Fat Tony’s speech went something like this:
2 Likes
I have seen lots of things from him that are consistent with creeping dementia. But so far, no leaks of problems from Court insiders, which would be the real “DANGER! DANGER,” sign.
So (free time today) i will be researching impeachment of SCOTUS. Learning something new every day!
Edited 30 seconds later… I typed “Can a supreme” in google, and the first auto-fill was “can a supreme court justice be impeached” Wow. Lots of inquiring minds want to know.
Corporations = People is just fine and dandy. Alrighty,
1 Like
That’s the real meaning of the 14th Amendment. Any Originalist will tell you so.
Here’s an idea. Scalia is egging on Cruz and Huckabee with this precedent… [emphasis mine]
'1957, at the height of McCarthyism, the Georgia General Assembly passed a joint resolution calling for “The Impeachment of Certain U.S. Supreme Court Justices” believed to be enabling Communism with their decisions. The resolution targeted … for “…[usurping] the congressional power to make law in violation of Article I, Sections I and 8, and violated Sections 3 and 5 of the 14th Amendment and nullified the 10th Amendment of the Constitution.”
Don’t know how good the source is (IMPEACH AND REMOVE US Supreme Court Justices) but the historical incident is interesting.
The problem, conceptually, with the Originalist approach is that it isn’t adaptive to a changing world. The Constitution (not an Amendment) says there will be 1 representative for every 30,000 People. An Originalist would argue that we should have a House with over 10,000 members. The imaginary typical person would still conclude that 1 representative for 30,000 people means…1 rep for 30,000 people. If the imaginary person thought that 10,000 members is too unwieldy, they would refer to the process of amending the Constitution. Which hasn’t happened. Ergo, we need to have an immediate election for the remaining 9,600 House members. Oh, and toss out every bit of legislation from the last century, as it was all passed with an unconstitutional House, and for the most part of the last 70 years, not even enough House members to hold quorum.
Or even more absurdly, how does an imaginary person from the 1780s contemplate an Air Force? Once you start making assumptions, which you have to do in this case, you are now imagining an imaginary person imagining the unimaginable. And when you can go there, well, a creative Justice can go all sorts of places.
Of course, Scalia is not even really an Originalist. He is a pure partisan who hides behind an Originalist argument when it suits his purposes. When it doesn’t, he has no problem in discarding it. Look at what he did in Heller…he didn’t put himself in a imaginary person’s role from the 1780s…he rewrote the 2nd Amendment to suit a real person from today…himself. He finds a right of self protection inherent in the 2nd Amendment, even though there is no such language to base that upon…he even discarded the language that IS there regarding a well ordered militia because it can be used as a basis to argue against a right to self protection.
Contrast that to his many dissents regarding a right to privacy, which actually IS implied throughout the Bill of Rights…the 1st, the 3rd, the 4th, the 5th are all based upon a right to privacy. But his imaginary person ignores them…so he imagines.
They can, and its even happened once. Its very doubtful it will happen again, at least in our life times, unless perhaps one of the elderly refuses to leave after going full dementia…stripping off their clothes and dancing around the court while singing “Chattanooga Choo Choo” type of thing. (yeah you’ll need brain bleach to get THAT image of Scalia out of your mind).
And honestly, Scalia isn’t even the one that should come to mind when discussing impeachment. Thomas is. He has abdicated his duties and makes no attempt to even hide selling his vote via his wife. And then cheats on his taxes for the money he grifts in such a manner. Plus he is a complete waste of space. I would rather have a right wing justice that I deeply disagree with then the empty chair that is Thomas. He brings zero value to the table.
“the furthest imaginable extension of the Supreme Court doing whatever it wants”
ummm… pretty sure that particular designation belongs to declaring corporations people…
even if he thinks all people aren’t
I’ll use the same words Scalia used when someone asked about the appointment of Bush in 2000: “Get over it!”
So says the asshole “justice” who would have upheld racial segregation if he had been on the Court when they heard Brown v Board of Education. After all, the Constitution is not a “living document” . . . and segregation had been practiced for almost a century after slavery was abolished before the Warren Court weighed in and put an end to it. This from the man who has no problem at all throwing out the Voting Rights Act, after it was reauthorized with near unanimous bipartisan support in both the House and Senate, because it worked too well.
The only “principle” to be gleaned from all of this is that, if Scalia disagrees with a policy, any law implementing that policy has to be unconstitutional, even if the legislative or executive branches unanimously disagree, and the law has previously been upheld many times (like the VRA), whereas if Scalia agrees with a policy, it it is nothing less than a violation of everything we stand for as a democracy for any other judge to overthrow it or rule it to be unconstitutional. And they say consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. . . . . .