for the ideals they valued. It is those ideals that have to be honored above all else and Scalia tends to ignore those when it goes against his personal likes and dislikes.
Seems to me your wife might supremely disappointed with you if she read this inanity and quite suspicious that you are bestowing sexual favors on others - although no doubt very discriminately. Just how many women are you bestowing these "favors" on! Sounds like either a chauvinist pig or a miserly chauvinist CEO talking here. Please share your comment with your wife and let everyone here know what she says! Thanks!
It is Scalia who is correct. Truths, principles are always correct, human nature being unchanged for tens of thousands of years.
I have to add that I am mostly speaking about politicians here, but local Republican voters are just as asleep, and therefore just as dangerous to our well-being.
Judges and judgment have always been a part of social beings. Social beings have disagreements and they have to be settled. They submit themselves to judges who are supposed to be wise and objective. Otherwise, no settlement is possible on no one would agree to submit to the decision.
The problem with our court system now is that it has become a crap shoot. When we have people like Scalia and Thomas on the panel, it is worse than a crap shoot. The odds are against a fair and objective hearing. People then turn to self help and avoid the system whenever possible.
in a dangerous place. We have not so quietly slipped into a savage, and damnable position of being not protected by our constituion but destroyed by it through the narrow and mean interpretation of a very very sick group of megalomaniacs. This is disturbing to say the very least.
This argument is as old as the day is long.
We the People and our betyter natures, our generous impulses, and our desire for equality for all have been progressively shut out from the government since at least post-WWII, when we brought back all those nasty Fascist ideas disguised as 'Americanism'!for those of us who lived through the assasinations, the viet Nam war protests, the 60's dreams aof a better society, the eroding of the country has been going on for 45 years!!!!
Get with it folks !!
dbesser@frii.com
This has been again proven by these 5 Judges ruling that Corporations could give money to any Political party they wanted to, thus making a Corporations in effect, a person, instead of a bueiness
entity.....What a joke.....
This makes for some mighty strange outcomes and very little consistency.
The Constitution is strict and clear, but judicial restraint is a flexible doctrine. You just have to read that document under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. That ensures that you won't be distorting it to conform to your merely personal opinion.
And as for the command to exercise "judicial restraint" itself, as restriction to "originalism" -- that's no merely personal opinion either: the Holy Spirit provides there, as well.
His cavalier dismissal of his partisan behavior in Gore v. Bush (essentially to just stop talking about it) shows his lack of real concern for constitutional issues and even less concern for his destructive attitude towards any real democracy in this benighted country.
He spoke as an institutionally sponsored invitee to a very select audience -- law school students who will themselves become lawyers and judges in the future -
Talking about sowing landmines for civil rights in the future!!
I'D BE WILLING TO SIGN A PETITION TO HAVE HIM RECALLED FROM THE US SUPREME COURT --
Remember how Justice Abe Fortas was forced to resign over his unsuitability in 1969??
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10346.html
LET'S REMOVE THIS BIGOT AS WELL!!
Of course Justice Antonin Scalia is not like most judges, who would recuse themselves from deciding a Vice President's case coming up shortly after they went duck hunting together. Which, of course, left Scalia open to the question: "Why do you think Cheney invited him to go duck hunting in the first place.
All the more reason not to elect Republican presidents in the first place.
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