Is Scalia Too Blunt to Be Effective?

Justice Out of Case About Which He Cares

Early next year, the Supreme Court will decide potentially the most significant case on the relationship between church and state since the court banned public school prayer in the 1960s.

Yet a member of the court who cares passionately about the issue will be stuck on the sidelines -- a victim, it appears, of his outspoken disagreement with what he sees as the court's misguided impulse to banish God from the public square.

Justice Antonin Scalia's decision not to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance case -- which he declined to explain publicly when the court announced on Tuesday that it would hear the case -- almost certainly means one vote fewer for the proposition that the states can require public school teachers to lead their students in reciting the words "one nation, under God." It also provoked some court watchers to wonder whether the justice has become so blunt in his criticism of judges who "invent new rights" -- and so frustrated by his inability to persuade a majority of his colleagues to halt the trend -- that he risks losing his ability to advance the conservative cause on the court.

Scalia took himself out of the Pledge case after Pledge opponent Michael A. Newdow noted that the justice had publicly criticized the idea that courts had the power to remove the words "under God" from the Pledge. Scalia told an audience in Fredericksburg on Jan. 12 that an appeals court's decision in the case was an example of a "new philosophy" among judges "that says, ' doesn't mean what Thomas Jefferson thought it meant, what the Framers thought it meant. It means what we think it ought to mean.' "

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38135-2003Oct16.html

It's obviously unconstitutional for the state to require people to recite a pledge placing our nation "under God".

While *I* believe our nation is "under God". I do not want my government telling others to say things they don't believe against their religion.

There should be no state enforced religion. That said, folks should put up all the churches and monuments to Christ that they want, outside of the government.

to add it to the Pledge. Don't know who started it, maybe they did.

to judicial activism. He is so, hmm... disingenuous.

Scalia is the gas in the intestine of the body politic; movement in any direction but duty or kneeling makes him be heard.

The man has an agenda as big as Shamu and he doesn't have any problems discussing it in public, nor in the dicta of his opinions. The integrity of the Supreme Court was jeopardized the day they put in a zealot like him. On the other hand, I'd rather him leaving the clear paper trail so that others will see the folly of picking someone who is incapable of being objective.

to effective

dig through all of his public speeches for cases in the future. He may recuse himself more often. What will Thomas and Rehnquist do?