POLITICS AND THE SUPREMES - Antonin Scalia isn’t sweating it. At a book reading and lecture at Washington’s American Enterprise Institute this week, the 76-year-old associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and self-described “textualist” entertained the crowd by rattling off a litany of his top judicial no-brainers.
“The death penalty? Give me a break. It’s easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the Constitution prevented restrictions on abortion,” he said. “Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state.” And then he went to bed that night and slept like a baby.
Scalia’s breathtaking nonchalance doesn’t come as any huge surprise to anyone familiar with the Roe v. Wade–opposing, affirmative action–blocking, death penalty–loving Reagan appointee’s strict interpretation of the Constitution as an immutable template of American justice. In the past, he’s argued that “the risk of assessing evolving standards is that it is all too easy to believe that evolution has culminated in one’s own views.”
(The rest of Mary Elizabeth Williams Salon.com column here.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 10 Issue 81
Pub: Oct 9, 2012