U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died at the age of 79 in his sleep. He was on a hunting trip in Texas with friends and went to bed Friday night commenting to his friend that he wasn’t feeling very well. He died peacefully in his sleep. I know many people despised him, claiming he was a crazy conservative. I have read many of his opinions where he was in dissent and wrote for the majority. I must say, I believe his reasoning was the most UNBIASED of anyone on the court. He believed in STRICT CONSTRUCTION, and had others on the Supreme Court maintained that position, Americans would not be taxed on worldwide income today. Due to desperate economic conditions, governments now hunt their citizens on a worldwide basis as well. Those applying to the Supreme Court go through a voting process. I believe I made it through that process, and understanding the reasoning of Scalia, I knew that if I could capture his interest, I would get in. When the Supreme Court ordered the government to respond to my case, I knew I had made it through all the hoops. I believe I owe that to Scalia’s STRICT CONSTRUCTION that limited the power of government, unlike others who seek to expand it at our expense. The government knew it would lose and the net result was that they had to tell the Supreme Court the case was moot for I was released.
Scalia was a STRICT CONSTRUCTIONIST. That means that judges do not make the law, the people do. Some of his lobbying within the court really pushed government abuse backward. I have written how the most notorious trial in English history was that of Sir Walter Raleigh who was convicted on a written statement of a threatened witness who was not present in court. Raleigh demanded to confront his accuser and the court denied that request and found him guilty for political purposes. This is our 6th Amendment; the Right to Confrontation. It was Scalia who wrote the opinion for the court providing the full history of this write and overturning a case in the state of Washington that entered recordings but denied the accused the very same right to cross-examine the State’s witness (Crawford v. Washington 541 U.S. 36 (2004).
It was also Justice Scalia who overturned the sentencing guidelines in the criminal case in Blakely v. Washington. The fundamental was the prosecutor got the jury to find someone guilty of a crime on minimum proof, and then the judge would enhance the sentence on facts never presented to the jury. This was a bitter fight, but who was on the government’s side was the so-called “liberal” justices who voted in favor of the government. This is what Scalia wrote in Blakely:
“Whether the Sixth Amendment incorporates this manipulable standard rather than Apprendi’s bright-line rule depends on the plausibility of the claim that the Framers would have left definition of the scope of jury power up to judges’ intuitive sense of how far is too far. We think that claim not plausible at all, because the very reason the Framers put a jury-trial guarantee in the Constitution is that they were unwilling to trust government to mark out the role of the jury.”
In the case authorizing the government to take personal property if someone else will improve it for a better use, KELO et al. v. CITY OF NEW LONDON, Scalia was in dissent.
“Today the Court abandons this long-held, basic limitation on government power. Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded.”
Scalia has been perhaps the most outspoken Justice to ever sit on the court. He recently stated in dissent that “… to say, as the court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications of the Immigration Act that the President declines to enforce boggles the mind.”
When it came to Obamacare in King v. Burwell, the Supreme Court upheld it as a tax, which was totally unconstitutional. It was clear that the decision was wrong but the court wanted to uphold it without any foundation of precedent. Scalia dissented and called it for what it was:
“We should start calling this law SCOTUScare … [T]his Court’s two decisions on the Act will surely be remembered through the years … And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.”
While many will disagree with me simply because they were on the other side of the question, the problem we now face is that this is becoming a very undemocratic process where appointed judges make the law (not the people) and the constitution is reduced to a scrap of paper referred to in selective parts that fit the current desire. Scalia was a STRICT CONSTRUCTIONIST. It is what it is. There should be no room for changing the Constitution. Both the LEFT and the RIGHT have not followed that road of Strict Construction. They criticized Scalia for having wit and a sharp tongue. I admired him for that for you always understood his reasoning regardless of if you agreed or not. The law is the law. We would not have this Black Lives Matter movement because the “liberal” prosecutors and judges are “liberal” in protecting their own.
Obama now gets to leave his mark on the court and we can expect probably a pro-government liberal socialist who will steer the court in the favor of government and hail the NSA for a job well done. It is strange but the “liberal” judges are only liberal with our rights, handing them to government for the greater good much like Brussels, because we are too stupid to know what is best for us. Unfortunately, Scalia’s death is going to be our undoing. He kept even the “conservatives” in check as he did Roberts with the health care issue. This was not a good weekend.
