Antonin Scalia (1936-2016) was, until this past weekend, the longest-serving judge on the US Supreme Court, the highest court in the land. He was also its most outspoken and, along with Bobbsey Twin Clarence Thomas, arguably its most right-wing. He was appointed by President Reagan in 1986, becoming the first Italian American on the court and the 101st White man.
His death leaves the Court divided four to four between liberals and conservatives. That gives President Obama the golden opportunity to make it a liberal court. But he will have to get his appointment through the Republican-controlled Senate – in an election year!
Scalia was against:
- 1964 Civil Rights Act,
- 1965 Voting Rights Act,
- affirmative action,
- school desegregation,
- same-sex marriage,
- equal rights for women,
- abortion.
Etc.
In Shelby County v Holder (2013) he helped to gut the Voting Rights Act, saying it was unfair to Whites.
In Citizens United v FEC (2010) he allowed the rich to, in effect, buy elections in the name of “free speech”.
He helped to send Troy Davis to his death, even though there was no physical evidence and most witnesses had taken back their testimony. Sending possibly innocent (Black) men to their death was no big deal:
“This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”
He also helped to send Gary Graham to his death, also probably innocent.
Scalia was a big believer in capital punishment, pointing to the case of Henry McCollum, found guilty of raping and killing an 11-year-old girl, calling a “quiet death by lethal injection” an “enviable” fate. But McCollum, like Davis, was found guilty based on coerced testimony and no physical evidence. Twenty years after Scalia refused to hear his case, DNA evidence proved that McCollum was innocent.
Scalia was an “originalist”, meaning he read the US Constitution according to the original intent of those who wrote it: rich White men who lived in the 1780s, many of them slave owners.
But that was just intellectual window dressing to make his stone-cold racism – and sexism and homophobia and classism – look respectable. When it came to, say, the Fourteenth Amendment, which was clearly intended give Black people equal protection under the law, he suddenly became a “textualist”, going strictly by the letter of the law, not the original intent.
His racism became crystal clear in the affirmative action case Fisher v University of Texas (2013), where he said:
“… there are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school … a slower-track school where they do well … I’m just not impressed by the fact the University of Texas may have fewer [Blacks]. Maybe it ought to have fewer.”
Scalia died this past weekend in his sleep after a day of hunting. He was 79.
– Abagond, 2016.
See also:
- Reagan
- Troy Davis
- Gary Graham
- Fisher v University of Texas
- 1964 Civil Rights Act
- 1965 Voting Rights Act
- American school resegregation
- racial nadir
- The 2016 Presidential Election
527
The ruby slippers image is priceless! LOL!
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Scalia, is that Italian for snake oil? Why didn’t his family want an autopsy done, did he have a shameful secret they want left hidden?
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Finally, an honest obituary. For the rest: what Pumpkin says.
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You Wil not be missed unles your replaced by WORST
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His political opinions were thoroughly reprehensible. But his originalism appeals more to me than the idea of a living constitution – even if he didn’t actually follow his theory.
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One less evil racist idiot, thankfully now gone.
Can’t fault him on his desegregation views. That, I agree with.
The less we mingle/integrate with them, the less like them we become, the less confused we’ll be.
A colonized (brainwashed/confused) mind is a terrible fate!
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Abagond
Italians are Latinos, not white. Scalia was a Latino justixe, as Latin as Sotomayor.
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That sounds familiar!
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What a wicked man!!!
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The shade with ruby slippers… caught me off guard.
And obviously, Italians are white… What kind of a derailment is that?
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Honestly? You do this to a great patriot and genius.
He wasn’t even on the court during the Civil Rights Movement.
And since when is being against Abortion a bad thing???
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The last picture wraps it up perfectly
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That house didn’t drop on him soon enough.
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Dig the racist bastard up and kill him again because he didn’t die hard enough the first time !
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He was a jerk.
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He was a hero. A genius! Something incredible!
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Love the house falling on the wicked witch meme.
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Abagond-that photo says it all! LOL *ding dong-the Witch is dead*
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How can you hate a man so intelligent? He cared so deeply for our country and its Constitution
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Bobby M, I love your sarcasm.
Scalia argued that a police officer did not use “deadly force” when he climbed onto an overpass and used an assault rifle to kill an unarmed man fleeing in a car, because, the cop was shooting at the car not the driver! We lost a mind reader. He stopped the vote in Florida to give Bush the election and claimed that the Constitution didn’t give the voters the right to elect the president.
All the presidential candidates, as well as the seating president, are in agreement with the claim that he was brilliant! What does that say about them?
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@gro jo
Amen!
I love how you sliced down to the bone with you assessment of Scalia:
That really sums up his intellectual rigor.
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It is painstakingly painful to see how many immigrants turn into purist racists themselves once in position of power. Need i to remind the thousands of thousands of Italian Immigrants who after having only themselves on the devouringly unforgivable sea and ocean waters, once on the American soil they became victims of outer racism and discrimination against them by supremacist whites. Yet their own sufferings are interwoven with the sufferings of Afro-Americans. Yet Italians in general are hypocrite racists just by looking at how they treat Black People in Italy and in New York to say the least. Amazingly the first inhabitants of Italy, Portugal and Spain are the GRIMALDI blacks close to Khoisans 45000 years ago and their remains have been found even in Germany isn’t this irony?
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^^^^^^^
Not surprising at all actually.
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http://revisionistreview.blogspot.in/2016/02/most-jewish-gentile-on-supreme-court.html
” The Most Jewish Gentile on the Supreme Court”
http://revisionistreview.blogspot.in/2016/02/scalias-sordid-simulacrum.html
Justice Scalia’s Sordid Simulacrum
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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Some loon from cornhole Idaho wrote those articles. I wonder what he writes about Black folks.
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Thank you Afrofem!
Leonardo Mulaja wrote:
Interesting and totally irrelevant. All this business about blacks 45,000 years ago is pure sentimentality. Brothers and sisters from the same parents treat each other like enemies, so I don’t see what’s ironic about dislike between peoples separated by 45,000 years.
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@Abagond: Do you still think Scalia’s racist quote regarding Abigail Fischer and University of Texas and blacks being incapable of being successful in so called white institutions of higher learning and would probably do well in black colleges because the bar was set lower. Do you still think his statement was taken out of context?
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Scalia reminds me of Giuliani. Another Italian American who gets off shaming blacks.
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@gro jo – I’m not being sarcastic. I’m 100% serious.
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@gro jo – I’m not being sarcastic. I’m 100% serious.
Comically stupid!
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Bobby M, I know, I was 100% sarcastic.
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No. This country was built for straight, White, Judeo-Christian men. If you don’t like it, go to some other country,
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^^^ Lyndon Johnson is in another country now.
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I’m thinking autoerotic asphyxiation. Any opinions?
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@Satanforce
Something was definitely up!
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Karmic justice in the afterlife: Lyndon Johnson stabs Antonin Scalia in the back.
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@satanforce
Too funny! LOL!
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@taotesan
I would hate to be Scalia on the receiving end of his karmic justice—that will be ugly indeed.
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No. This country was built for straight, White, Judeo-Christian men. If you don’t like it, go to some other country,
Bull! Gorge Washington was rumored to be homosexual.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3040404/New-book-asserts-George-Washington-Abraham-Lincoln-Jamestown-gay-sex.html
Alexander Hamilton was passionately in love with him!
I’m thinking autoerotic asphyxiation. Any opinions?
You may be on to something! A lot of these powerful men are perverts in their private lives.
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Herneith,
You have a wicked sense of humor. Larry Kramer’s book sounds like a joke since the only ‘evidence’ he provides, based on the article you linked to, is his “gaydar”.
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I especially loved the part of this article that claims that Lincoln was killed by Booth because he, Lincoln, spurned booth. Apparently, Booth and Lincoln had an affair. I absolutely adored the part about Washington designing the soldiers’ uniforms down to the buttons and redecorating head- quarters. I do agree with the contention of proving these guys to be gay. How can you prove they were straight? Is Jamestown still there?
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I would love the look on Bobby M’s face if he saw Washington or Lincoln win drag traipsing up and down the promenade. A treasure!
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I predicted his death because I’m a bad a** lol. I also celebrated by getting a giant pizza with ham, bacon and extra cheese!
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(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=427qS5A4gZo)
Mike Malloy asks President Obama for a liberal Scalia replacement
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I’ll put my name forward. Is the pay and benefits good?
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With Scalia dead, Clarence Thomas asked his first question since 2006:
http://www.theroot.com/articles/news/2016/02/justice_clarence_thomas_asks_question_in_court_ending_10_year_silent_streak.html
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http://www.madmagazine.com/blog/2016/03/01/other-questions-clarence-thomas-will-ask-now-that-hes-broken-his-10-year-silence
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I had thanksgiving dinner over the weekend with some people originally from the USA and their hanger-ons.
One of the guests works for a US media organization in HK, but she conducted the very last media interview that Scalia did just a few days before he died. So the others were pleading with her not to interview Ruth Ginsburg, but she could freely go and interview Clarence Thomas.
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Wasn’t he and RGB real good friends. They seem to hangout with each other
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@ John Smith
Yes, she was friends with Scalia, from before they were on the Supreme Court.
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@Abagond
Doesn’t this say a lot about her character and where she stands seeing that she was friends with him on and off the Supreme Court?
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@ John Smith
And Rachel Maddow considered Roger Ailes a friend:
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/rachel-maddow-laments-passing-of-roger-ailes-i-considered-him-to-be-a-friend/
It does make me wonder about them.
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