Remembering Antonin Scalia
BY Herschel Smith
8 years, 9 months ago
When I found out about Scalia’s death on Saturday, I yelled “No, No, No, No,” fifteen or twenty times at the top of my lungs. Much badness will follow.
While Mitch McConnell has said that the vacancy will be filled by the next president, he is a traitor like Paul Ryan. The Senate and House have given Obama everything he’s asked for seven years. They won’t stop now. Ted Cruz has promised to filibuster any nominee, and good on him for planning this ahead of time. I predict that the other senators will hang him out to dry like the worthless, quisling traitor, spineless crap weasels they are and like they did on his filibuster of Obamacare funding.
As to Scalia, I found that his Heller decision was his weakest, and leaves us with much work to be done by the Supreme Court in the future. Perhaps it was the best he could get past the other justices, but he is now dead and the balance of the court may change for the worse. This is a lesson for future justices. Don’t do things incrementally. We may not have you around long enough to finish the job.
His best work was in his dissents, and if you haven’t read the book “Scalia Dissents,” you owe it to yourself to get it and read it. Not only is it educational for the cases that have been before the court (you need some understanding of them in order to understand his dissent), but it is a window into one of the great minds of the twentieth century. His jurisprudence is a demarcation of the legal landscape for generations to come.
On a personal note, I do not know and have never met Scalia. But my brother, who graduated from Emory Law School, has met him and had a chance to discuss his writings. One question my brother posed went something like this. “I admire your decisions and dissents, but what I really wanted to ask you pertains to your writing style and abilities. Your writings can be understood by scholar and layman alike, and in my opinion it is part of what has made you so successful. How did you learn to communicate the way you do?”
Scalia responded something like this. “Thank you, I spent time reading and studying everything C.S. Lewis wrote. Read and study his writings and you’ll find someone who can communicate to both scholar and layman.” As for my reaction to what my brother relayed to me, I’m not surprised. I know someone who visited England recently and took the C.S. Lewis tour, in which they saw his home, where he taught, personal effects and other such things.
The tour was given by one person, and my friends were the only ones on the tour. “England,” said the tour guide, “has forgotten about Lewis. The only people I guide now are Americans.” How tragic. Lewis was a national treasure. So too, Scalia was a national treasure. I fear we will not really know what we had and be able to miss it with necessary earnestness for a very long time. But at least with me, I will not forget C.S. Lewis, and I won’t forget Scalia. National treasures are like that.
