at work.

Isn't Scalia doing a sharp about-face from his own previous stance on the role of the USSC versus the majoritarian role of Congress?

How many times since 1964 have Republicans campaigned for statewide and national office on pledges to appoint :strict constructionists: rather than judges who "legislate from the bench"?

We need to appreciate the enormity of what Scalia is spouting.

Scalia is advocating overturning majority rule, just what Republicans have accused Democrats of since the 1960s Warren Court.

But recently a historian demonstrated that anri-majoritarian accusations against the Warren Court are false:

Here's a snippet from a favorite MSNBC law professor guest's review of "The Warren Court and American Pollitics". by Lucas A. Powe, Jr. (Harvard University Press).

From http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/the-end-deference :

"THE END OF DEFERENCE, by Jeffrey Rosen

... how did the Warren Court come to be defined as a group of judicial legislators who repeatedly thwarted the political branches? ... In 1964, Barry Goldwater tried to make an election issue of the civil rights, criminal procedure, and school prayer decisions, but he was dramatically rebuffed. Indeed, the Court viewed Johnson's landslide election as a vindication of its bold leadership in Brown. "Never before in American history," Powe writes, "has a Court been told it was so right." ...

Powe argues that at the beginning of the 1960s the Warren Court decided cases on the basis of values that most Americans (with the exception of recalcitrant outliers) shared, such as overcoming segregation, Victorianism, malapportionment, and the use of the third degree. ...

Of course, all three branches of national government will not always agree: the harmony of the Warren era appears to have been the exception rather than the rule. But although the Court should never allow the president and Congress to violate clearly defined constitutional rights, it should give Congress substantial leeway to define and to enforce its own conception of constitutional rights, even when this vision is more expansive than that of the Court. This deference to the competing constitutional views of Congress was clearly anticipated by the framers of the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution, who saw Congress, and not the Court, as the primary enforcer of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the laws. But deference to Congress is a virtue that the imperious Rehnquist Court has refused to display. ...

A deferential Court would generally uphold the acts of the political branches, even when it disagreed with them, unless the president and Congress had violated constitutional rights and limitations that were too clear to ignore. It is not surprising, perhaps, that the Court has managed to avoid a political backlash against its high-handedness by keeping its finger to the political winds. But have the political branches become so cowed by the Court's grandiose assertions of its own supremacy that they have lost the will to stand up for themselves?"

I think he wants to beat the record for longest serve Justice.

8/

The guy really believes he's doing the work of God.

Meanwhile, I wonder if he's wearing barbed wire underwear.

Oppie guy. It figures.

I can only assume that nature takes care of his longevity?

I'll order him 200 Heart Attack Grill burgers laden with so much cholestrol to be delivered today

from your lips to gods ears.

Olive oil, fresh vegetables, red wine, etc.
I've known many Italians to live to advanced ages.

There must be another way to get Scalia out of there.

What a little toad.

Scalia sounds like a Fox News posterboy

was nothing but a partisan hack with a poison pen. As a jurist he is incompetent.

far more dangerous and damaging to America, its people and our liberty, freedom, and Constitution, than an incompetent partisan hack.

...the American people in commentary about his past rulings, effectively stating that he was helpless in every way to change the laws he was asked to interpret or to interpret them outside of the very narrowest legal boundaries. In fact, this sort of narrow interpretation gig is his whole schtick at least over the last 13 years so to have him make those kinds of statements is exceptionally revealing.

PB

"You have to understand. Scalia has a results driven jurisprudence."

... in a cozy little apartment in The Vatican.

Seriously.

This kind of garbage HELPS us. This is exactly what we want to see. This is the kind of evil that breeds in darkness and whispers. So preach on Brother Scalia, preach on. Tell everyone what you really think, and we will make note of who is standing with you.

But worried? There is nothing to worry about. NO ONE is going to take away your right to vote. That's not going to happen.

Scalia is a national and judicial disgrace.

So is Clarence Thomas, but he's quiiet about it.
Scalia is loud and noisy.

And Boehner will have to be forced to introduce one via a discharge petition.

If someone introduced an impeachment resolution against Scalia someone else would introduce one against Kagan and very quickly there would be impeachment resolutions against all 9 Justices. No one except anarchists want to see that fiasco.

Others dream things that never were and ask why not?'...that outlook has become a far too common and destructive approach to interpreting the law."

Antonin Scalia, in a speech at Catholic University, Columbus School of Law.
(Wikiquote)

"a slimy attempt to return to the past"?

Are you calling me "slimy' for posting the quote?

It's the Serpent speaking in Back to Methuselah.


THE SERPENT. If I can do that, what can I not do? I tell you I am very
subtle. When you and Adam talk, I hear you say 'Why?' Always 'Why?' You
see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I
say 'Why not?' I made the word dead to describe my old skin that I cast
when I am renewed. I call that renewal being born.

"Some look at things that are, and ask why, I dream of things that never were and ask why not?".....George Bernard Shaw

"There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why....I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?".....Robert F. Kennedy

"Robert F. Kennedy used to say 'Some men see things as they are and ask why,
others dream things that never were and ask why not?'.That outlook has become a far too common and destructive approach to interpreting the law" ......Antonin Scalia

People are entitled to not have people try to keep them from voting because of their race!!

Voting is a right and responsibility of citizenship.

Everywhere I typed "people", I mean, to be more specific, "citizens." But this current Supreme Court case is about the rights of citizens, not letting non-citizens vote.

we can only hope.

never intended for all Americans to vote. He will say that there is no Constitutional guarantee that any specific citizens have a right to vote. But the amendments that guarantee African Americans and women the right to vote clearly identify voting as a right. I'm not so sure about all white men though.
When we switched from Jeffersonian democracy to Jacksonian democracy was there a constitutional convention and an amendment? How was that decided and then coded into law.

to justify torture?! And how ironic of him: in the 19th and early 20th, Italians weren't regarded as white. It wasn't until later Italians and Irish were granted white privilage.
I hate that man.

Fat Tony responds to your concerns:


PS--along with Scalia, Alito & Thomas are also rumored to be Opus Dei

whole pope changing thing going on

Because it would prevent him from speaking out. Guess Scalia didn't read the rule book.

But just in case, the right has been trying to dismantle Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action, etc., for decades. "Reverse discrimination," ya know. And now they've got a shot at the Voting Rights Act. Tony Boy is just doin' what he can to help the cause.

terms of the voting rights act?

no idea what he could possibly mean.

more "special treatment," lumping it in with those other things that grew out of the civil rights movement. At issue is mainly section 5 which requires states in the South with a history of minority voter suppression to get advance approval from the Feds before making changes to their voting laws. Alabama is calling that an "undue burden" that is no longer necessary because...black President.

Last edited Fri Mar 1, 2013, 05:03 AM - Edit history (1)

I'll take a wild, wild guess that Alabama and some other states with the section 5 restriction would love to jump on the voter suppression bandwagon that has been sweeping other states with Republican officials, i.e. voter ID, cutting back on early voting, etc., but that doggone section 5 is standing in the way.

Just wondering if this is in line with the history of the court: denigrating Congress and reasons for the law, etc. He can't be impeached but can we bring to bear on public opinion his lowering of the reputation of the court?