Over the weekend the family took a hike up Chimney Rock.  This is the flag flying half staff for the lion of the court, the one who single-handedly changed the arc of constitutional interpretation in America.

NRO:

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.

AP:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Saturday the idea of religious neutrality is not grounded in the country’s constitutional traditions and that God has been good to the U.S. exactly because Americans honor him.

Scalia was speaking at a Catholic high school in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, Louisiana. Scalia, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 is the court’s longest serving justice. He has consistently been one of the court’s more conservative members.

He told the audience at Archbishop Rummel High School that there is “no place” in the country’s constitutional traditions for the idea that the state must be neutral between religion and its absence.

“To tell you the truth there is no place for that in our constitutional tradition. Where did that come from?” he said. “To be sure, you can’t favor one denomination over another but can’t favor religion over non-religion?”

He also said there is “nothing wrong” with the idea of presidents and others invoking God in speeches. He said God has been good to America because Americans have honored him.

Scalia said during the Sept. 11 attacks he was in Rome at a conference. The next morning, after a speech by President George W. Bush in which he invoked God and asked for his blessing, Scalia said many of the other judges approached him and said they wished their presidents or prime ministers would do the same.

“God has been very good to us. That we won the revolution was extraordinary. The Battle of Midway was extraordinary. I think one of the reasons God has been good to us is that we have done him honor. Unlike the other countries of the world that do not even invoke his name we do him honor. In presidential addresses, in Thanksgiving proclamations and in many other ways,” Scalia said.

“There is nothing wrong with that and do not let anybody tell you that there is anything wrong with that,” he added.

He’s right, of course.  Moreover, this thinking is right in line with the historical reformed thinking of men like Cornelius Van Til, Gordon Clark, and my own professor C. Gregg Singer and others, on the logical impossibility of neutrality.  All syllogisms have presuppositions, those presuppositions being axiomatic irreducibles, with the balance of thought and deduction being impossible without them, and the rest of the system able to be judged on its logical consistency based on those presuppositions.  And I agree with Scalia, even if he doesn’t invoke reformed thinkers for his basis.

Unlike Scalia, however, who is Roman Catholic, I don’t think God cares very much whether we invoke His name in a presidential address or some similar charade.  The invocation of His name must be sincere, humble and within the context of repentance.

This is what I don’t see in America, and thus God will not long bless her.  She is even now experiencing the lack of God’s favor because of her stubbornness.

So Scalia is right, and he is wrong.