12 Must-Read Quotes From Scalia’s Blistering Same-Sex Marriage DissentAnyone who thought Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Thursday’s Obamacare — which Scalia now calls “SCOTUScare” — ruling was intense should read his dissent in Friday’s 5-4 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states. In fact, Fox News’ Andrew Napolitano said that Scalia’s Obamacare dissent “looks like a Christmas card” compared to his rebuke of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion.
Scalia didn’t hold back in his criticisms of the Supreme Court and the “wisdom” of five robed members of the federal government. We pulled out a dozen of the best quotes from his blistering disagreement with the SCOTUS majority (emphasis added): No. 1: SCOTUS Is a ‘Threat’“I write separately to call attention to this Court’s threat to American democracy.” No. 2: Our New Rulers“[I]t is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact—and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create ‘liberties’ that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.” No. 3: Naked Claim to Power“This is a naked judicial claim to legislative—indeed, super-legislative—power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government. Except as limited by a constitutional prohibition agreed to by the People, the States are free to adopt whatever laws they like, even those that offend the esteemed Justices’ ‘reasoned judgment.’ A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.” No. 4: ‘Pretentious’ and ‘Egotistic’“The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic. It is one thing for separate concurring or dissenting opinions to contain extravagances, even silly extravagances, of thought and expression; it is something else for the official opinion of the Court to do so.” No. 5: Five Justices Think They Know All“The five Justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding that every State violated the Constitution for all of the 135 years between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts’ permitting of same-sex marriages in 2003. They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a ‘fundamental right’ overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since. They see what lesser legal minds—minds like Thomas Cooley, John Marshall Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, William Howard Taft, Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly—could not. They are certain that the People ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to bestow on them the power to remove questions from the democratic process when that is called for by their ‘reasoned judgment.’ These Justices know that limiting marriage to one man and one woman is contrary to reason; they know that an institution as old as government itself, and accepted by every nation in history until 15 years ago, cannot possibly be supported by anything other than ignorance or bigotry. And they are willing to say that any citizen who does not agree with that, who adheres to what was, until 15 years ago, the unanimous judgment of all generations and all societies, stands against the Constitution.” No. 6: Court’s Reputation Diminished“The stuff contained in today’s opinion has to diminish this Court’s reputation for clear thinking and sober analysis.” No. 7: ‘Profoundly Incoherent’“[T]he opinion’s showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent. ‘The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality.’ (Really? Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie. Expression, sure enough, is a freedom, but anyone in a long-lasting marriage will attest that that happy state constricts, rather than expands, what one can prudently say.) “Rights, we are told, can ‘rise . . . from a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era.’ (Huh? How can a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives [whatever that means] define [whatever that means] an urgent liberty [never mind], give birth to a right?) “And we are told that, ‘[i]n any particular case,’ either the Equal Protection or Due Process Clause ‘may be thought to capture the essence of [a] right in a more accurate and comprehensive way,’ than the other, ‘even as the two Clauses may converge in the identification and definition of the right.’ (What say? What possible ‘essence’ does substantive due process ‘capture’ in an ‘accurate and comprehensive way’? It stands for nothing whatever, except those freedoms and entitlements that this Court really likes. And the Equal Protection Clause, as employed today, identifies nothing except a difference in treatment that this Court really dislikes. Hardly a distillation of essence. If the opinion is correct that the two clauses ‘converge in the identification and definition of [a] right,’ that is only because the majority’s likes and dislikes are predictably compatible.)” No. 8: Supreme Court ‘Ends’ Public Debate“When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, every State limited marriage to one man and one woman, and no one doubted the constitutionality of doing so. … Since there is no doubt whatever that the People never decided to prohibit the limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples, the public debate over same-sex marriage must be allowed to continue. “But the Court ends this debate, in an opinion lacking even a thin veneer of law.” No. 9: A ‘Judge-Empowering’ Decision“Buried beneath the mummeries and straining-to-be-memorable passages of the opinion is a candid and startling assertion: No matter what it was the People ratified, the Fourteenth Amendment protects those rights that the Judiciary, in its ‘reasoned judgment,’ thinks the Fourteenth Amendment ought to protect. That is so because ‘[t]he generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions . . . . ‘ One would think that sentence would continue: ‘. . . and therefore they provided for a means by which the People could amend the Constitution,’ or perhaps ‘. . . and therefore they left the creation of additional liberties, such as the freedom to marry someone of the same sex, to the People, through the never-ending process of legislation.’ But no. What logically follows, in the majority’s judge-empowering estimation, is: ‘and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.’ The ‘we,’ needless to say, is the nine of us.” No. 10: Violating Principles“[T]o allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.” No. 11: Overthrowing the Government“[W]hat really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch.” No. 12: ‘One Step Closer …’“With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them—with each decision that is unabashedly based not on law, but on the ‘reasoned judgment’ of a bare majority of this Court—we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.” — Follow Chris Field (@ChrisMField) on Twitter © 2015 TheBlaze Inc |