"History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake." - James Joyce

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Idiotocrates of the Day: Justice Scalia


What? Him again? Yes, he just keeps on being himself: grandiose, obtuse, reactionary, and, here, self-pitying because he can't get his way. As Paul Waldman writes at "The American Prospect":

Scalia is outraged at the majority's contention that the core purpose of DOMA was to discriminate against gay people, and this, he asserts, means that they're calling everyone who supports it a monster. "To defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions. To hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution," he writes.

His overreach is breathtaking: he surely ignores what happened in Congress at the time of DOMA's passage, the intentions behind the bill, and the atmosphere of America at the time. Because the Court has acknowledged that, and declared singling out a group of people for special animus and discrimination is unconstitutional, it is somehow being massively unfair to those who took that action then and still support it. Thus, Scalia enunciates the "victim" mentality which animates so much of the right-wing nowadays: because we cannot get our way, and discriminate at will and force others to bend to our demands, we are being discriminated against! Boo-hoo...poor us! This is resentment raised to the level of sociopathy. 

Waldman concludes:

After all, this is a guy who, in a decision delivered just yesterday, helped gut the Voting Rights Act, one of the most important pieces of legislation ever passed by Congress and one that was reauthorized in 2006 by votes of 390-33 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate, yet spends two-thirds of this very dissent arguing that the Supreme Court is a bunch of black-robed tyrants when they invalidate a law passed by Congress. In other words, despite his carefully cultivated reputation as a principled "originalist," the only principle that guides Antonin Scalia is "what he can get away with." For him, it's the outcome that matters. The justification comes after. Is that true of the Court's liberals as well? Maybe. But it's a little rich to make that charge when your own hypocrisy is on such obvious display.

Scalia must be the least self-aware person on the planet when he declares that this decision "demeans this court."


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