Discussion for article #238004
Justice Scalia has become an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. If he will not resign, Chief Justice Roberts should make him resign before the whole court becomes a laughing stock.
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The depth of this man’s hypocrisy knows no bounds.
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John, in case you read the TPM comments, please please don’t leave Comedy Central. You are one of the most reliable sources of real news and your commentary cuts through the political haze and BS.
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I’m really gonna miss Jon Stewart.
I won’t be missing Scalia when he becomes unemployed.(yes I know court appointments are lifetime).
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AGREED
Would make the font larger if I knew how to.
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Scalia just seems to have a total lack of disregard for the law and the duty of his position. Seems like there ought to be a way that a judge that does this could be reprimanded and then forced out of the position if they continue to do this shit.
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I think you mean “total lack of regard”…and in the past, if the Chief Justice didn’t force someone out for acting like a petulant child, a pretext was found to impeach them. As much as I disagreed with Chief Justice Renquist, he would never have stood for this or for Thomas’ antics either and both would have been out on their asses before they had a chance to complain. From what I’ve been told, the Chief Justice has a lot of power inside the Court, and if he wants to, he can make life very uncomfortable for a justice who doesn’t behave.
It’s been nice to hear Scalia supporters say he’s disgraced the Court…
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Funny how the SCOTUS and the GOP “care” about what the people want. Then do the exact opposite.
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With you here. As much as I object to everything to come out of him, the last couple of years he seems to be losing his grip. Over the years, I’ve had to give him props for his skill at torturing the language to get the result he wants. Recently though, there has been little evidence of intelligence, and going more and more into grumpy crazy old guy yelling at the squirrels to get off his lawn, and talking to the furniture (played as ever by Thomas.)
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Corporations are people too, my friend.
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using the Judith Viorst story, “*Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day,” is priceless! Scalia is one of the best examples of ‘jiggery-pokery’ himself. he just keeps contradicting himself over and over and over again…
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He’s starting to show signs of senility and possible other mental health issues. He’s started to forget people’s names and it’s just going to get worse.
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Scalia has been this way for years. He goes off on tangents and often has a poor grasp of technology and science. This was immediately apparent in Edwards V Aguillar [1987] One of the Evolution V. Intelligent Design cases. Stephen J. Gould finally figured out that Scalia was following a red herring which he himself had thrown down.
Stephen Jay Gould, perhaps responding to George Will’s call, joined in criticism of Scalia’s dissent. In an essay entitled Justice Scalia’s Misunderstanding, Gould wrote that “he couldn’t have helped wondering how two justices could have ruled” in favor of Louisiana. After studying Scalia’s dissent “carefully,” the paleontologist concluded the justice “does not understand the subject matter of evolutionary biology.” In Gould’s opinion, Scalia failed to recognize that creation science “is free of evidence” and “merely restates the Book of Genesis.” The dissenters just didn’t grasp that “all scientists’ believe “the scientific evidence for evolution is so conclusive that no one would be gullible enough to believe that there is any real scientific evidence to the contrary.” In Gould’s words, “evolution is as well confirmed as anything we know.” Scalia’s mistake, Gould concluded, lay in equating evolution with “the search for life’s origins,” not—as it correctly signifies—the process by which “life changes after it originates.” Scalia should have known that science has nothing to say about “questions of ultimate origins.”
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/brennanscalia.html
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Rhenquist was Chief Justice over both Thomas and Scalia, nor did Scalia just start throwing tantrums after Roberts took over.
The reality is a Chief Justice doesn’t have much power over the others, beyond some simply administrative duties. He certainly cannot “force out” any of the other justices. And there has only been one Justice impeached. (though I personally think a very strong case can be made for the impeachment of Thomas, it will probably never happen).
Behind the scenes, what Scalia did in his dissent on the SSM case was damage working relationships with both Kennedy and Roberts…and probably Alito too to a lesser degree. That’s going to make it harder for him in the future to sway those justices to his point of view…they may for example agree generally, but not sign on to the specific legal theory that Scalia wants to use. Roberts will probably be looking more to the other conservative justices to pen decisions in the future as well…though that has been hinted at for workload reasons anyway…Scalia has written far more decisions than any other justice under Roberts.(and for practical purposes, any writing Thomas does is actually Scalia).
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More like his judicial BS rantings are finally starting to catch up with him. And when he was saying “2+2=5 because founding fathers” 10 years ago, and he’s now trying to say “2+2=-3 because founding fathers and ignore what I said earlier”, it’s making the hypocrisy of his rulings flare even more brightly due to all the methane produced by the b*ullsh!t he’s written throughout his long ignominious career.
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I think it is the consequence of defying reality too much and too often. The act goes from a tactic, to a strategy, to an impulse, and finally an instinct. Even the most educated people can turn into raving loons when they substitute rational thought for an ideology of rationalizations. Scalia is another example why the Conservative Movement’s intellectual and moral rot makes it incapable of contributing to the progress of this country.
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DaveyJones…
Believe it not, the Chief Justice can put pressure on a Justice to resign, especially if they are behaving in a horrible manner which hurts the Court. Rhenquist may have served as Chief Justice over both Thomas and Scalia, but the bad behavior did not start until after he was dead. What goes on behind closed doors in the Supreme Court tends to be closely guarded, but there have been a number of resignations that came about due to bad behavior or rank disagreements with the Court.
Certainly, the Chief Justice can’t walk over to an Associate Justice and just say “pack your bags”, but he can make a bad behaving Justice’s life difficult including assigning them the frivolous cases to write opinions on and ignore their points of view. That’s what I mean by ‘force out’. I think you and I are talking about two different things. The Chief Justice has a lot of what we might consider petty power plays at their disposal to force someone to resign.
Basically, those administrative duties can be used to make someone’s life hell and force them out.
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Scalia is still in his tantrum from not being selected Chief Justice. He certainly is a contradiction. He is a religious man, Opus Dei, and leans more to his religion for decisions than the Constitution. Then he behaves like a mafioso Don when others disagree with him. He attempts to belittle them with words rather than rub them out with bullets. And, like the mafioso, his decisions always defer to the Bosses. In his case the corporations, his church and the Republican Party. I think Roberts may be getting tired of him grabbing headlines because his court will be defined as a Scalia Court and more political than blind. Roberts is shoveling crap against the tide because Scalia has lap dogs Thomas and Alito.