{"id":184387,"date":"2012-05-15T19:49:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-16T00:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/05\/15\/why-yes-antonin-scalia-has-gone-nuts\/"},"modified":"2012-05-15T19:49:00","modified_gmt":"2012-05-16T00:49:00","slug":"why-yes-antonin-scalia-has-gone-nuts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/05\/15\/why-yes-antonin-scalia-has-gone-nuts\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Yes, Antonin Scalia has Gone Nuts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It appears that there is a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/2012-05-15\/scalia-turns-advocate-against-obama-as-queries-criticized.html\">growing consensus on this matter<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: blue;\"><p>In January, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia accused the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of \u201chigh-handedness.\u201d He was just getting warmed up.<\/p>\n<p>Over the next 3 1\/2 months, Scalia asked whether federal immigration policy was designed to \u201cplease Mexico,\u201d fired off 12 questions and comments in 15 minutes at a government lawyer in a case involving overtime pay, and dismissed part of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli\u2019s defense of President Barack Obama\u2019s health-care law as \u201cextraordinary.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Scalia\u2019s tone this year, particularly in cases involving the Obama administration, is raising new criticism over the temperament of a justice who has always relished the give-and- take of the Supreme Court\u2019s public sessions. Some lawyers say Scalia, a 1986 appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan, is crossing the line that separates tough scrutiny from advocacy.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHis questions have been increasingly confrontational,\u201d said Charles Fried, a Harvard Law School professor who served as Reagan\u2019s top Supreme Court advocate. While the justice has always asked \u201cpointed\u201d questions, in the health-care case \u201che came across much more like an advocate.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Scalia\u2019s approach is fueling the perception that the biggest cases this term, including health care, may be influenced by politics, rather than the legal principles that he and other justices say should be their guide. A Bloomberg News poll in March showed that 75 percent of Americans think the court\u2019s decision on the 2010 law will be based more on politics than on constitutional merit. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Scalia has always been a partisan political hack, but lately, he&#8217;s not even trying to pretend that he has an open mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It appears that there is a growing consensus on this matter: In January, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia accused the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of \u201chigh-handedness.\u201d He was just getting warmed up. Over the next 3 1\/2 months, Scalia asked whether federal immigration policy was designed to \u201cplease Mexico,\u201d fired off 12 questions and comments &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,972,1104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-justice","category-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184387"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184387\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}