And Now For Something Completely Different…

It’s 5:26 Eastern Standard Time and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is still dead.

Justice Scalia apparently passed away in his sleep, at the age of 79, while on a “hunting” trip in Texas.  As deaths go this is pretty much a conservative Republican’s wet dream.  So good for him.  Incidentally I put hunting in quotes up there because my understanding was that this was one of those quail hunts, where the quail are all but domestic pets who are suddenly taken out one day, stuffed in thickets and then wait, too terrified to move, until a dog, (or on really tough days a guide), flushes them out of the thicket, whereupon, assuming no attorneys are in the way, a fat-ass elderly Republican like Dick Cheney blasts them out of the sky with a shotgun.

C’est l’vie bird.

Justice Scalia was the first Italian-America appointed to the bench.  He was approved unanimously and served for nearly 30 years.  Scalia was an “originalist”, (alternatively called the “Old man yells at cloud” theory of Constitutional interpretation) ,   and on many occasions seems determined to bring the United States back to the peak of his greatness, which he seemed to believe was right around 1826, when Jefferson and Adams died within hours of each other.  He could be, and more often than not was, scathing in his dissents, or even when in the majority and addressing the arguments of dissenting Justices.

Scalia’s legacy will be a complicated one.  There’s no doubt he was a brilliant jurist and well deserving of his position on the Supreme Court.  There’s also no doubt that, if he had his way, gays would remain very much second class citizens, denied not just the right to marry but the right to have sex with another consenting adult should a state decide that was a good idea.  Scalia wasn’t much for racial quotas, actually voted to overrule Miranda v. Arizona, (with apparently no consideration given to how that would effect the writers of detective procedurals), and LOVED the death penalty.  He was, in my opinion justifiably, criticized for allowing religious views, both his own and what he perceived as the religious beliefs of the majority of Americans, to affect the way he looked at cases, particularly regarding teh gays.

For every criticism us liberal types come up with however there’s a conservative who will praise Scalia for leading the charge to protect American exceptionalism and all the traditional values that made us the greatest country in the world.  The traditional values that made us so great, by the way, are having a great Navy and being located between Canada and Mexico and in the  middle of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans while Europe and Asia teed off on each other, (with our help), in WWII, leaving us as the only intact industrial nation in a world that needed lots of stuff that only we could make.  It’s been downhill since.

But I digress.

The point is Constitutional Law is not black and white.  For every position I have there’s an alternate position(s) and for every position Scalia had there’s an alternate one or more.  I don’t have a lot of respect for the way he argued those positions, particularly towards the end of his career, but he had the right and the ability to make them, and make them as well as he could.  I’m not going to celebrate Antonin Scalia dying, (karma only goes so far and I’m saving that party for Dick Cheney), but I am going to celebrate that there is now an opening on the Supreme Court, caused by an arch-conservative leaving this mortal coil and finding out the answers to many mysteries, such as whether or not the Devil is real, and President Obama gets to at least try to fill it as one of his last acts as President.

That appointment promises to be a clusterfuck of epic proportions.  It may even be enough to save Twitter’s stock price!

Now back to dick jokes, football and Sill’s rugby world tour.