Jeffrey Toobin,New Yorker - Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor....
His revulsion toward homosexuality, a touchstone of his world view, appeared straight out of his sheltered, nineteen-forties boyhood. When, in 2003, the Court ruled that gay people could no longer be thrown in prison for having consensual sex, Scalia dissented, and wrote, “Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.” He went on, “Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a life style that they believe to be immoral and destructive.”
But it was in his jurisprudence that Scalia most self-consciously looked to the past. He pioneered “originalism,” a theory holding that the Constitution should be interpreted in line with the beliefs of the white men, many of them slave owners, who ratified it in the late eighteenth century... Even Scalia’s ideological allies recognized the folly of trying to divine the “intent” of the authors of the Constitution concerning questions that those bewigged worthies could never have anticipated. During the oral argument of a challenge to a California law that required, among other things, warning labels on violent video games, Justice Samuel Alito interrupted Scalia’s harangue of a lawyer by quipping, “I think what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games. Did he enjoy them?”....
Not long ago, Scalia told an interviewer that he had cancelled his subscription to the Washington Post and received his news from the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times (owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church), and conservative talk radio. In this, as in his jurisprudence, he showed that he lived within the sealed bubble of contemporary conservative thought....
Like Nick Carraway, Scalia “wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever.” The world didn’t coöperate. Scalia won a great deal more than he lost, and he and his allies succeeded in transforming American politics into a cash bazaar, with seats all but put up for bidding.
3 comments:
I am glad the man is gone, and I honestly don't care if it was natural, accidental, or murder....it's all for the better!
When I read this article, considering who is writing it, a lot of problems surface with media and the legal profession. I don't disagree with Toobin's assessment. Scalia was a product of a much earlier era in American history, and while his positions of a number of issues are not in sync with contemporary, to word your opening paragraph is beneath any real journalist, and even a lawyer. Now I better understand why you keep showing up on talk shows and anywhere else your attacks are allowed. You are not a journalist; I also question your ethics as a lawyer based on the article. You have accomplished what all the hate mongers strive and are accomplishing as evidenced by the comment below. Your article is typical of the denial of others right to an opinion if it is not consistent with your views. I would expect more of a person trained in the legal profession, but instead you add to the hate rhetoric and motivate others to follow suit. There is a way to critique the performance of anyone, and the critique of public officials is certainly needed. But a critique is not a lecture or tirade on your personal dislikes of another person. If you disagree with Scalia, then educate the rest of us on why his position was wrong...only those that can be proven to be wrong, not out of step with others opinions. I've wasted enough time on this; I shouldn't have wasted the time after the first paragraph, but you're a smart man or you would never have completed law school and passed the bar. So I have to ask the question; why do you join the rest of the talking heads and ink jerks in such vitriol and hate? You can do better than that if you want to. I guess that poses the second question......
The essential quality for a good judge is wisdom. Scalia had none.
Moussolini could only dream of the degree of corporate control
we have of this country. Scalia was irresponsible and reckless.
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