By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s funeral was held Saturday, February 20th, 2016 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the largest Roman Catholic church in North America. We now feature the videography of his funeral service.
Source: Youtube
The views expressed in this posting are the author’s alone and not those of the blog, the host, or other weekend bloggers. As an open forum, weekend bloggers post independently without pre-approval or review. Content and any displays or art are solely their decision and responsibility.
According to Toobin and many others we now have four liberals and four conservatives on the SCOTUS. Are the liberals, socialists as most liberals appear to be today and are the conservatives, fascists as most rank and file conservatives appear to be today. According to Kelo vs Town of New London their communists. Come on, Scalia was a fascist excluding his position on gun control. Greater central powers, continued prohibitions of vice and not a single central banker went to jail.
It is about individual rights vs greater government powers. If the federal government has grown from $314 billion in 1950 to $3.4 trillion today, guess which philosophy is winning and losing.
Libertarians believe in individual rights and the various statist believe in greater centralized government powers. In a pay to play system with vast amounts of corruption and graft, do you wonder why there are no libertarians on the court.
L’Observer
Thank you for posting Toobin’s piece. It was right on the money and I could not agree more. Scalia’s ideas were perverse at best. The Constitution is not the bible. Except in the sense that it was written by a bunch of men, trying their best to be as wise as they could given the age in which they lived. In some respects they succeeded magnificently and in others they failed miserably. Which is why we have amendments and court decisions to help us keep up with the times. James Madison and video games indeed.
Ralph A
Perhaps you need to broaden your reading material. I had never heard of Poindexter or his case before this happened. Since Scalia’s death I have read several articles that have told of the relationship. Here’s one:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/02/was-scalias-west-texas-vacation-morally-suspect.html
But you’re right that the usual media outlets did not do a good job of reporting this part of the story.
When Poindexter invited Scalia to a free, all-expenses paid trip to his luxury ranch in the middle of nowhere in Texas as gift from Poindexter to Scalia for his favorable SCOTUS ruling on Poindexter’s side, Scalia should have had the street smarts not to accept the invitation from a man who was a very close friend and ally of Obama’s, as well as a big donor.
(Ever wonder why the media never mentions Poindexter’s SCOTUS case, nor Poindexter’s photos with his good friend Obama? Surely that information would be newsworthy. But no, the American public are treated like sheep by the media, and, unfortunately, the public willingly complies.)
As the great economist Milton Friedman put it, “There is no free lunch.” In this case, Scalia just had the most expensive “free lunch” of his life. Here’s a clip of Poindexter (I mean Tessio) inviting Michael Corleone for his own “free lunch,” but Michael, unlike Scalia had street smarts:
What is the case, consigliere?
The comments of Mr. Faust should not be tossed aside lightly. They should be thrown with great force.
hinkeydinkkenna
Nice post.
By most accounts, Scalia was a brilliant and personally affable gentleman. His opinions tended to be didactic and filled with erudite arguments based on his legal analysis. However, it will be up to future historians to consider whether he truly established a different direction for the Court or merely was a Justice of long tenure whose opinions ultimately became rejected.
To be upfront, I did not agree with many of his positions, which I felt were a product of his conservative political philosophy rather than an analysis of original Constitutional intent. In fact, I thought he used “originalism” as a club to be used to justify his political views. Yes, he said he decided cases based on the original intent of the Constitution; however, what he really did do was to base his opinion on his interpretation of original intent. He became a self-styled arbiter of what was original intent and any other view was heresy. By significant intellect, he was able to justify his personal view with his interpretation of original intent. This was a great achievement for supporters of his views, but did not necessarily advance the law.
To those persons who agreed with his outcomes based on “original intent,” he was a great jurist who was defending the Constitution. To those persons who believed the law must advance with society or who did not agree with his Constitutional interpretation, he was a judge with a political agenda. History will tell.