Trump's Desire to Weaponize the Supreme Court

One of the main bulwarks of democracy and the rule of law is an independent judiciary that, at least in theory, equally applies the law to all citizens.  In practice, of course, one's ability to hire top legal counsel can result in some receiving very different outcomes than others.  Still, the concept of the equal rule of law is key to a democracy and, in America, the court of last resort on federal and constitutional issues is the Supreme Court of the United States.  This fact makes that court a target of Trump's megalomania and desire to weaponize the court against those who oppose him and those he dislikes: non-whites, gays, non-Christians, - the list is a long one.  With several of the Court's justices in their 80's, Americans who care about democracy should be terrified of the prospect of a retirement which would allow Trump to appoint another bigoted ideology like Neil Gorsuch.   Pray that no justice retires before the end of January, 2019, and that the Democrats retake control of the U.S. Senate in the 2018 midterm elections.   A column in the Washington Post looks at Trump's sinister agenda.  Here are excerpts:

Think about that last sentence, which received way less attention, and condemnation, than it deserved: “We . . . must ALWAYS hold the Supreme Court,” as if it were the presidency or a house of Congress, a prize awarded to the electoral victors.

As always, Trump manages to combine ignorance and cunning. He is ignorant of — ignorant, really, to the point of allergic to — the importance of the judiciary as an independent institution and the operation of the rule of law. Yet he is also maliciously canny; this is a man who knows that nothing motivates his base more than the prospect of courts packed with conservative judges.

“When I got in, we had over 100 federal judges that weren’t appointed,” Trump observed the day after the Stevens tweet, somewhere in the middle of a speech on infrastructure. “It was like a big beautiful present to all of us. Why the hell did [President Barack Obama] leave that?” Um, because Republicans, led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), did their best to stall and block nominations?

For Trump, judges are just another set of crude political actors, on Team Trump or off it. When they rule against his political or financial interests, they are to be demeaned (“Mexican” judge, “so-called judge”) and bullied (“Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril,” Trump tweeted after a ruling halting his travel ban. “If something happens blame him and court system.”)

But the Supreme Court, his tweet notwithstanding, is not “held” by Republicans — it is occupied by judges, who are nominated by Republican or Democratic presidents and confirmed by a Senate that has a Republican or Democratic majority. Unlikely that Trump was aware of this, but Stevens — who turned out to be a stalwart liberal — was nominated by a Republican president, Gerald Ford.

That is why Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s famous umpire analogy, depicting judges as neutral arbiters dispassionately using their Very Big Brains to reason through legal problems, was so frustrating, unsatisfying and, ultimately, misleading. “I believe that there are right answers,” Roberts said, “and judges, if they work hard enough, are likely to come up with them.”

But judging doesn’t work that way, certainly not at the Supreme Court level. The justices are not computers, they are humans, very smart ones, with very well-thought-through views about the Constitution and the law.

Trump is in good company with his cynical instrumentalism: McConnell’s brute-force refusal to consider Merrick Garland’s nomination to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia stems from the same anything-goes conviction. 

And the future of the high court, and the judiciary generally, is not solely a Republican concern. My colleague Ronald Klainhas predicted a “battle of the ages” if Justice Anthony M. Kennedy retires this summer — one that Klain thinks will motivate Democrats even more than Republicans.

[T]he court functions best — it produces better results and stands a better chance of broad societal acceptance — when justices’ views are tested and contested, when they have to defend their interpretations and temper their positions to accommodate alternate ideologies.

A court composed entirely or overwhelmingly of justices appointed by presidents of a single party, whether Republican or Democratic, would not be a better court. It would be a far more flawed — and therefore more dangerous — branch.

Adding to my concern are two facts: (i) today's GOP put's party over country, and (ii) the American Bar Association - the country's largest association of attorneys - have rated many of Trump's federal court nominees as "unqualified."  Some have been so bad that their nominations were withdrawn.  Be very afraid if a justice retires before February 1, 2019.

Electing Hillary and the Importance of Filling the Supreme Court

A piece in The Advocate looks at an issue that ought to wake up Bernie Sanders supporters from their impossible dream: the desperate need to put a Democrat in the White House in November and the potential horrific consequences if Donald Trump - who has condemned the Obergefell ruling - were to be the one making nominations to the Court. Sanders may be endangering progressive causes for a generation if he allows his ego to over rule pragmatic, common sense thinking that may save the nation, and certainly LGBT citizens from the disaster of Trump appointments to the Court.   Here are some article highlights that ought to make Sanders supporters to awake from their dreams:

The post-Scalia court will likely confront a host of legal questions important to the LGBT community, from antigay “religious liberty” and employment discrimination to trans rights and bathroom access. It is not at all clear that the champion of marriage equality, Justice Anthony Kennedy, will again side with the liberals on these knotty issues. And it therefore seems quite likely that Scalia’s successor will hold the key to LGBT equality on a divided court. 

Given Kennedy’s famously sentimental marriage-equality opinion, the justice is often presumed to be a reliable vote in favor of gay rights against discrimination. But Kennedy has several competing passions — one of which is a near-absolute belief in a constitutional right to free association. In one especially regrettable 2000 decision, Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, Kennedy joined an opinion holding that the Boy Scouts have a First Amendment right to exclude gays from their group. Allowing gays to join, a slim majority of the court held, would “force the organization to send a message, both to the youth members and the world, that the Boy Scouts accepts homosexual conduct as a legitimate form of behavior.” Thus, the group was constitutionally exempt from LGBT nondiscrimination laws.

Kennedy’s willingness to join the Boy Scouts opinion has deeply troubling implications for the series of antigay “religious liberty” cases making their way toward the court’s docket. These cases typically involve businesses (such as photographers and florists) who refuse to serve same-sex couples on account of their religion, often couching their refusals in the language of free-speech and free-association claims. The antigay business owners who turn away gays insist that the First Amendment protects their right not to associate with gay couples; doing so, they assert, would express a message that they approve of same-sex relationships. 

This argument is cleverly crafted to capture Kennedy’s heart. The key difference between the Boy Scouts case and the “religious liberty” cases is the distinction between a private organization and a business. But the constitutional importance of this distinction can easily be waved away if one buys into the idea that merely associating with a gay person sends a message of tolerance — as Kennedy clearly does. Moreover, Kennedy provided the fifth vote for Hobby Lobby, a decision that vastly expanded private, for-profit corporations’ right to discriminate on religious grounds. With Scalia gone, the Hobby Lobby majority is now a man down; the justice’s replacement could reverse that case’s license to discriminate — or extend it to antigay businesses.

Gay and trans Americans have another Supreme Court showdown on the horizon. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans employment discrimination “because of sex.” . . . . the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has ruled that Title VII also proscribes anti-trans discrimination and antigay discrimination. Anti-trans discrimination, the agency held, is inherently based in sex stereotyping about women’s femininity and men’s masculinity; distaste for an individual’s gender identity is, by definition, a sex-based judgment call. Homophobia is similarly sexist, according to the EEOC:

But EEOC is just a federal agency, with no actual power over federal judges. Some federal courts have accepted these EEOC rulings; some have rejected them; none are bound by them — until the Supreme Court signs off, which it has not yet done. LGBT advocates have long been nervous that Kennedy will reject the EEOC’s comprehensive definition of sex discrimination and sex stereotyping. . . . . Once again, Scalia’s replacement may tip the balance one way or the other.

A constitutional challenge to North Carolina’s vicious new anti-LGBT law, which nullifies local LGBT rights ordinances and bars trans people from using many public bathrooms, centers its analysis on Romer. As well it should: Romer’s basic rule — that laws motivated by animus toward a single group are constitutionally invalid — would seem to obviously implicate bathroom bills. With no evidence that trans people pose a threat in bathrooms, the anti-trans animus driving these bills is essentially undeniable. Legislatures simply want to disadvantage trans people because they don’t like them. And if Romer means anything at all, it means the government doesn’t get to do that.

Which side of Kennedy will trans activists face? The compassionate author of Romer or the sexist traditionalist? With any luck, trans people’s rights won’t hinge on this question: A Democratic appointee to the high court is almost certain to side with equality over intolerance. Indeed, that justice may well hold the critical vote in the next round of LGBT cases. 

Let’s hope he or she makes it onto the bench in time to ensure that Obergefell was just the beginning of a new era of LGBT constitutional equality. 

U.S. Supreme Court Unanimously Reverses Alabama’s Anti-Gay Adoption Ruling

As if members of the LGBT community needed any more proof of how important it is that an anti-gay Republican NOT be elected to the White House in November, yesterday, the United States Supreme Court unanimously reversed an Alabama Supreme Court decision refusing to recognize a lesbian mother’s prior adoption of her three children. As a result of the ruling, the adoptive mother's rights to the children were restored.  The sad truth is that in a majority of states LGBT individuals and same sex couples continue to face bigotry and discrimination - always at the hands of god professing Christians and their political whores - with the federal courts being the only ultimate source of protection.  A press release from the Center for Lesbian Rights looks at this very important ruling.  Here are highlights:

(Washington, DC, March 7, 2016)—Today, the United States Supreme Court unanimously reversed an Alabama Supreme Court decision refusing to recognize a lesbian mother’s prior adoption of her three children in Georgia. Today’s summary reversal restores V.L. full rights as an adoptive parent.

“I am overjoyed that the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Alabama court decision,” said the adoptive mother, V.L. “I have been my children’s mother in every way for their whole lives. I thought that adopting them meant that we would be able to be together always. When the Alabama court said my adoption was invalid and I wasn’t their mother, I didn’t think I could go on. The Supreme Court has done what’s right for my family.”

“The Supreme Court’s reversal of Alabama’s unprecedented decision to void an adoption from another state is a victory not only for our client but for thousands of adopted families,” said National Center for Lesbian Rights Family Law Director Cathy Sakimura, who is representing V.L. “No adoptive parent or child should have to face the uncertainty and loss of being separated years after their adoption just because another state’s court disagrees with the law that was applied in their adoption.”

V.L and E.L. were in a long-term same-sex relationship in which they planned for and raised three children together, using donor insemination. To ensure that both had secure parental rights, V.L., the non-biological mother, adopted the couples’ three children in Georgia in 2007, with E.L.’s support and written consent. When the two later broke up, E.L. kept V.L. from seeing the children, fighting her request for visitation, and arguing that the Georgia adoption was invalid in Alabama, where they live.

In September 2015, the Alabama Supreme Court issued an order refusing to recognize V.L.’s Georgia adoption and declaring that it is “void.” 

Before this ruling, no state supreme court had refused to recognize a same-sex parent’s adoption from another state—or any out-of-state adoption—based on a disagreement with how the court issuing the adoption interpreted its own adoption laws. Under the United States Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit Clause, states are required to respect court judgments, including adoption orders, issued by courts in other states. V.L.’s request said “this Court’s review of the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision is urgently needed” because “the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision flouts a century of precedent on the Full Faith and Credit Clause and will have a devastating impact on Alabama adoptive families.”

In December 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the Alabama court’s decision, allowing V.L. to have visitation with her children while the Court considered her case.

Scalia's "Free" Trip to an Exclusive Resort

One of the things that judges, but federal judges in particular, are supposed to avoid is any appearance of impropriety or bias.  Having had two law partners become federal judges, I have seen the vetting process first hand and witnessed the efforts of these two individuals to refrain from any appearance of political partisanship or acceptance of gifts from those who might ever appear before them in court.  Not so with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, each of whom did little to hide their political or religious prejudices.  I have long argued that both needed to be removed from the Supreme Court if they could not abide by the canons of judicial conduct.  Likewise, as we now discover, nor did Scalia avoid accepting expensive gifts. As it turns out, Scalia was enjoying a free junket at the Cibolo Creek Ranch resortat the time he suffered his fatal heart attack.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this unseemly situation.  Here are excerpts:

Justice Antonin Scalia’s sudden death over the weekend at a West Texas ranch raised questions about the nature of his travel, who paid for the trip and whether justices are subject to the same disclosure guidelines as other judges or federal officials.

The ranch is 30,000-acre getaway that is home to John B. Poindexter, according to the website of J.B. Poindexter & Co. It is a remote location that has reportedly attracted the likes of Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall and Bruce Willis. 

All of which raises the question: Who pays for a Supreme Court justice to make this kind of trip?  Not Scalia, it turns out. Poindexter told The Washington Post that Scalia was not charged for his stay, something he described as a policy for all guests at the ranch.

“I did not pay for the Justice’s trip to Cibolo Creek Ranch,” Poindexter wrote in a brief email Tuesday. “He was an invited guest, along with a friend, just like 35 others.” . . . However, Poindexter said he did not pay for Scalia’s charter flight to Texas. . . . Poindexter, who would not identify Scalia’s friend . . . 

The nature of Poindexter’s relationship with Scalia remained unclear Tuesday, one of several lingering questions about his visit. It was not known whether Scalia had paid for his own ticket to fly to the ranch or if someone else picked up the tab, just as it was not immediately clear if Scalia had visited before.

It is also still not known who else was at the Texas ranch for the weekend, and unless that is revealed, there could be concerns about who could have tried to raise an issue around Scalia, said Stephen Gillers, who teaches legal and judicial ethics at the New York University School of Law.  

The 1978 Ethics in Government Act, passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal, states that all federal judges — up to and including the chief justice and the associate justices — are required to report certain gifts. It also requires them to identify and describe when someone who is not a relative gives them “transportation, lodging, food, or entertainment” worth a certain amount.

Scalia was among the court’s most active travelers. However, these disclosure forms offer scant details about who else attends events with the justices.

Judges must report reimbursements related to travel totaling $335 or more, according to filing instructions posted by the group Judicial Watch. And judges are not allowed to accept anything of value from a person who has a case in their court, the document notes.

The biggest ethical questions involve when justices should recuse themselves from cases, says Gillers.

“Is [the justice] the final arbiter of whether or not he has to recuse himself? And the answer is yes,” he said. “Every other federal judge below the Supreme Court, every other federal judge’s decision about whether or not he should be recused is potentially subject to the review of a higher judge or other judges on his court. But no one reviews the decision of a justice.”

Roberts issued his [2011] report at the end of a year in which more than 100 law professors nationwide asked Congress to give the Supreme Court an ethical code of conduct after it emerged that Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas had attended private political meetings sponsored by billionaire conservative donors David and Charles Koch. That same year, Kagan was called on to recuse herself from hearing challenges to health-care reform, and a watchdog group said Thomas had failed to report his wife’s income from a conservative think tank before he amended his financial forms.

In my view, Scalia was a very arrogant and bigoted man and one who cared little about the rights of others.  In many ways, he was the Donald Trump equivalent of the Supreme Court.  The Court is better without him.  

The Hypocrisy of Mitch McConnell on Supreme Court Appointments

As noted in the previous post, I loath Senator Mitch McConnell who embodies much of what is wrong with the nation's political class and GOP obstructionists in particular.  The man is a liar and hypocrite.  Even as he now seeks to block any Obama nominee to the United States Supreme Court to replace the bigoted and reactionary Antonin Scalia, McConnell seemingly has forgotten his own words back in 2005 when George W. Bush - perhaps the worse president in the nation's history - occupied the White House.  A reader sent me a link to Daily Kos which captures McConnell's total dishonesty and hypocrisy:

 Sen. Mitch McConnell, in 2005, defending the absolute right of a sitting president to nominate judges.

"The Constitution of the United States is at stake. Article II, Section 2 clearly provides that the President, and the President alone, nominates judges. The Senate is empowered to give advice and consent. But my Democratic colleagues want to change the rules. They want to reinterpret the Constitution to require a super majority for confirmation. In effect, they would take away the power to nominate from the President and grant it to a minority of 41 Senators."

"[T]he Republican conference intends to restore the principle that, regardless of party, any President's judicial nominees, after full debate, deserve a simple up-or-down vote. I know that some of our colleagues wish that restoration of this principle were not required. But it is a measured step that my friends on the other side of the aisle have unfortunately made necessary. For the first time in 214 years, they have changed the Senate's 'advise and consent' responsibilities to 'advise and obstruct.'"

Take it from Sen. Mitch McConnell: for the Senate to block a sitting president from nominating a Supreme Court nominee—not just a specific nominee, mind you, but any nominee at all, would put the Constitution of the United States itself at stake. And he's a patriot, so he would never even consider such a thing.

And some wonder why I left the Republican Party years ago - it has turned into something truly foul and seems to become even more foul with every passing day.

Supreme Court Stays Virginia Marriages, Inflicts Harm on Gays and Their Families

As many past posts on this blog have laid out in detail, the only true objection to same sex marriages derives from religious based bigotry.  All the other "arguments" do not hold water - as a string of federal court rulings have laid out in detail - and the Christofascists, their political whores in the Republican Party, and bigoted United States Supreme Court justices want to punish gays and withhold civil legal rights solely because of non-adherence to Christofascist hate, ignorance embracing and fear based religious beliefs.  Sadly, today the United States Supreme Court stayed the ruling of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit which would have allowed gay marriages to commence tomorrow morning in Virginia.  While one can hope the Court will ultimately strike down same sex marriage bans nationwide very soon, the short term results are that gays and their families are harmed while vile, nasty individuals like Victoria Cobb of The Family Foundation, Virginia's principal hate organization, bigoted cows like Michele McQuigg, Prince William County Circuit Court Clerk, and arrogant asses like Antonin Scalia for at least a short while longer can preen, pat themselves on the back for their self declared piety, and deprive other Americans of civil legal rights while granting special privileges to one religious faith group.  I suspect that the Founding Fathers, who were rightly suspicious of religion and opposed restricting civil rights based on religious belief would find the Court's action today abhorrent.  The Washington Blade has details on the Court's unfortunate action.  Here are excerpts:

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to a stay Wednesday on a federal appeals court’s ruling against Virginia’s ban on same-sex marriage, blocking same-sex marriages from taking place this week in the Old Dominion.

Without explanation, the court announced in a single-page order it has stayed the ruling by the U.S. Fourth Circuit of Appeals in Schaefer v. Bostic, which affirmed Virginia’s prohibition on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional.

Although Chief Justice John Roberts is responsible for stay requests in the Fourth Circuit, the order indicates he referred the matter to the entire court. The vote by the Supreme Court on the decision isn’t included in the order.

The court adds that if the court ends up declining a writ of certiorari to hear the case, the stay will terminate automatically. But if the court decides to hear the case, the stay will continue until judgment is issued.

Evan Wolfson, president of Freedom to Marry, said the stay decision from the Supreme Court “underscores of the urgency” of a national resolution in favor of marriage equality.

“Americans across the country are being deprived of the freedom to marry and respect for their lawful marriages, as well as the tangible protections and precious dignity and happiness that marriage brings,” Wolfson said. “It is time for the Supreme Court to affirm what more than thirty courts have held in the past year: marriage discrimination violates the Constitution, harms families, and is unworthy of America.”

Prior to the announcement from the Supreme Court, the anti-gay legal firm Alliance Defending Freedom, which is defending Virginia’s marriage ban on behalf of McQuigg, followed up with a response insisting that a stay on the Fourth Circuit decision is necessary to prevent harm to the state. 

As noted before, I hope history views Victoria Cobb, Michele McQuigg and Antonin Scalia, et al, with the same scorn as segregationists of the past and judges who ruled in favor of slavery and later segregation and bans on interracial marriage.  Hate and bigotry are still hate and bigotry no matter how one tries to wrap it in feigned religiosity.

 

Utah AG Emergency Stay Request: Recognizing Gay Marriages "Harms" State

The disingenuousness (can we say lies?) of anti-gay bigots and their whore like minions in the Republican Party at times seems to know no limits.  In the wake of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that Utah must recognize same sex marriages performed in Utah before the stay of the U.S. District Court ruling striking down Utah's gay marriage ban, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes (pictured above) has filed a 35-page emergency stay request U.S. Supreme Court.  In the filing, Reyes claims that recognizing the roughly 1000 marriage would cause harm to the state of Utah. How?  The same old usual bullshit arguments that have been rejected by U.S. District courts across the country, not to mention the 10th Circuit.  The New Civil Rights Movement looks at Reyes' batshitery:

The 10th Circuit federal Court of Appeals Friday evening ruled that a stay requested by the State of Utah will indeed expire and the State will have to recognize the legal civil marriages of about 1300 same-sex couples performed in December and January, unless the Supreme Court were to intervene.
This evening, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes filed a 35-page emergency request for a stay with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

"Absent a stay," Reyes' petition claims, "there is a likelihood—indeed, a certainty—of irreparable harm to the State" should it be forced to recognize the 1300 legal civil marriages of same-sex couples.

Reyes claims recognizing the 1300 "interim marriages," as he calls them, will "moot the novel issues involved," denying the courts an opportunity to examine them.

The Utah Attorney General forgets that these marriages do not represent legal issues, but people -- the very citizens he claims "are better served by obtaining complete, final judicial resolution of these issues."

Reyes also seemingly chastises the Supreme Court in advance -- declaring the State of Utah "will be irreparably harmed without a stay. In denying a stay pending appeal, this court is running roughshod over state laws which are currently in force. It is disingenuous to contend that the State will suffer no harm if the matter is not stayed; undoing what is about to be done will be labyrinthine and has the very real possibility to moot important issues that deserve serious consideration."

Despite the Supreme Court's decision last summer in Windsor, striking down Section 3 of DOMA, and despite several dozen rulings in federal courts -- all favorable to same-sex marriage -- Reyes claims "the State has shown a likelihood of success on the merits."  Hardly.

The Salt Lake Tribune tonight reminds that just last week at the 10th Circuit, a "panel of three judges — the same panel which upheld another federal judge’s ruling that invalidated Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage because he found it violates citizens’ Fourteenth Amendment rights — declared Utah failed to prove it would suffer irreparable harm in recognizing the marriages and didn’t demonstrate that the state is likely to prevail in its appeal."

The reality is that the only "harm" will be that Christofascists will not be able to deprive 1000+ same sex couples equality under the civil laws and not be able to inflict their toxic, hate based religious beliefs on all the citizens of Utah.

Is Scalia in Denial About His Own Homophobia?

As even casual readers have likely figure out, I do not like Justice Antonin Scalia and believe it is time for him to either retire or be removed from the United States Supreme Court.  The man doesn't even attempt to appear impartial before hearing cases and he makes a mockery of the federal judiciary supposedly staying out of partisan activities.  And on issues of gay rights, one has lost the case before the first pleading is filed.  A piece in Slate looks at Scalia's inability to recognize his own anti-gay bigotry,  Here are highlights:

New York magazine’s expansive new interview with Supreme Court Justice (and lecture-circuit troll) Antonin Scalia contains a number of delightful revelations—he thinks the soup Nazi is hilarious! he doesn’t want ladies to use the F-word!—but the real fun lies in his tortured justification for his gay rights jurisprudence. When Jennifer Senior asks the justice about his attitudes toward homosexuality, Scalia spins out this specious yarn:

I’m not a hater of homosexuals at all. ... I still think it’s Catholic teaching that it’s wrong. Okay? But I don’t hate the people that engage in it. In my legal opinions, all I’ve said is that I don’t think the Constitution requires the people to adopt one view or the other. ... [I’m] not saying I personally think it’s destructive. Americans have a right to feel that way. They have a democratic right to do that, and if it is to change, it should change democratically, and not at the ukase of a Supreme Court.

This, to quote Scalia himself, is argle-bargle. The justice wants us to believe that his personal views on homosexuality have absolutely no bearing on his jurisprudence and that his legal opinions on gay rights are simply cerebral exercises in judicial reasoning. 

Scalia’s writings on gay rights explode any notion of judicial remove, rocketing beyond casual homophobia into the repugnant realm of virulently anti-gay invective. Scalia has compared homosexuality to murder, polygamy, and animal abuse. He’s analogized gay people to drug addicts and prostitutes and likened gay sex to incest, adultery, and bestiality. He’s echoed his son in questioning whether gay people even exist, suggesting that homosexuality is actually aberrant, depraved conduct rather than a true identity. And he’s derided the “homosexual agenda” for “eliminating the moral opprobrium” against “a lifestyle [many Americans] believe to be immoral and destructive.”

 Scalia wants to spout this censure while also insisting—as he does in the opinion quoted above—that “I have nothing against homosexuals.”

[L]et’s be clear here: Whatever he says in this interview, Antonin Scalia really, really hates gay people. He thinks they’re wicked and twisted and deviant; he suspects they’re insidiously indoctrinating America with perverted values; he thinks homophobes are merely “protecting themselves and their families” from homosexuality’s corrupting immorality.

None of this, moreover, is conjecture: It is all taken straight from the justice’s own writings and copious public comments. These comments aren’t one-off gaffes; they’re an endless barrage, which, taken together, form a consistent philosophy of unrelenting homophobia. If Scalia feels constantly compelled to air his grievances about gay rights, so be it. But it’s intellectually dishonest for him to simultaneously maintain that these beliefs have no bearing on his jurisprudence.

There's more, but you get the idea!

Supreme Court Justice Souter to Retire

In what will set the stage for the first test of what kind of justice Barack Obama will nominate to the United States, Justice David Souter has announced that he intends to retire at the end of the current term of the Court. Souter has been a liberal to moderate justice and we can only hope that Obama selects someone of a similar judicial temperament. Having suffered personally at the hands of judges who in my opinion cannot separate their personal religious views from the administration of the civil laws, I hope Obama makes sure his nominee understands the concept of separation of church and state. Thank God there is no Republican the White House currently. Here are some highlights from NPR:

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NPR has learned that Supreme Court Justice David Souter is planning to retire at the end of the current court term. The vacancy will give President Obama his first chance to name a member of the high court and begin to shape its future direction.

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At 69, Souter is nowhere near the oldest member of the court. In fact, he is in the younger half of the court's age range, with five justices older and just three younger. So far as anyone knows, he is in good health. But he has made clear to friends for some time that he wanted to leave Washington, a city he has never liked, and return to his native New Hampshire. Now, according to reliable sources, he has decided to take the plunge and has informed the White House of his decision.

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Factors in his decision no doubt include the election of President Obama, who would be more likely to appoint a successor attuned to the principles Souter has followed as a moderate-to-liberal member of the court's more liberal bloc over the past two decades.

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Possible nominees who have been mentioned as being on a theoretical short list include Elena Kagan, the current solicitor general who represents the government before the Supreme Court; Sonia Sotomayor, a Hispanic judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; and Diane Wood, a federal judge in Chicago who taught at the University of Chicago at the same time future President Barack Obama was teaching constitutional law there.