What’s Wrong With the US Supreme Court – Start With Scalia

The highest court in any democratic state ought to be the preserve of the best legal minds in the country. It is the court of last resort. It is the court that has to weigh constitutional questions and define statutory enactments.

American presidents, it seems, have been pretty lax in their duty to select proper material for the nation’s Supreme Court and Antonin Scalia is one clear example.

Scalia is the guy who goes duck hunting with Dick Cheney while a case against Halliburton is before him.

Now he’s shown the depth of his juridical prowess by his asinine arguments that Guantanimo detainees should be denied the right to prove their innocence in federal courts. In the case of Boumediene v. Bush, Scalia wrote, “At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo have returned to the battlefield.”

Now just where did Mr. Justice Scalia get that pearl of factual wisdom? The Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research answers that:

“The statistic was endorsed by a Senate Minority Report issued June 26, 2007, which cites a media outlet, CNN. CNN, in turn, named the DoD [Department of Defense] as its source. The ’30’ number, however, was corrected in a DoD press release issued in July 2007, and a DoD document submitted to the House Foreign Relations Committee on May 20, 2008, abandons the claim entirely.”

So, if it comes straight from the mouth of Wolf Blitzer, Scalia is able to take judicial notice of it, to treat it as fact upon which to base a judgment? This guy is a never ending disgrace to his bench and yet he just keeps going on like that battery bunny. If he had a shred of integrity he’d resign because he’s repeatedly shown himself unfit to serve.

 

Scalia’s Jack Bauer Moment

US Supreme Court judge Antonin Scalia says some physical interrogation could be used on a suspect in the event of an imminent threat, such as a bomb set to go off.

Scalia told BBC, “You can’t come in smugly and with great self-satisfaction and say, ‘Oh, it’s torture, and therefore it’s no good.”

Justice Scalia said it would be “extraordinary” to assume that the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment applied to “so-called” torture in the face of imminent threat. He said that the Constitution “is referring to punishment for crime.”

But “is it really so easy,” he said, “to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the Constitution?”

“It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that,” the justice said. “And once you acknowledge that, we’re into a different game. How close does the threat have to be? And how severe can the infliction of pain be?”

This is just the sort of thinking we ought to expect from Cheney hunting partner and fellow moral reprobate Scalia. It glibly masks what’s not said.

For example, who on this planet believes that security services wouldn’t freely smack someone in the face if they believed that necessary to discover the whereabouts of a hidden bomb? But this isn’t about a smack across the face, is it? Scalia tacitly admits that when he concedes the issue becomes one of justification of torture – cause and extent. How close does the threat have to be and how severe can the infliction of pain be?

What Scalia deliberately omits is the real issue – how legitimate does the threat have to be? His sanction would absolve a torturer who could claim an “honest but mistaken” belief that something dire was imminent. What if it’s nothing more than a perceived threat, something based on ginned-up “intelligence” of the sort that Bush manipulated to justify invading Iraq? With enough wiggle room, anything is excusable, there is no excess.

No, I’m sorry. Torture needs to remain illegal because claiming that it all depends on circumstances admits just too many vagaries into the calculation of right and wrong, so many as to render judgment virtually impossible and meaningless.

Scalia then went on to show the BBC audience what a knuckle-dragger he is by wading into the death penalty issue:

“If you took a public opinion poll, if all of Europe had representative democracies that really worked, most of Europe would probably have the death penalty today,” he said. Excuse me, Tony, “representative democracies that really worked?” You mean like your own, the United States of America? This man is positively delusional.