Fat Tony Speaks...

Is Antonin Scalia the most dishonest person in America? [c.f. Fat Tony Scalia Pimps Book, Sensitive Side on NPR]

If not, then he's certainly in the running.

Fat Tony has been granting select interviews with tame reporters to pimp his new book on courtroom persuasion. The first thing that really strikes the listener is his almost apologetic approach to the Constitution, as if he knows he's completely full of shit. My initial reaction was: "what a tool..."

To illustrate... in the interview, he says:

"My Constitution is not living, it is dead," Scalia says.

As an "originalist" and a "textualist," to Scalia the Constitution means what the framers intended back at the founding of the republic.

"Whatever they understood then is, in my view, the meaning ... and it's not up to me to say it really shouldn't mean that any more, it should mean something different. Once you get into that boat, you have no criterion," he says.

Forget the horrible fornication of actual history he engages in there for a moment, if you can, and focus rather on this:

"[It is] entirely clear from our Nation’s historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists.”

So quoth The Tool in McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky

This is directly at odds with what the primary framer of the First Amendment intended. We know it specifically because James Madison commented frequently upon it; not merely relying on Jefferson's "wall of separation" letter to the Anabaptists. Madison writes:

“Strongly guarded as is the separation between religion and government in the Constitution of the United States the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies, may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history”

“The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.”

“And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together”

“The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state”

“Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Government”

In another example of Fat Tony's questionable judicial honesty: In 2000, he wrote a majority opinion regarding federal port fees in Charleston, South Carolina. The organizing principle of his take was that those kind of administrative functions had no business being done by the Feds. It was tantamount to federal interference with a state activity and of course the federal government couldn’t do that.

In less than 90 days, his ideology swung around 180 degrees and he ruled that the Federal Government had every right to stop a state from recounting votes and overturning a Republican victory in a state election, and that the state had no business interfering in such a critical federal function. And he did it quoting the same phrase of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution both times...

So, yeah, his commitment to his ideology and his honesty is somewhat questionable.

Moreover, I am extra-unimpressed with his assertions that he is really sensitive and he personally suffers from criticism. This from the guy who routinely adds little digs and insulting quips about his fellow justices' reasoning and even their fitness as jurists in his opinions.

Memo to Fat Tony: Hey Jackass, if you don't want people to react to you like that, then don't provoke them in your writing. You are a legal bully, and we all know Mojo's patience for bullies. So spare me your "but I'm really just a sensitive troll..." routine. You are a swaggering thug, and swaggering thugs get run, here.

Look, let's just get to the essence of my take... Justice Scalia, you are a tool, a liar and a hypocrite and -- left or right -- you are the worst thing to happen to American jurisprudence in my lifetime.

I look forward to seeing your half-bright screeds being relegated to the scrapheap of dead letter legal history.

mojo sends