Scalia is one of the VERY BEST reasons to get rid of life-time appointments ~ ~ Sooz

What Scalia considers 'easy'
By Steve Benen - Fri Oct 5, 2012 12:30 PM EDT

Jurists are generally supposed to struggle with complex legal issues, weighing the subtleties and nuances of the law and legal history, and using their best judgment to reach sound conclusions to tough calls.

But for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, tough legal questions aren't difficult to answer at all (thanks to reader R.S. for the tip).

Scalia calls himself a "textualist" and, as he related to a few hundred people who came to buy his new book and hear him speak in Washington the other day, that means he applies the words in the Constitution as they were understood by the people who wrote and adopted them. [...]

"The death penalty? Give me a break. It's easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the Constitution prevented restrictions on abortion. Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state," Scalia said at the American Enterprise Institute.

Mary Elizabeth Williams added, "It takes a special kind of man to shrug off challenges to death penalty and abortion restrictions with nary a care in the world about how his interpretations of text might affect real human lives, and to use the phrase 'homosexual sodomy' in 2012."

Quite right. The ease with which Scalia draws these conclusions is striking, but not surprising. In his mind, if gay people were legally prohibited from having sex two centuries ago, and the right to privacy is a sham, then there's no reason for the Supreme Court to protect those Americans' civil liberties against state intrusion now.

And who's Antonin Scalia? He's the right-wing jurist who, just this week, Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) praised as his "model Supreme Court justice."

What's more, if you go to Mitt Romney's website right now, it tells voters, "As president, Mitt will nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito."

http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/10/05/14244608-what-scalia-considers-easy?lite

These kinds of comments refute and violate the judicial code, which requires an "open mind" approach ~ but these comments are not the first, and certainly not the last, time Scalia will violate the code ~ ~ there are "live links" in the original [accessible via the end link] to further info ~ Sooz

No, Justice Scalia, Overruling Roe, Criminalizing Sex and Killing Inmates Are Not ‘Absolutely Easy’ Cases
By Ian Millhiser on Oct 5, 2012 at 3:30 pm

Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia routinely pretends that his approach to the law is merely to follow the clear language of the Constitution, and anyone who does not reach the same conclusions he does must be doing it wrong. In truth, however, Scalia’s rhetoric far more often just exposes how simplistic his vision of the Constitution truly is. Consider a speech he gave earlier this week at a conservative think tank:


This is the opposite of true, at least for someone who claims to take the text of the Constitution seriously. Take, for example, the death penalty. The Constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments,” but it provides no other guidance on just how vicious a punishment must be to become “cruel” or how uncommon it must be to become “unusual.” Does the fact that the death penalty is increasingly rare in the United States meet the threshold of unconstitutionality? The Constitution doesn’t say.

Similarly, both abortion bans and bans on particular sex acts were held unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment, the relevant part of which provides that “[n]o State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” What are the “privileges and immunities of citizens?” How much “process” are people “due”? Why is it a denial of the “equal protection of the laws” for the government to refuse to hire someone because of their race or gender, but not because they performed poorly in college or have an unimpressive resume? The text of the Constitution does not answer these questions.

Scalia’s answer is that rights protected in the Constitution must be understood exactly as they were understood at the time they were ratified, but there’s also nothing in the document itself which suggests that “unusual” punishments are those that were unusual 200 years ago and not those that are unusual now, or that the amount of “process” that people are “due” is the amount that they were given in the 1860s. Indeed, if anything, the Constitution’s text suggests the opposite. The framers were perfectly capable of being very precise about which rights they wanted to protect when they wanted to be — just read the Third Amendment for an example. When they chose, for example, to use words whose scope would naturally change over time — something that is common today may be unusual 50 years from today — that suggests that they wanted the scope of those rights to match that natural process.

Of course, the Constitution doesn’t always use flowing or ambiguous language and when it speaks precisely judges are wrong to read their own preferences into language that does not support their views. Unfortunately, Scalia is hardly a model of textual loyalty in such instances. Nor is he particularly loyal to his notion that the words of the Constitution should keep the meaning the founding generation would have understood them to have. The Constitution gives Congress power to “regulate commerce … among the several states.” And one of the ratifiers of the Constitution explained in the very first decision to interpret these words that there is “no sort of trade” that the words “regulate Commerce” do not apply to and that the power to “regulate” something “implies in its nature full power over the thing to be regulated.” Yet Scalia voted to strike down the Affordable Care Act, a law that regulates trade in health care.

No one who takes the text of the Constitution seriously can reach the decision he reached in that case.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/10/05/969591/no-justice-scalia-overruling-roe-criminalizing-sex-and-killing-inmates-are-not-absolutely-easy-cases/

Sure it's easy. It's easy for him because HE doesn't have to live with the consequences of HIS rulings.

See...?

It's easy.

I repeat my comment from the op: "Scalia is one of the VERY BEST reasons to get rid of life-time appointments ~ " ~ Sooz

Tuesday, Dec 11, 2012 10:19 AM CST
Scalia’s still obsessed with sodomy
The justice defends his "absurd" arguments to a gay student, and is astonished when he can't persuade him.
By Mary Elizabeth Williams

Antonin Scalia, you crazy cutup, you. With the Supreme Court currently gearing up to review two cases that have the potential to become watershed moments in the fight for marriage equality, the famously conservative associate justice is facing his old nemesis yet again – the HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA. And he’s doing it in his usual way — by behaving like an arrogant, dismissive tool to gay people, right to their faces.

At a speaking event in Princeton on Monday, the justice was confronted by a gay freshman named Duncan Hosie, who questioned why he has equated laws banning sodomy with those banning bestiality and murder. “It’s a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the ‘reduction to the absurd,’” Scalia sniffed. That’s funny; I thought it was called hyperbole. Or maybe just a steaming pile of wrong.

“If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?” he continued. Exactly. If we do not want anchovies, do we not reject pepperoni as well? Can we truly expect human beings to have different feelings about entirely different things? Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you, is not Team Edward tantamount to Team Jacob? This is what gets you a black robe and a job for life. He then told the student, “I’m surprised you aren’t persuaded.” How dreary and tiresome to be Antonin Scalia, and live in a whole world full of people who are not.

There may be something vaguely admirable in the way Scalia, who also told the audience that the Constitution “isn’t a living document … It’s dead, dead, dead, dead,” sticks so consistently with his textualism. But it’s the way he desperately tries to wrap it around controlling behavior he finds icky that’s peculiar to the point of ridiculous.

Take, for instance, the statements that Hosie was referring to. In 1996, in his dissenting opinion in the gay rights case Romer v. Evans, Scalia huffed, “I had thought that one could consider certain conduct reprehensible — murder, for example, or polygamy, or cruelty to animals — and could exhibit even ‘animus’ toward such conduct.” And in his 2003 dissenting opinion in the landmark Lawrence v. Texas case, which struck down sodomy laws, Scalia cited “government interest in protecting order and morality.” He warned about “state laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity” and “the impossibility of distinguishing homosexuality from other traditional ‘morals’ offenses.” Back then, he concurred with the assessment that “certain forms of sexual behavior are ‘immoral and unacceptable,’” citing legal limits on “adultery, fornication, and adult incest, and laws refusing to recognize homosexual marriage.” And he warned ominously that “today’s opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as formal recognition in marriage is concerned.” Can you imagine how freaked out he must be, nine years later, now that this homosexual unions thing is happening? It’s everything he feared coming true. Hahahahahaha.

Scalia is still clinging tenaciously to his “ew, gross” vision of homosexuality — and working with all his might to prove that the great love of his life, the Constitution of the United States of America, agrees with him. In October, he eye-rolled at a lecture, “Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state.” It must be difficult to find himself, a man appointed back in the glory days of Ronald Reagan, to be on the increasingly smaller, losing side of the culture war. To be the great and powerful Antonin Scalia, facing off against a measly college freshman, and to come across so defensive, so hollow and so very, very wrong. It’s called reduction to absurd. Scalia’s living it.

http://www.salon.com/2012/12/11/scalias_still_obsessed_with_sodomy/

He's obsessed with sodomy because he's an asshole.

Oh, so he rules according to his "feelings"?
I thought it was supposed to be according to the law.

Scalia has "not been opaque" about his feelings toward same-sex marriage in the past, and gay rights advocates do not expect him to change his mind when the Supreme Court hears the cases in the spring, said Fred Sainz, vice president of communications at Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay rights organization.

"It's safe to say he is a vote in the 'no' column," Sainz said. "He is not a justice that has an open mind towards these issues that are coming his way.”

I think Supreme Court judges SHOULD have open minds, but so often they don't. I think Hosie was very wise to raise the issue.

Hosie said he hopes the exchange he had with Scalia, while it may not change the justice's mind, will at least change the fiery words he uses in the future.

"I feel as if he’s crossed a line in comparing some of the things he’s compared gay rights to ... so hopefully this media coverage will encourage Justice Scalia to be more conscientious and careful in the words he uses," he said.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12 ... ments?lite

who ever knew that conservatives were so touchy feely?