I will not pretend to be saddened. He caused a great deal of unnecessary suffering. Cruz is calling for Congress to stall Obama so the next President chooses him, thus making it more likely Obama does choose the next Justice (Congress hates Ted Cruz.)
I have no idea who is on Obama’s short list. We’ll see plenty of stories about that soon enough. Sotomayor, his first nomination, has been a reliable member of the liberal bloc of the court, but is hardly radical.
(Source: Supreme court justice Antonin Scalia dies at 79).
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)
Update: I see that McConnell is also saying this. I guess it will the GOP line. They have really enjoyed having that reliable five judge conservative majority on the court.
Sanders statement:
Shorter Sanders: I’m sure there are people who mourn Scalia and I feel bad for those people.
Update 2: It’s worth noting that if a new Justice is not appointed until 2017, most issues which would have split 5-4 cannot be settled and the lower court ruling will stand.
Bruce Wilder
Elena Kagan was Obama’s second appointment to the Court.
Ian Welsh
Yeah, ooops. Supreme Court, not my strong point. Thanks.
Chucky
Well, damn.
This was shaping up to be the election season that pro-imperialism liberals finally had to publicly explain and justify themselves. Now, it’s gonna be all Senate/SC drama all the time.
Even in death, Scalia fucks us over.
Spinoza
This election has now been taken to the next level. My God. Who knew the stakes could rise higher?
markfromireland
I’m with “chucky” on this one – Scalia was a bollocks and I for one am far from regretful that he’s dead – even in death he’s doing harm.
Hugh
I used to call Scalia’s doctrine of original intent legal analysis by ouija board. It was all hokum, just a screen to cover his own conservative political and social views determining his votes. Naturally, the Framers he invoked always just happened to agree with whatever view he already had. How did we know they agreed with him? because Scalia knew what they were thinking and could tell us they did. He could not only read minds. He could read the minds of dead people.
In the past, I’ve posted on various of the SCOTUS opinions that I found interesting and important. Scalia is remembered principally for his bombast, but you really need to have read some of his opinions and dissents to appreciate how sophistic and incoherent his legal argumentation really was. I mean Roberts too uses really lame arguments but he knows how to dress these up by burying them in what looks like really impressive legal documentation. Altogether Roberts is a much oilier and effective writer. On the other hand, Scalia was not the worst writer on the Court. Kennedy, in my opinion, holds that distinction. You might think it would be Alito or Thomas, but Alito is just drily ideological in an uninspired, never had an original thought in his life kind of way and Thomas is usually relegated to corporate-corporate stuff and the opinion is written by his staff. Staff do a lot of the heavy lifting in most opinions but most of the other justices are more hands on. Thomas not so much.
One of my major contentions is that we in the US do not know our own history. Instead we have been served up a bunch of mush and myths about our leaders and how our country came into being and has progressed, or not, since. The Court has been around for 226 years now, and except for a little less than 20 of these from Brown versus the Board of Education in 1954 to Roe v. Wade in 1973, it has always been on the side of the have against the have-nots, the rich against the poor, the powerful against the powerless. The Court has always promoted and defended the powers that be, whether these have been landowners, slaveholders, factory owners, or corporations. When I look at the Court, I see 4 conservatives and 5 (now 4 with Scalia gone) reactionaries. The Court has 9 pro-corporate, pro-elite, pro-status quo, anti-populist justices (now 8 with Scalia’s death). There will be a lot of Democratic-Republican hoopla about a replacement for Scalia, but conservative or reactionary, you can bet he or she will be very much more of the same.
Tony Wikrent
Hugh: this is not terribly important, but you seem to have better grasp of Supreme Court history than almost anyone else, so a point of personal historical curiosity. You write that there was only one era, 1954-1973, that the Court was not in the pocket of the haves. What about the late 1930s and 1940s, when Brandeis, Cardozo, and Frankfurter were on the court? I would think the conservative majority was replaced at some point given the three term tenure of FDR. And what about the effect of Holmes, though I understand from the little I’ve read that he was always in a minority, and his impact came later, when jurists began to use his “thundering dissents” to change the direction of jurisprudence.
Hugh
In 1935 and 1936, the Supreme Court ruled most of FDR’s early efforts to end the Great Depression unconstitutional. This led FDR in 1937 to threaten to pack the Court, that is increase the number of justices on the Court. You don’t need a constitutional amendment to do this. The Constitution only has this to say: “The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” So while the Supreme Court is the receptacle of federal judicial power. It is the Congress which determines the shape and size of that receptacle. Originally, the Court had 6 members.
In one way, FDR’s attempt to stack the Court was a tactical failure but a strategic success. He didn’t get to increase the size of the Court but, on the other hand, the Court became much less aggressive in challenging his programs. Then too you could argue that, under the influence of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, FDR had already decided to end most of the New Deal and that the Court’s decisions gave him cover to do so. Although dialing back the New Deal plunged the country back into the depression it had just come out of (and which it would take WWII to get out of again), FDR and Morgenthau thought capitalism had been saved so I guess it was all OK then.
Tom W Harris
In an America where we had a functioning media or a functioning Democratic Party, Tony
Scalia would be universally scorned as a worthless piece of treasonous filth for his role in engineering
the installation of the loser of the 2000 election as President.
Five Four Tony died on my 73rd birthday, and a damn fine present it was.
Sam Adams
The true modern day hero of the Supreme Court was Brennan. He truly understood. Ginsberg wears his mantle. Im curious who she will pass it to.
Russ
I agree with Hugh that the court is unanimously pro-corporate. The only difference I see is between what I call the “activist” judges (five of them until now, at the moment four), who will bend over backwards to attain the pro-corporate result, and the “passive” four whose default will be to support corporate power but may endorse a duly passed law which restricts corporate power.
Thus for example Citizens United was really a 9-0 pro-corporate decision, in that none of the four so-called dissenters dissented on the grounds that Buckley v. Valeo was wrong, that money =/= speech, that there’s no such thing as corporate “speech” or corporate “rights” at all, but only on the purely technical ground that Congress had passed a law limiting what is otherwise assumed to be normative, that corporate “rights” are infinite.
Thus in the courts these days we have only the activists who seek to expand corporate power no matter what, and the passivists whose default is to go along with this. The general tendency for justices to want to be as narrow as possible in the rulings suits the latter well.