What a week Justice Scalia is having. He’s all over the place selling the dream. Like a detestable version of Bill Murray, no one will ever believe you when you tell them he’s a Supreme Court justice.
Just this past Thursday, he was participating in a discussion with Harvard’s Marvin Kalb in which Justice Ginsburg also participated, and he answered a question from a member of the audience who asked, ‘why he is the way he is,’ to which Scalia replied, “the Devil makes me do it.”
Score one for Satan!
And, now, it turns out that spreading the message of selective jurisprudence is a full-time gig for this originalist from a bygone era.
On Tuesday, during a speaking engagement at the University of Tennessee’s law school, Justice Scalia was asked about the constitutionality of the federal income tax, and Scalia said it was constitutional, “but if it reaches a certain point, perhaps you should revolt.”
“You’re entitled to criticize the government, and you can use words, you can use symbols, you can use telegraph, you can use Morse code, you can burn a flag,” said Scalia.
Yes, criticize all you want, America. You can use words, symbols, loaded weapons, threats of violence, the telegraph(?) and Morse code, and you can even burn a flag!
While you’re doing that, dear, sweet, Democracy, his people will be over there “criticizing” the Defense Of Marriage Act and the Voting Rights Act (which Scalia described last year as “the perpetuation of racial entitlement“) with hundreds of millions of “symbols” and telegraph ads.
Symbols, speech, and expression are fine, unless they say “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” on them.
After ruling in the Citizens United case, Scalia was quoted as saying, “Thomas Jefferson would have said the more speech the better.”
Last year, when defending the theory of “Originalism” while pretending to understand what judicial activism is, Justice Scalia warned that it was judicial activism that led to the Holocaust, arguing, “Who in a democratic society should have the power to determine the government’s view of what natural law is? In an open, democratic society, the people can debate these issues.” He’s so above it.
Which is weird, since, according to Scalia, Democracy can certainly decide for itself, without the intervention of activist judges, things like Bush v Gore. A decision that ruled in favor of George W. Bush who went on to appoint two conservatives judges to agree with Justice Scalia as a general principle for life. Because Democracy!
But as it is with the perpetually static man living in an evolving world, he went on to tell the aspiring young lawyers in Tennessee, ”The Constitution is not a living organism for Pete’s sake, it’s a law. It means what it meant when it was adopted.”
Yeah, for Pete’s sake! The Constitution is not a living organism! It’s dead tissue, babe! As dead as the day it was ratified. The doors for redress are now closed. Thank you for flying with Crash & Burn Airlines.
Only, there’s this thing called the Bill Of Rights, which is somewhere in the constitution, and with those enumerated rights comes the Ninth Amendment, which states:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
It lives and breaths as it was intended.
An amendable document can never be dead, and the purveyors of this comically-absurd myth are either fools, or liars.
So, lesson for all you kids and Tea Party delinquents out there: If you don’t like the law, just protest it with signs and symbols, or revolt against your country. But when it comes to voting and elections, or deciding our leaders and laws for ourselves, just leave all that up to your Supreme Court overlords. Wingnuts know best?