Antonin Scalia, the Lawless Supreme Court Justice

Following his statements and opinions, I increasingly see Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as a menace to the nation.  The man is out of control and increasingly unhinged - in fact to the point where he thinks he is above any and all rules.  You might even say that he's become the Dick Cheney of the Supreme Court ranks except for the fact that even Cheney seems less crazy.  Scalia increasingly shows himself to be a political extremist and somehow thinks his personal beliefs trump the Constitution not to mention the long held views on judicial propriety.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at this increasingly lawless justice.  Here are highlights:

It has been widely assumed—including by yours truly—that calling Supreme Court justices “politicians in robes,” as I did just last week counts as an insult. But as of Monday—almost surely before, but without any question as of Monday—Nino Scalia wants precisely to be thought of as a politician in a robe. No other reasonable conclusion can be drawn from his churlish and self-aggrandizing and probably unethical tirade against President Obama’s recently announced immigration policy. And while the court majority’s ruling (from which Scalia of course dissented) represents a pretty solid victory for the Justice Department, the narrow win for the state of Arizona on the controversial “where are your papers” part of the law makes it quite possible that these very issues will come to the court again, after Scalia has taken his political position. Just as Zola famously said “J’Accuse!,” I hope the liberal legal groups are already practicing saying “Recuse!”

As a rule, Supreme Court justices don’t comment much on current events (and if they do, they usually do so elliptically). As a rule, Supreme Court justices never comment on matters that they have reason to think might come before them.

But the rules aren’t for Scalia. He refused to recuse himself back in 2004 in the case involving the secrecy of Dick Cheney’s energy task force. He had, you’ll recall, gone hunting with Cheney (emerging, as far as we know, unscarred). I’m not naive enough to think for a second that Scalia’s personal loyalty to Cheney was purchased with a few rounds of duck ammo. After all, the case was the one in which Cheney asserted that he was in essence beyond the law’s reach, which is fine with Scalia if you’re a conservative, ducks or no ducks. And of course he and Clarence Thomas are somehow allowed to attend highly political gatherings put together by the Koch brothers too, without any consequences.

And what if, someday, the Obama immigration directive comes before the court? Even conservative blogger Ed Morrissey flagged this as problematic. 


The Court’s liberals are nicely old-fashioned that way. They believe in the small-r republican virtues (even, at times, when it’s naive to do so). But for the conservatives, and for Scalia most of all, legal propriety is absurdly quaint. He doesn’t answer to a nation. He answers to a cadre, a vanguard, of which he is a cherished member, which is about as likely to say no to him as the College of Cardinals is to the Pope, and to which all outside criticism is the chirping of crickets. The crickets will be chirping awfully loudly in the coming days, and I hope at least that this self-satisfied martinet gets an ear-splitting headache.

It is far past time that ethical constraints be placed on the justices, starting with Scalia, Thomas and Alito.