Antonin Scalia, Follow-Up

The reaction is starting to hit the blogosphere. Here's my comment at a post at Box Turtle Bulletin:

I have no particular feelings about Scalia’s death, except that it’s always sad for someone when someone dies.

He may very well have been a brilliant legal mind, but he never let that get in the way of his ideology, and he was an ideologue — I always thought of him as the Vatican’s representative on the Supreme Court.

He’s been called a “true conservative,” which perverts the meaning of conservative: he was a reactionary, pure and simple. As a thought experiment, compare him to Richard Posner, who sits on the Seventh Circuit: a real legal scholar, a brilliant analyst with impeccable conservative credentials, and a jurist who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. (His opinion in Baskin [http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj/usca7_ssm_20140904.pdf] is not only erudite, but scathing in its dismissal of the states’ claims. I wouldn’t mind at all seeing Posner nominated to take Scalia’s place — he’s everything Scalia was not.)

What’s going to happen is that anyone Obama nominates is going to be ignored by the Senate. Even if there is pressure to proceed with a confirmation vote, some red-state asshole will put a hold on it.

But then, this is the Republican party, which is still working on making Obama a one-term president.

Also, here's Jim Burroway's commentary on Scalia's "brilliant legal mind."

In the next several days, we’ll have a number of pious politicos tell us what a great Justice he was, and why they want more Justices like him on the bench. And we’re also going to hear a number of politicians and thought leaders tell us what horrible people we are for remembering Scalia for the judicial scourge that he was. But how can we remember him otherwise, particularly when his oft-quoted dissents from four landmark gay rights cases are so memorable?

So in the interest of remembering that great man Antonin Gregory Scalia, here are some choice quotes from those four dissents.

It's worth reading the whole post, just to see Scalia skewered by his own words.

This, from Ted Cruz, via Joe.My.God., is pretty funny -- but then, consider the source:

Today our Nation mourns the loss of one of the greatest Justices in history – Justice Antonin Scalia. A champion of our liberties and a stalwart defender of the Constitution, he will go down as one of the few Justices who single-handedly changed the course of legal history.

You have to wonder if someone in Cruz' camp was able to write this with a straight face.

Cruz, of course, is only one of the Republicans who are calling on the Senate to stall on any nomination from Obama, because Freedom! and the Constitution! (With just a bit of racism and obstructionism.)

For a fun Twitter recap, see this post at Balloon Juice.

John Cole has a no-holds-barred post at Balloon Juice that sort of sums up Scalia pretty well:

“There is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough), for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction.”

“My concern is that in making life easier for ourselves we not appear to make it harder for the lower federal courts, imposing upon them the burden of regularly analyzing newly-discovered-evidence-of-innocence claims in capital cases (in which event such federal claims, it can confidently be predicted, will become routine and even repetitive).” – Antonin Scalia

This is the man that Ted Cruz called an "American hero."

And of course, the tinfoil hat brigade is out in full force. From conspiracy theorist and all-out wingnut Alex Jones (video at the link):

Jones: My friends, it's Saturday night, this is an emergency transmission.

Jones: The question is, was Antonin Scalia murdered? And the answer to that is, has the Bill of Rights and Constitution been murdered? Has it been reported that members of the Supreme Court have been blackmailed? Yes it has.

When they kill somebody they say, "it appears to be natural causes, nothing to see."

And I wish it was natural cause, but man, my gut tells me no. And if this is an assassination, this signifies that they are dropping the hammer.

I'm not making this up.

Feel free to add any of your own favorite reactions in the comments.