Here is an interesting
piece from EJ Dionne.
Quote:
Justice Scalia must resign
Justice Antonin Scalia needs to resign from the Supreme Court.
He’d have a lot of things to do. He’s a fine public speaker and teacher. He’d be a heck of a columnist and blogger. But he really seems to aspire to being a politician — and that’s the problem.
So often, Scalia has chosen to ignore the obligation of a Supreme Court justice to be, and appear to be, impartial. He’s turned “judicial restraint” into an oxymoronic phrase. But what he did this week, when the court announced its decision on the Arizona immigration law, should be the end of the line.
Not content with issuing a fiery written dissent, Scalia offered a bench statement questioning President Obama’s decision to allow some immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children to stay. Obama’s move had nothing to do with the case in question. Scalia just wanted you to know where he stood.
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Ah, Scalia. The man who assumed that Bush would naturally ask him to become Chief Justice after Rehnquist. He was wrong; Bush picked Roberts.
So now we have this health care ruling. One would expect Scalia to come totally unglued and denounce it as well, per the example in EJ Dionne's piece, above.
But wait: SC Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the
majority in very
significant way.
Scalia will be forced to choose between:
(a) giving into his true nature in a public display of overt partisanship or
(b) keeping his mouth shut in order not to piss off his boss.
Frankly, I wonder if that isn't the reason why Roberts sided with the majority - to finally put a cork in Scalia's senile mouth and prevent such outbursts. That, and to also remind Scalia that it was Roberts who was chosen as Chief Justice, and *not* Scalia. The public behavior of Scalia suggests that he would prefer to *not* remember that, unless he is forced to do so.