Supreme Court's Future Could Go to the Voters
The Onion's wizards of wacky wit struck just the proper tone with this headline: "Justice Scalia Dead Following 30-year Battle With Social Progress."
I can easily imagine the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who professed a robust belief in the existence of heaven, would have nodded his approval of that satirical sendoff.
He defended his conservatism with the happy abandon of William F. Buckley's classic definition of a conservative: "someone who stands athwart history yelling Stop."
Scalia was a giant as an "originalist," which also is the title of a play about the justice that premiered in Washington last year.
Originalism, simply put, holds that the Constitution must be applied based on the original meaning of its text, not on legislative history or the assumed intention of its authors.
In other words, we are to judge justice in today's world by the standards of a time when women and nonwhites could not vote and slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of reapportionment.
I prefer the view of the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, who was about as liberal as Scalia was conservative. Marshall observed that the original Constitution should be celebrated, not for the rights it failed to include but for the ingenious ways that it contains the tools for its own improvement -- through the amendment process.
Yet, as much as I disagreed with Scalia, I read his arguments with the admiration of someone who appreciated the challenges he posed. Regardless of where you stand, it pays to keep track of what your adversaries are up to.
I also admired his cordial relationship with his liberal colleagues, particularly fellow Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But as one long-tenured Washingtonian once told me, "If you let politics get in the way, you'll never have any friends in this town."
Which brings us to the big political showdown that Scalia's death immediately ignited.
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