Thank you for this brilliant takedown of an evil, filthy, no-good bastard. I’ve read every story I could find that takes on Scalia since the moment his death was announced, and I am happy to report, Paul A. Bromley, that yours is the best I’ve found, by a mile. Funny, savage, perfect.
I can’t decide which image made me laugh the hardest: The overwrought Clarence Thomas rocking back and forth in front of the fire, or the “Danny Devito’s stunt double” line. Whew!
Scalia did very real damage to this nation and to the world — damage that can’t be undone. He voted in the majority in the three most God-awful decisions in recent decades, each decided by a 5–4 vote, each like a repeated kick to the groin, the face, and the kidneys of America. All three cases should have gone, and were this close to going, the opposite way, and Scalia wrote opinions in two of the three cases:
- Bush v. Gore, 2001: Five Supreme Court Justices, including Scalia, brazenly stole the 2000 election from Al Gore and handed it to George W. Bush by stopping the statewide recount of Florida’s ballots three days before the prescribed deadline. Had the recount been allowed to continue, Gore would have won the statewide vote and Florida’s 25 electors, for a total of 291 electoral votes — 21 more than he needed to win the election outright. Instead, the Supreme Court stopped the recount and handed the victory to Bush, who then earned Florida’s 25 electors to put his total at 271 electoral votes, one more than he needed to win the election.
And why the fuck didn’t Al Gore fight like a crazed wildcat and refuse to vacate his vice presidential office until every American knew that the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount when it became clear that Gore was about to win the election?
Imagine America and the world today if Gore had been president. Even if the 9–11 terror attacks had still happened, which is not a given, our response would have been vastly different. We probably would still have sent troops to Afghanistan because they hosted the terrorist training camps. We would not have invaded Iraq — that was nothing but a personal vendetta being pursued by the Trimvirate of Torture, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Therefore the Middle East would not be in flames today, ISIS would not be ascendant, and Syria would not be embroiled in a years-long civil war that has bloomed into World War III.
Our nation would not have been bankrupted by the trillions of dollars Bush spent to wage his personal war — trillions, by the way, that he never accounted for in his annual budgets, so there’d be no official cost of the war that accrued against his administration. And the financial meltdown of 2007–2008 would have been about one-third as severe as it was under Bush.
If Gore had been president, my children would not have become the first American generation in more than a century to have a lower standard of living projected for them than for the previous generation. This is how thoroughly Bush destroyed the economy — the harm he caused stretches well past his time in office. Bush squandered the future for Americans who were very young children on September 11, 2001. He pissed all over it while telling us how he knew in his gut that he had made the right choices because God told him so. Think about that for a minute: He didn’t need to understand the facts on the issues he was deciding —because he was the decider who went with his gut, the same strategy he employed when invading Iraq, because God had told him the right thing to do. God.
Bush, you fucking wanker.
Now I’ve got myself all pissed off, and I don’t want to finish this by writing about the two other cases. OK, I’ll try to be brief:
2. District of Columbia v. Heller, 2008. If Scalia ever called himself a Constitutional Originalist again after this decision, he probably caused milk to shoot out of everyone’s noses as the room around him erupted in laughter. With the stroke of a pen, Scalia did away with 200 years of legal precedent and established, for the first time in America, that the right of an individual to keep guns for self-defense superseded the authority of the state to regulate them.
The case overturned a 1975 law that had restricted residents of the District of Columbia from owning handguns, except those registered before 1975, and it required rifles and shotguns to be unloaded and disassembled or else bound by a trigger lock. The court found the handgun ban and trigger lock sections unconstitutional.
In his majority opinion, Scalia explicitly differentiated the rights of the individual as being separate from the right of the state to maintain an armed militia. Until 2008, the right to bear arms had been seen as being tied to the need for “a well-regulated militia.” Those four words are the very first words in the Second Amendment, yet Scalia ignored them, as he was no doubt paid to do by the NRA.
3. Citizens United v. FEC, 2010.This is the case in which the court declared that money is speech and corporations are people, and turned the campaign finance reforms inside out and burnt them beyond recognition. This case reminds me of nothing so much as George Orwell’s famous novel 1984, set in a dystopian future when the state systematically brainwashes the people.
“War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength” is a slogan of the English Socialist Party (INGSOC) of Oceania. Such doublethink was the primary hazard in the book as INGSOC tried to achieve total control over the people and, more importantly, over their minds. Doublethink is the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as both being correct.
Money is speech, corporations are people. And now, corporations and individuals can funnel unlimited amounts of dark money into SuperPACs, often with no requirement to report it. Thanks to Scalia, Thomas, et al, our nation’s politics is mired in a cesspool of dirty money. Every election is for sale to the highest bidder. It’s more than disgusting — it’s sickening, and one hundred percent corrupt.
Well, Paul, I’ve raged on past the point of enough. Your piece inspired me and got my dander up. Thanks again for telling it straight-up and true.
