Law Scalia Died today

[NelmarksGhost]

One scenario I've read described how Obama might use this politically knowing that his nomination will be blocked.

He could nominate someone who would be very popular with swing voters. When the GOP blocks it will deliver their votes to the democratic candidate.

Democrats are brainstorming such plans as I type this.

 

[theBLADE1]

I'll just leave this here....

 

[Bukowski82]

Yeah I think you're probably right, actually. He doesn't have anywhere near the same inclination for dishonest debate like JVS has. He's been pretty straight from what I've seen, albeit "intense" as you mentioned.

While we disagree, I am grateful that you can at least acknowledge my consistency on the issues. But I have to say; I wish I had anywhere near the intellect that Jack has. He's passionate about liberal and human rights issues and he's very intelligent. These are good things.

 

[Fawlty]

You're about to make me start quoting Jack Donnelly on the subject of Human Rights... You clearly have zero idea about what you're talking about. And no, it wasn't just on same sex marriages, though that is a huge part of my distaste for the late justice. Scallia having the power he did over other people's lives based on his dogma is a truly terrifying concept. He did a lot of bad in this world. Now he's dead. I wouldn't dance on his grave or anything, but I'm not going to pretend we're not all better off for it.

I don't have a problem with people being happy about the death of some looming judicial figure who seemed to have been a religious nut and let it influence his interpretation of secular laws. But you also put yourself on the backside of the same coin as the Republicans who are already vowing to prevent a new appointment.

 

[second sight]

Wow, Scalia is not even cold and the GOP candidates are already putting a political spin on this. Wow.

this is as big of a deal as it gets, I'm assuming you think obama isn't going to make it political

 

[soonerphil]

Stay classy Cenk.

 

[Bukowski82]

Bukowski is still mad about the better team winning the Super Bowl last year.

You have no idea.

 

[Greoric]

You're about to make me start quoting Jack Donnelly on the subject of Human Rights... You clearly have zero idea about what you're talking about. And no, it wasn't just on same sex marriages, though that is a huge part of my distaste for the late justice. Scallia having the power he did over other people's lives based on his dogma is a truly terrifying concept. He did a lot of bad in this world. Now he's dead. I wouldn't dance on his grave or anything, but I'm not going to pretend we're not all better off for it.

You're right. I don't, which is why I inquired for your case. I just see a poster's pleasure reaction to someone's death. That's the definition of sociopathy, Christian Bale style, especially when you consider the reaction in proportion to the "crime". In this case the crime of humanity was the proposal for some people's prohibition from getting tax breaks based on ineligibility of a religious contract. How about his defense of human rights to allow people the option of how they'll defend themselves? I'm sure you'll remain consistent with human rights violations with the other justices whom ruled to the contrary?

 

[Bukowski82]

I don't have a problem with people being happy about the death of some looming judicial figure who seemed to have been a religious nut and let it influence his interpretation of secular laws. But you also put yourself on the backside of the same coin as the Republicans who are already vowing to prevent a new appointment.

Yes, but at least I'm honest about it...

 

[INeedARemedy]

The guy was a piece of shit. Nothing of value was lost today

 

[Fawlty]

Well Obama doesn't exactly have a track record of nominating people in the middle or apolitical for the SCotUS.

If he has to nominate somebody in the middle to get it done, he should do it. I prefer that over the inevitable Roy Moore impersonator that a Republican president would surely nominate.

 

[Rod1]

Did someone actually try and sell the Mexican judicial system as good?

Nobody said that.

And spare me your sarcasm, the mexican law itself its not the problem, its the blatant corruption of the political class and the hispanic culture that breeds said corruption.

That being said such system is present in pretty much all constitutions based on western liberalism.

 

[Fawlty]

Yes, but at least I'm honest about it...

I'd rather the people speaking for my team were just one little notch above the opposition in class.

 

[Jack V Savage]

That's not really how it works. Whether he will or won't is up in the air, but it's unrelated to his private practice representing corporations.

Weird how much people care about that anyway.

 

[Rod1]

Damn Buk, you really are a 1 or 100 kind of guy.

Buk hates anything resembling christianity, im pretty sure a priest molested him or something.

 

[Jack V Savage]

Yeah I think you're probably right, actually. He doesn't have anywhere near the same inclination for dishonest debate like JVS has. He's been pretty straight from what I've seen, albeit "intense" as you mentioned.

Dude, do you have to slime up every thread with this kind of thing? You made a bad prediction. Get over it. You're so low, man.

 

[second sight]

so are we looking at the first transvestite on the court, maybe we need a black panther transvestite

 

[Arkain2K]

It is well known that Scalia produced pure gold in his opinions...

Bear in mind that brains and learning, like muscle and physical skill, are article"s of commerce. They are bought and sold. You can hire them by the year or by the hour. The only thing in the world not for sale is character.

People look at rights as if they were muscles — the more you exercise them, the better they get.

The point at which life becomes 'worthless,' and the point at which the means necessary to preserve it become 'extraordinary' or 'inappropriate,' are neither set forth in the Constitution nor known to the nine Justices of this Court any better than they are known to nine people picked at random from the Kansas City telephone directory...[therefore] even when it is demonstrated by clear and convincing evidence that a patient no longer wishes certain measures to be taken to preserve her life, it is up to the citizens of Missouri to decide, through their elected representatives, whether that wish will be honored.

Perhaps the dissenters believe that 'offense to others' ought to be the only reason for restricting nudity in public places generally. . . . The purpose of Indiana's nudity law would be violated, I think, if 60,000 fully consenting adults crowded into the Hoosierdome to display their genitals to one another, even if there were not an offended innocent in the crowd.

'for want of a nail, a kingdom was lost' is a commentary on fate, not the statement of a major cause of action against a blacksmith.

I find it a sufficient embarrassment that our Establishment Clause jurisprudence regarding holiday displays has come to require scrutiny more commonly associated with interior decorators than with the judiciary.

It is hard to consider women a 'discrete and insular minority', unable to employ the 'political processes ordinarily to be relied upon' when they constitute a majority of the electorate. And the suggestion that they are incapable of exerting that political power smacks of the same paternalism that the Court so roundly condemns.

The tradition of having government-funded military schools for men is as well rooted in the traditions of this country as the tradition of sending only men into military combat. The people may decide to change the one tradition, like the other, through democratic processes; but the assertion that either tradition has been unconstitutional through the centuries is not law, but politics-smuggled-into-law.

In my view, a right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children is among the 'unalienable Rights' with which the Declaration of Independence proclaims 'all Men . . . are endowed by their Creator.'

Campaign promises are, by long democratic tradition, the least binding form of human commitment.

You could fire a grapefruit out of a cannon over the best law schools in the country - and that includes Chicago - and not hit an originalist.

Dispensing with confrontation because testimony is obviously reliable is akin to dispensing with jury trial because a defendant is obviously guilty.

Now the Senate is looking for 'moderate' judges, 'mainstream' judges. What in the world is a moderate interpretation of a constitutional text? Halfway between what it says and what we'd like it to say?

If you're going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you're not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you're probably doing something wrong.

The main business of a lawyer is to take the romance, the mystery, the irony, the ambiguity out of everything he touches.

I believe that our people’s traditional belief in the right of trial by jury is in perilous decline. That decline is bound to be confirmed, and indeed accelerated, by the repeated spectacle of a man’s going to his death because a judge found that an aggravating factor existed. We cannot preserve our veneration for the protection of the jury in criminal cases if we render ourselves callous to the need for that protection by regularly imposing the death penalty without it.

Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. He saved hundreds of thousands of lives, are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so."

The virtue of a democratic system with a constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech is that it readily enables the people, over time, to be persuaded that what they took for granted is not so, and to change their laws accordingly.

A Bill of Rights that means what the majority wants it to mean is worthless.

....but what I like most about Justice Scalia is that as a Literalist, he has no qualm about calling out the Judicial branch when it violates the Separation of Powers.

We Americans have a method for making the laws that are over us. We elect representatives to two Houses of Congress, each of which must enact the new law and present it for the approval of a President, whom we also elect. For over two decades now, unelected federal judges have been usurping this lawmaking power by converting what they regard as norms of international law into American law. Today's opinion approves that process in principle, though urging the lower courts to be more restrained. This Court seems incapable of admitting that some matters - any matters - are none of its business.

Robert F. Kennedy used to say, 'Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not?'; that outlook has become a far too common and destructive approach to interpreting the law

It is difficult to maintain the illusion that we are interpreting a Constitution, rather than inventing one.

The story is told of the elderly judge who, looking back over a long career, observes with satisfaction that, when I was young, I probably let stand some convictions that should have been overturned, and when I was old I probably set aside some that should have stood; so overall, justice was done. I sometimes think that is an appropriate analogy to this Court's constitutional jurisprudence, which alternately creates rights that the Constitution does not contain and denies rights that it does.

More importantly, the Court forgets that ours is a government of laws and not of men. That means we are governed by the terms of our laws, not by the unenacted will of our lawmakers. 'If Congress enacted into law something different from what it intended, then it should amend the statute to conform to its intent.' In the meantime, this Court 'has no roving license ... to disregard clear language simply on the view that ... Congress 'must have intended' something broader.

Perhaps sensing the dismal failure of its efforts to show that 'established by the State' means 'established by the State or the Federal Government,' the Court tries to palm off the pertinent statutory phrase as "inartful drafting.' This Court, however, has no free-floating power 'to rescue Congress from its drafting errors.'

The Court's decision reflects the philosophy that judges should endure whatever interpretive distortions it takes in order to correct a supposed flaw in the statutory machinery. That philosophy ignores the American people's decision to give Congress '[a]ll legislative Powers' enumerated in the Constitution. They made Congress, not this Court, responsible for both making laws and mending them.

The Court's opinion serves up a freedom-destroying cocktail consisting of two parts patent falsity.

As long as judges tinker with the Constitution to 'do what the people want,' instead of what the document actually commands, politicians who pick and confirm new federal judges will naturally want only those who agree with them politically.

Among the questions considered nonjusticiable is the definition of an impeachable offense. Whatever Congress says is an impeachable offense is an impeachable offense.

'The operation was a success, but the patient died.' What such a procedure is to medicine, the Court's opinion in this case is to law.

We should start calling this law SCOTUScare ... This Court's two decisions on the Act will surely be remembered through the years ... And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.

 

[Jack V Savage]

You're about to make me start quoting Jack Donnelly on the subject of Human Rights... You clearly have zero idea about what you're talking about. And no, it wasn't just on same sex marriages, though that is a huge part of my distaste for the late justice. Scallia having the power he did over other people's lives based on his dogma is a truly terrifying concept. He did a lot of bad in this world. Now he's dead. I wouldn't dance on his grave or anything, but I'm not going to pretend we're not all better off for it.

The thing is, this is a man of great accomplishment with a wife of 60-plus year, nine kids, 28 grandkids, and a lot more friends and admirers.

I agree that his successor will likely to a lot of good for America that wouldn't have been done under Scalia, but we're talking about honest disagreement about what is best for the country.

Something you might like, Buk: "Antonin Scalia" is an anagram for "I sanction anal," which he actually didn't (http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/scalias-domino-theory/).

 

[in the]

Couldn't agree more. Despicable behavior coming from both sides tonight.

It's sad how many people on the left are celebrating this while so many people on the right already have some conspiracy about his death.