Scalia Dissent: SCOTUS Gay Marriage Ruling Represents ‘Threat to Democracy’

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia issued yet another of his trademarked biting dissents in Obergefell v. Hodges, calling the majority’s pro-gay marriage ruling a “threat to democracy.”

Scalia joined Chief Justice John Roberts‘ chief dissent, but dissented separately to voice just how disappointed he was in the decision. Scalia voiced indifference to the issue of gay marriage itself, but wrote that it was the legislatures’ responsibility to address the issue, not the courts.

“Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court,” Scalia wrote. “The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact— and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create ‘liberties’ that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention.’”

“This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.”

 

He continued to say that it was unimaginable that the drafters in the of the Fourteenth Amendment back in the 1860’s intended to make gay marriage bans unconstitutional. “The five Justices who compose today’s majority… have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a ‘fundamental right’ overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since.”

Scalia even went after the justices’ personal history, accusing them of being unrepresentative of the American public. “Four of the nine are natives of New York City. Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States. Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between. Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans), or even a Protestant of any denomination.”

“The strikingly unrepresentative character of the body voting on today’s social upheaval would be irrelevant if they were functioning as judges…” Scalia wrote.

Via: Mediaite.com

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Awesome! Justice Scalia Goes Nuclear In Obamacare Dissent, “We Should Start Calling This Law SCOTUScare”…

Scalia +1,000,000

1. “Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the State.’”

2. “Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved.”

3. “Today’s interpretation is not merely unnatural; it is unheard of.”

4. “And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.”

5. “We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.”

Via Weasel Zippers

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[BREAKING NEWS] SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS NATIONWIDE HEALTH CARE LAW SUBSIDIES

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the nationwide tax subsidies under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, in a ruling that preserves health insurance for millions of Americans.

The justices said in a 6-3 ruling that the subsidies that 8.7 million people currently receive to make insurance affordable do not depend on where they live, under the 2010 health care law.

The outcome is the second major victory for Obama in politically charged Supreme Court tests of his most significant domestic achievement. It came the same day the court gave the administration an unexpected victory by preserving a key tool the administration uses to fight housing bias.

Chief Justice John Roberts again voted with his liberal colleagues in support of the law. Roberts also was the key vote to uphold the law in 2012. Justice Anthony Kennedy, a dissenter in 2012, was part of the majority on Thursday.

"Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them," Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.

In a dissent he summarized from the bench, Justice Antonin Scalia said, "We should start calling this law SCOTUS care." Using the acronym for the Supreme Court, Scalia said his colleagues have twice stepped in to save the law from what Scalia considered worthy challenges.

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas joined the dissent, as they did in 2012.

Nationally, 10.2 million people have signed up for health insurance under the Obama health overhaul. That includes the 8.7 million people who are receiving an average subsidy of $272 a month to help pay their insurance premiums.

Via: AP

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Ex Parte Scalia

Is the U.S. Senate really the least democratic legislative 

chamber in the world?

IF WE CONSTITUTIONAL fundamentalists ever triumph in the courts, the person to have whispering the reminder that all glory is fleeting would be Hendrik Hertzberg. A former chief speechwriter for President Carter and now a writer for the New Yorker, he is an honest liberal—and a crafty constitutionalist. He is just out with a column on the only remaining feature of the Constitution that the parchment itself says can’t be amended, namely the equal representation in the Senate of each state, no matter what its population. 

Hertzberg’s column came up on the scope when I started poking around about the logic of the Senate, which has been creeping into the national conversation. There was the 13-hour filibuster against drones mounted by Rand Paul. There are all of Harry Reid’s threats to use the “nuclear option”—to change the chamber’s rules so that certain filibusters can be ended with just a simple majority, instead of the 60 votes now required. There is the rat-a-tat of the New York Times against the evils of the upper house, the latest being that it is the “least democratic legislative chamber in any developed nation.”

That phrase is from a dispatch the other day by Adam Liptak, the Times’s Supreme Court reporter and a cagey constitutionalist in his own right. He filed his piece from Rutland, Vermont, where, by his calculation, a voter has 30 times the representation in the Senate of a voter just over the state line in New York. This is owing to the fact that New York has 19 million persons and Vermont 625,000. He reports that the largest gap, between California and Wyoming, is more than twice as big. So in theory, each of Wyoming’s citizens is represented 60 times as much as each of California’s.

Via: The American Spectator

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Antonin Scalia: 14th Amendment Protects Everyone, Not 'Only The Blacks'

During oral arguments on an affirmative action case on Tuesday, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said the 14th Amendment protects everyone, not "only the blacks."

The quote was tweeted by the New York Times' David Leonhardt:

The high court debated Tuesday whether voters can ban affirmative action programs through a referendum. The case is centered around a 2006 Michigan vote that approved a ballot initiative amending the state's constitution to ban affirmative action programs in higher education.

Scalia has brought race into previous arguments. In February 2013, Scalia suggestedthat the continuation of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act represented the "perpetuation of racial entitlement," saying that lawmakers had only voted to renew the act in 2006 because there wasn't anything to be gained politically from voting against it.

Via: Huffington Post Politics

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Book: Justice Scalia ‘Enraged’ With Chief Justice Roberts Over Obamacare Decision

(THE BLAZE) A new book details how Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the liberal wing of the court to uphold President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul and says Justice Antonin Scalia was “enraged” at him for doing so.

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin’s “The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court“ says the other four conservative justices on the court wanted to ”kill off the entire health care law,“ alienating Roberts who sought out a ”middle ground,” according to excerpts of the book published Saturday by Politico.

A lifelong Republican, Roberts originally intended to vote to overturn the law, but it became apparent to the other justices in April and May that he was going “wobbly,” Toobin wrote:

“The four conservatives had overplayed their hand with the chief justice. By demanding that Roberts kill off the entire health care law, they prompted him to look for some kind of middle ground. … [Justice Antonin ] Scalia was enraged at the chief.”

“Wobbly,” incidentally, is the same word sources used to describe Roberts in a major CBS News story published just days after the court announced its decision.

Part of the reason for Roberts’ switch, according to Toobin, is that he had two goals for his tenure as chief: “to push his own ideological agenda but also to preserve the court’s place as a respected final arbiter of the nation’s disputes.”

A complete nullification of the health care law on the eve of a presidential election would put the Court at the center of the campaign … Democrats, and perhaps Obama himself, would crusade against the Court, eroding its moral if not its legal authority. … Gradually, then with more urgency, Roberts began looking for a way out. …

Via: Pat Dollard

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