[Vision2020] Tony Scalia's Retirement Has Started Early

[Rosemary Huskey]

The brilliant, funny, and insightful commentary below(even though it is
almost a year old) nails  "Tony."  Although many attorney friends (and I
confess even family members in the profession) always point to his legal
brilliance I don't find his brains any more attractive than those of an
intellectually gifted sociopath.  Brains aren't the whole story - especially
for a judge. He may have been the smartest kid in the class but I am betting
he was also the most despised.   Scalia is a bigoted old git, who is narrow
minded, culturally bound, and  really, really needs to get off the stage.  

Rose Huskey

Tony Scalia's Retirement Has Started Early

By Charles P. Pierce
<http://www.esquire.com/archives/blogs/politics/by_author/68/15;1>   March
28, 2012

Here's the deal. I think Justice Antonin Scalia isn't even really trying any
more. It's been clear for some time now that he's short-timing his job on
the Supreme Court. The job bores him. All these inferior intellects coming
before him. All those inferior intellects on the bench with him, now with
some other Catholics who aren't even as Catholic as he is, Scalia being the
last living delegate who attended the Council of Trent. Inferior Catholics
with inferior minds. What can a fellow do? He hung in there as long as he
could, but he's now bringing Not Giving A Fuck to an almost operatic level.

His "originalism" was always a shuck, even if it was consistent, which it
rarely was, and even if it was principled, which it never was. Bush v. Gore
was proof enough of that. More often, it was just an excuse
<http://www.ginandtacos.com/2012/03/28/reading-between-the-lines/>  for
Scalia to be an arrogant bully to the people appearing before him, and to
the clients out in the world that those people were representing, most of
whom were unworthy of the time that Scalia and his mighty mind had to devote
to their petty little grievances. But at least, for a while, he actually
tried to act like a judge in a democratic republic, and not the lost Medici
pope. Reports pop up periodically that he's bored, that he's unsatisfied,
that he knows he'll never be Chief, so he'd rather just chuck it all and go
teach, and write, and flip off the occasional tabloid reporter. Now, though,
it appears that the man has pretty much checked out without going through
the formality of resigning from the bench.

It is plain now that Scalia simply doesn't like the Affordable Care Act on
its face. It has nothing to do with "originalism," or the Commerce Clause,
or anything else. He doesn't think that the people who would benefit from
the law deserve to have a law that benefits them. On Tuesday, he pursued the
absurd <http://prospect.org/article/individual-mandate-not-slippery-slope-0>
"broccoli" analogy to the point where he sounded like a micro-rated
evening-drive talk-show host from a dust-clotted station in southern
Oklahoma. And today, apparently, he ran through every twist and turn in the
act's baroque political history
<http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entries/scalias-distaste-for-reform-l
aw-palpable-in-wednesday?ref=fpb>  in an attempt to discredit the law
politically, rather than as a challenge to its constitutionality. (What in
hell does the "Cornhusker Kickback" - yet another term of art that the
Justice borrowed from the AM radio dial - have to do with the severability
argument? Is Scalia seriously making the case that a banal political
compromise within the negotiations from which bill eventually is produced
can affect its ultimate constitutionality? Good luck ever getting anything
passed if that's the standard.) He's really just a heckler at this point. If
he can't do any better than that, he's right. Being on the court is a waste
of his time.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/scalia-retires-7675276

 

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