In Conversation: Antonin Scalia

On the eve of a new Supreme Court session, the firebrand justice discusses gay rights and media echo chambers, Seinfeld and the Devil, and how much he cares about his intellectual legacy (“I don’t”).

By Jennifer Senior
Published Oct 6, 2013

On September 26—a day that just happened to be the 27th anniversary of his swearing-in as associate justice—Antonin Scalia entered the Supreme Court’s enormous East Conference Room so casually that one might easily have missed him. He is smaller than his king-size persona suggests, and his manner more puckish than formal. Washingtonians may know Scalia as charming and disarming, but most outsiders tend to regard him as either a demigod on stilts or a menace to democracy, depending on which side of the aisle they sit. A singularity on the Court and an icon on the right, Scalia is perhaps more responsible than any American alive for the mainstreaming of conservative ideas about ­jurisprudence—in particular the principles of originalism ­(interpreting the Constitution as the framers intended it rather than as an evolving document) and textualism (that statutes must be ­interpreted based on their words alone). And he has got to be the only justice to ever use the phrase “argle-bargle” in a dissent.

You came to Washington as a lawyer during the Nixon administration, just before Watergate. What on Earth was that like?
It was a sad time. It was very depressing. Every day, the Washington Post would come out with something new—it trickled out bit by bit. Originally, you thought, It couldn’t be, but it obviously was. As a young man, you’re dazzled by the power of the White House and all that. But power tends to corrupt.

Then you served in the Ford administration. That must have been an awfully lonely time to be a young conservative.
It was a terrible time, not for the Republican Party, but for the presidency. It was such a wounded and enfeebled presidency, and Congress was just eating us alive. I mean, we had a president who had never been elected to anything except … what? A district in Michigan? Everything was in chaos.

It was a time when people were talking about “the imperial presidency.” I knew very well that the 900-pound gorilla in Washington is not the presidency. It’s Congress. If Congress can get its act together, it can roll over the president. That’s what the framers thought. They said you have to enlist your jealousy against the legislature in a ­democracy—that will be the source of tyranny.

http://nymag.com/news/features/antonin-scalia-2013-10/

We went to a Haunted House last night. Wandering through Scalia's mind is worse.