Scalia: unelected judges have no place deciding politically charged questions when the Constitution is silent on those issues.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen, debated some “hot” topics yesterday in front of an ACLU friendly audience. Justice Scalia argued the position:
liberal judges in the past improperly established new political rights such as abortion, Scalia warned, “Someday, you’re going to get a very conservative Supreme Court and regret that approach.”
“On controversial issues on stuff like homosexual rights, abortion, we debate with each other and persuade each other and vote on it either through representatives or a constitutional amendment,” the Reagan appointee said.
“Whether it’s good or bad is not my job. My job is simply to say if those things you find desirable are contained in the Constitution,” he said.
Counter by the ACLU with:
That decision actually supports Scalia’s position. The Supreme Court did not rely on Brown or the NAACP to make it’s decision. The case was argued in December of 1952 and reargued in 1953, with the SCOTUS relying on the 14th amendment to the COTUS. This is exactly what Scalia was talking about.
An interesting tidbit from Brown: The Board of Education’s defense was that, because segregation in Topeka and elsewhere pervaded many other aspects of life, segregated schools simply prepared black children for the segregation they would face during adulthood. The board also argued that segregated schools were not neccessarily harmful to black children; great African Americans such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and George Washington Carver had overcome more than just segregated schools to achieve what they achieved.
When the SCOTUS made their ruling in 1954, the decision did not abolish segregation in other public areas, such as restaurants and restrooms, nor did it require desegregation of public schools by a specific time. It did, however, declare the permissive or mandatory segregation that existed in 21 states unconstitutional. It was a giant step towards complete desegregation of public schools. Even partial desegregation of these schools, however, was still very far away, as would soon become apparent.
October 16, 2006 - 08:53 AM on October 16th, 2006
Scalia, ACLU Go Head To Head
I think Scalia had them at “hello”:
Justice Antonin Scalia on Sunday defended some of his Supreme Court opinions, arguing that nothing in the Constitution supports abortion rights and the use of race in school admissions.
Scalia, a leading con…
October 16, 2006 - 10:08 AM on October 16th, 2006
The Anti-American Communist Liberals United (ACLU) is wrong yet again. I wish more Americans would wake up to the damage this insidious, evil entity is doing to America.
October 16, 2006 - 12:48 PM on October 16th, 2006
Time to call for the removal of these activist judges who are putting their own liberal leftists ideas over our constitutuion:mad:
October 16, 2006 - 06:55 PM on October 16th, 2006
Scalia is a great judicial mind.
October 16, 2006 - 10:20 PM on October 16th, 2006
I’m in favor of adopting a legal review process for circuit court judges. The 9th Circuit court has over 80% of its decisions overturned on appeal. With that kind of failure rate, why isn’t something being done to remove them from the bench? If they are that incompetent, they should be investigated and recommended for impeachment. They just issued an injunction against the implementation of proposition 200 that required proof of citizenship to register to vote and Identification to actually cast a ballot. The list of things that were acceptable as ID was ludicrously long. They claimed that it caused too much of a hardship on minorities and the poor to have to produce documentation proving that they were actually eligible to vote.
It’s funny how the minority poor can come up with all kinds of ID when it comes to collecting social services.
October 17, 2006 - 10:45 AM on October 17th, 2006
It’s funny how the minority poor can come up with all kinds of ID when it comes to collecting social services. Well said FAO:wink:
October 19, 2006 - 12:36 AM on October 19th, 2006
Thank you Peejz. I used to manage a rent to own store in a shopping center at the corner of the black ghetto and hispanic (mostly Puerto Rican) barrio in Wilmington, DE. Between the 1st and 3rd of each month, there were lines of people pushing carts filled with large cuts and huge bulk packs of meat and chicken. All paid for with food stamps. Your tax dollars at work. I worked 50 – 60 horus a week to eat hamburger while they were pushing carts filled with full rounds and briskets of beef as well as 40 lb boxes of chicken parts paid for with my tax dollars.