Scalia
About the man himself, there isn’t much to say that Ross Douthat didn’t already say. I’ll only add that his iconic status should really go beyond the political or the legal. He’s the patron saint of swimming against the tide and doing it magnificently. The tide moves on nonetheless.
As far as the political fallout goes, everyone on the right suddenly has a strong principled opposition to confirming SCOTUS nominations in an election year. Everyone on the left suddenly has a strong principled stance that the president has an absolute right to have his nominees confirmed no matter how much time is left in his term.
This is silly. Everyone knows that if Ruth Ginsburg had died in early 2008, they’d all be arguing the reverse. The Constitution is silent on the matter, so spare me the arguments from abstract principle.
Here is the real argument for blocking Obama’s nominee: The Left’s main path for crushing its enemies has been through the courts. One more leftist on the court gives them free rein. Any Republican who lets in an Obama nominee through the Trojan horse of comity and tradition is a traitor to Christians and everyone else not under the left-wing umbrella, and should be treated accordingly.
Filed under: We transcend your bourgeois categories | Tags: legal wonkery, Obama, Republican, Supreme Court
Bruce Charlton
February 15, 2016
It was contemplating the Supreme Court over several years which was one of the factors in my recognizing the badness of voting as a system of decision making
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/evils-of-voting.html
This means all types of voting. Because everything suggests that a small, highly selected, expert group who work together on very tightly specificed jobs (i.e. the SUpreme Court) ought to be able to overcome the hopelessness of the voting system if anyone could. But they can’t.
Most other systems of voting (such as elections) are so ludicrously stupid and wickedly unaccountable that they are indefensible even in principle.
The fact that the average person has internalized the propaganda that voting is the only ‘just’ way of making any important decision (while still doing everything in his power to ‘rig’ the vote) is a major factor in the decline of the The West.
Zen
February 15, 2016
Churchill was very close to exactly right when he said that Democracy was the worst possible system, except for all the others.
So long as we are governed by man, things will be imperfect. And so long as we are governed by wicked men, “the people will mourn”.
But the time will come when God himself will say he has given us a fair trial of 6000 years to govern ourselves, and the next 1000 years He will govern the world.
(My understanding of Hebrew numbers suggests the 1000 in this case just means, a really, really long time)
Bruce Charlton
February 15, 2016
@Zen – Greatly tho’ I respect him, I am sure that Churchill would not have said the same if he had been around today – and he did regard King Alfred the Great as the greatest ever Englishman.
At any rate, our attitude of the supreme validity and wisdom of voting is on the one hand insincere (we don’t really believe it) and on the other hand it isn’t true when it comes to really important things that we know about.
No man is a ‘democrat’ concerning matters he understands and cares about!
Leo
February 15, 2016
Bruce,
Interesting thought.
If Supreme Court decisions had to be unanimous, its decisions would be much more conservative and would carry greater weight when breaking new ground (e.g. Brown vs. Board of Education, which was unanimous).
Unanimity would create a much different dynamic within the court. This is hard to imagine since the Court has now become a political branch.
It could work for a small, highly selected, expert group working together if they were committed to the principle of unanimity. The Constitution would have to require that only unanimous decisions would be binding on the lower courts and on the people. Very interesting thought, indeed.
Bruce Charlton
February 16, 2016
@Leo – It certainly generates a completely different mindset. It is also the way that most religious ‘committees’ work – such as the LDS General Authorites, and the early councils of the undivided Catholic church. I believe the Eastern Orthodox still adhere to this principle.
But I believe that, like any procedure or method, it will only lead to good decisions when there is a unity based upon a common religious basis – otherwise it would probably only result in mediocre decisions (for example electing mediocre people on negative grounds of inoffensiveness and having nothing against them).
In other words, the decision must be guided by prayer, meditation, and the principle of being subordinated to a higher will. It is the lack of this which allows and encourages manipulation, short termism, in-fighting, horse-trading, bribery and intimidation and … partisanship and in general makes modern democracy so disgusting (whether in national elections or in the innumerable committees which rule modern institutions).
The Supreme Court has, for me, lost all credibility following the (almost literally) last minute reversal of the Chief Justice wrt Obamacare – that event bore all the hallmarks of coercion and intimidation.
From where I stand, in the past 8 years the US has crossed the line into de facto banana republic – and this election will therefore be different from all previous ones – the ‘real deals’ will be happening out of public vision and the result will be constructed to reflect those deals.
Agellius
February 17, 2016
Love the Thomas More hat.