The voting rights decision was a pet project of Chief Justice Roberts, an opponent of the Voting Rights Act since his days as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration. But Justice Scalia was much more than just a passenger. His behavior during the oral argument gave a public face to the ugliness behind the attack on the foundational civil rights law, which both houses of Congress had reauthorized by overwhelming margins.
.. His frequent parroting of right-wing talking points in recent years may have reflected the contraction of his intellectual universe. In an interview with the writer Jennifer Senior (now a New York Times book critic) in New York magazine in 2013, Justice Scalia said he got most of his news from the car radio and from skimming The Wall Street Journal and the conservative Washington Times. He said he stopped reading The Washington Post because it had become so “shrilly, shrilly liberal” that he “couldn’t handle it anymore.”
.. These insights might help explain why someone as smart as Antonin Scalia seemed so un-self-conscious about his inflammatory rhetoric. He was simply giving voice to those he spent his time with. His world was one that reinforced and never challenged him.
.. About 10 years ago, I attended a gathering of Canadian judges and lawyers at Cambridge University. Justice Scalia gave his stump speech there about how his Constitution was not “living” but “dead,” with legitimate constitutional interpretation limited to the words and original understanding of the document’s authors. He may or may not have known that in Canada, constitutional interpretation starts from the premise that “the Constitution is a living tree.”
.. But I came to realize that Justice Scalia wasn’t playing the inside game. No matter that he never persuaded a majority of his fellow conservatives on the court to sign up for his brand of originalism.
What mattered was his ability to invoke originalism as a mobilizing tool outside the court, in speeches and in dissenting opinions. The message was that courts have no business recognizing “new” rights. (Except, evidently, new rights of which Justice Scalia approved, such as an unconstrained right for corporations to spend money in politics.)
.. Within a matter of months, federal district judges around the country invoked Justice Scalia’s dissent in striking down same-sex marriage bans. The much less polemical dissent in Windsor by Chief Justice Roberts, describing the decision as a narrow one based on principles of federalism, went uncited.
Had Justice Scalia overreached?
What Would Scalia Want in His Successor? A Dissent Offers Clues
Justice Scalia wrote, the court “consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School.” Justice Scalia attended Harvard, as did five other members of the court. The other three went to Yale.
.. Since Justice John Paul Stevens retired in 2010, the court, for the first time, has no Protestant member. Justice Scalia was Catholic, as are five other justices. The other three are Jewish.
.. Justice Scalia also surveyed the lack of geographical diversity on his court. “Four of the nine are natives of New York City,” he wrote.
Indeed, every borough but Staten Island was represented. Justice Scalia was from Queens. Justice Ginsburg is from Brooklyn, Justice Kagan is from Manhattan and Justice Sonia Sotomayor is from the Bronx.
What Liberals Learned From Antonin Scalia
The fact that today the court’s right-leaning bloc has far more interesting internal disagreements than the often lock-step-voting liberal wing is itself a testament to the premium its leading intellectual light placed on philosophical rigor and integrity.
.. and it makes it impossible to imagine Republican senators confirming an Obama appointee in the next 11 months. And it’s probably a good thing for the republic that they won’t: If there is to be a liberal replacement for a figure as towering as Scalia, if the court is about to swing sharply to the left, it’s far better for the judicial branch’s legitimacy if that swing follows a democratic election, a campaign in which the high court stakes are front and center in the race.
Elizabeth Warren: One Way to Rebuild Our Institutions
When Novartis, a major drug company that was already effectively on federal probation for misconduct, paid kickbacks to pharmacies to push certain drugs, it cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and undermined patient health. Under the law, the government can boot companies that defraud Medicare and Medicaid out of those programs, but when Novartis got caught, it just paid a penalty — one so laughably small that its C.E.O. said afterward that it “remains to be seen” whether his company would actually consider changing its behavior.
.. Last year, five of the world’s biggest banks, including JPMorgan Chase, pleaded guilty to criminal charges that they rigged the price of billions of dollars worth of foreign currencies. No corporation can break the law unless people in that corporation also broke the law, but no one from any of those banks has been charged. While thousands of Americans were rotting in prison for nonviolent drug convictions, JPMorgan Chase was so chastened by pleading guilty to a crime that it awarded Jamie Dimon, its C.E.O., a 35 percent raise.
.. Personnel is policy.