Hats Off to Judge Antonin Scalia

[DanTana]

He seems to be the only Justice with a shred of dignity and common sense, and for reminding us what the Supreme Court is actually for. He was appointed by Ronald Reagan.

[Longitude Zero]

Absolutely.

[muggsy]

Ya know, I always thought that the job of the Supreme Court was to judge the constitutionality of a law and nothing more. Some of the members of the Supreme Court should be told that written words actually mean something. They are not suppose to legislate from the bench.

[muggsy]

Now that homosexuals are allowed to marry in all fifty states, if three of them decide to join in Holy matrimony is that considered bigamy or is it ok if it's done in the name of love. I guess now anything goes and along with the corner stone of America's foundation.

[Longitude Zero]

Now that homosexuals are allowed to marry in all fifty states, if three of them decide to join in Holy matrimony is that considered bigamy or is it ok if it's done in the name of love. I guess now anything goes and along with the corner stone of America's foundation.

Trigamy aka doomed to Hades.

[Higgy Baby]

Does this mean that concealed carry permits and hunting licenses must now be recognized by all states?......

[OvalNut]

Antonin Scalia is a stud!


Tim

[yqtszhj]

Ya know, I always thought that the job of the Supreme Court was to judge the constitutionality of a law and nothing more. Some of the members of the Supreme Court should be told that written words actually mean something. They are not suppose to legislate from the bench.

Now they practice social engineering.

[b4uqzme]

Ya know, I always thought that the job of the Supreme Court was to judge the constitutionality of a law and nothing more. Some of the members of the Supreme Court should be told that written words actually mean something. They are not suppose to legislate from the bench.

Oh so true. The heck with what our forefathers designed. Throw The Constitution out with the wash. Do whatever you want. Who's gonna stop you? Boehner?

[DanTana]

Here are the top 15 quotes we pulled from his scathing rebuke of the Roberts court’s ruling that saved Obamacare’s federal exchanges. It is Scalia at his Scaliaiest (emphasis added):


No. 1: ‘SCOTUScare’

“We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.”

No. 2: Supreme Court Plays Favorites

“But this Court’s two decisions on the Act will surely be remembered through the years. The somersaults of statutory interpretation they have performed (‘penalty’ means tax, ‘further [Medicaid] payments to the State’ means only incremental Medicaid payments to the State, ‘established by the State’ means not established by the State) will be cited by litigants endlessly, to the confusion of honest jurisprudence. 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.”

No. 3: Making a ‘Parody’ of The Federalist Papers

“Just ponder the significance of the Court’s decision to take matters into its own hands. The Court’s revision of the law authorizes the Internal Revenue Service to spend tens of billions of dollars every year in tax credits on federal Exchanges. It affects the price of insurance for millions of Americans. It diminishes the participation of the States in the implementation of the Act. It vastly expands the reach of the Act’s individual mandate, whose scope depends in part on the availability of credits. What a parody today’s decision makes of Hamilton’s assurances to the people of New York: ‘The legislature not only commands the purse but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over . . . the purse; no direction . . . of the wealth of society, and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL but merely judgment.’”

No. 4: ‘Quite Absurd’

“The Court holds that when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act says ‘Exchange established by the State’ it means ‘Exchange established by the State or the Federal Government.’ That is of course quite absurd, and the Court’s 21 pages of explanation make it no less so.”

No. 5: ‘So Obvious’

“This case requires us to decide whether someone who buys insurance on an Exchange established by the Secretary gets tax credits. You would think the answer would be obvious—so obvious there would hardly be a need for the Supreme Court to hear a case about it.”

No. 6: ‘Pure Applesauce’

“The Court claims that the Act must equate federal and state establishment of Exchanges when it defines a qualified individual as someone who (among other things) lives in the ‘State that established the Exchange.’ … Otherwise, the Court says, there would be no qualified individuals on federal Exchanges, contradicting (for example) the provision requiring every Exchange to take the ‘”interests of qualified individuals”‘ into account when selecting health plans. … Pure applesauce.”

No. 7: Court’s ‘Overriding Principle’

“Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved.”

No. 8: ‘Not Our Place’

“This Court holds only the judicial power—the power to pronounce the law as Congress has enacted it. We lack the prerogative to repair laws that do not work out in practice, just as the people lack the ability to throw us out of office if they dislike the solutions we concoct. …

“Trying to make its judge-empowering approach seem respectful of congressional authority, the Court asserts that its decision merely ensures that the Affordable Care Act operates the way Congress ‘meant [it] to operate.’ … [T]he 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. …

“Even less defensible, if possible, is the Court’s claim that its interpretive approach is justified because this Act ‘does not reflect the type of care and deliberation that one might expect of such significant legislation.’ … It is not our place to judge the quality of the care and deliberation that went into this or any other law. A law enacted by voice vote with no deliberation whatever is fully as binding upon us as one enacted after years of study, months of committee hearings, and weeks of debate. Much less is it our place to make everything come out right when Congress does not do its job properly. It is up to Congress to design its laws with care, and it is up to the people to hold them to account if they fail to carry out that responsibility.”

No. 9: ‘Interpretive Distortions’ Ignore the Constitution

“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.”

No. 10: ‘Jiggery-pokery’

“The Court’s next bit of interpretive jiggery-pokery involves other parts of the Act that purportedly presuppose the availability of tax credits on both federal and state Exchanges.”

No. 11: Increasing SCOTUS’ Power

“The Court’s insistence on making a choice that should be made by Congress both aggrandizes judicial power and encourages congressional lassitude.”

No. 12: ‘Unheard Of’

“Ordinary connotation does not always prevail, but the more unnatural the proposed interpretation of a law, the more compelling the contextual evidence must be to show that it is correct. Today’s interpretation is not merely unnatural; it is unheard of.”

No. 13: ‘Feeble Arguments’

“Faced with overwhelming confirmation that ‘Exchange established by the State’ means what it looks like it means, the Court comes up with argument after feeble argument to support its contrary interpretation.”

No. 14: ‘Why Context Matters’

“Context always matters. Let us not forget, however, why context matters: It is a tool for understanding the terms of the law, not an excuse for rewriting them.”

No. 15: SCOTUS Cannot ‘Rescue Congress’

“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.’”

Scalia's Opinion on Gay Marriage:

"I join THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s opinion in full. I write separately to call attention to this Court’s threat to American democracy," he begins.

"The substance of today’s decree is not of immense personal importance to me," he offers. "It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. Until the courts put a stop to it, public debate over same-sex marriage displayed American democracy at its best."

"But the Court ends this debate, in an opinion lacking even a thin veneer of law," he opines. "Buried beneath the mummeries and straining-to-be-memorable passages of the opinion is a candid and startling assertion: No matter what it was the People ratified, the Fourteenth Amendment protects those rights that the Judiciary, in its 'reasoned judgment,' thinks the Fourteenth Amendment ought to protect."

"'The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality,'" he quoted from the majority opinion before adding, "Really? Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie."

"The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic," he writes. "If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: 'The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,' I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie."

"And to allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation," he writes. "But what really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch."