Scalia embodies power corrupt right wing

[struggle4progress]

Ted Frier
JUNE 27, 2012 1:00PM

... In his scathing dissent in United States v. Arizona, where a 5-3 Court majority struck down that state's infamous "papers please" immigration statute, Scalia put aside the law and launched into a highly-partisan, ad hominem, rant against the Obama administration over policies, such as the presidential directive on the DREAM Act, totally unrelated to the issues before the Court.

According to Milbank, Scalia thundered that the Obama administration "desperately wants to avoid upsetting foreign powers;" that it was acting with "willful blindness or deliberate inattention" to Arizona's illegal immigrants; that the majority's opinion "boggles the mind;" and that the states are "at the mercy of the Federal Executive's refusal to enforce the nation's immigration laws."

Salon's Nathan Pippenger added that Scalia offered "plenty of FOX News-ready invective" about Arizona residents who "feel themselves under siege by large numbers of illegal immigrants who invade their property, strain their social services, and even place their lives in jeopardy."

As Scalia's stunned audience listened to what Pippenger described as Scalia's "bellowing, bullying and bombastic" screed, the Justice came off sounding like some crazed neo-Confederate re-enactor reminiscing about the Lost Southern Cause and "the jealousy of the states with regard to their sovereignty" ...

http://open.salon.com/blog/ted_frier/2012/06/27/scalia_embodies_power_corrupt_right_wing

[Hestia]

1. This article nails Scalia

The last two paragraphs of the article -

Conservative administrations in the past have nominated conservative Justices, says Fallows. But none have been like the "radical partisans" who now constitute the five-member conservative Catholic majority of the Roberts Court -- one that "overthrows precedent to get to the party-politics result they want" and acts with its own papal infallibility to empower the kind of oligarchic hierarchy we associate more with the Catholic Church than the American Republic.

However brilliant Antonin Scalia may be, his thuggish outbursts from the bench and his petulant, adolescent contempt for accepted norms of behavior when things don't go his way mark him out to be one of Lippmann's uncivilized primitives - and just like the autocrats he champions.

[CanonRay]

2. Scalia "sounding like some crazed neo-confederate re-enactor"

My personal favorite.