Justice Antonin Scalia on 60 Minutes
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was interviewed and profiled on 60 Minutes last night. He calls his judicial philosophy “originalism.”
At 72, Justice Scalia is still a maverick, championing a philosophy known as “orginalism,” which means interpreting the Constitution based on what it originally meant to the people who ratified it over 200 years ago.
Scalia has no patience with so-called activist judges, who create rights not in the Constitution - like a right to abortion - by interpreting the Constitution as a “living document” that adapts to changing values.
Asked what’s wrong with the living Constitution, Scalia tells [Lesley] Stahl, “What’s wrong with it is, it’s wonderful imagery and it puts me on the defensive as defending presumably a dead Constitution.”
“It is an enduring Constitution that I want to defend,” he says.
Scalia makes a convincing argument that in a democracy like ours, the people through their representatives should make laws, not judges sitting in courts.
“I’m surprised at how many people really, really hate you. These are some things we’ve been told: ‘He’s evil.’ ‘He’s a Neanderthal.’ ‘He’s going to drag us back to 1789.’ They’re threatened by what you represent and what you believe in,” Stahl remarks.
“These are people that don’t understand what my interpretive philosophy is. I’m not saying no progress. I’m saying we should progress democratically,” Scalia says.
Back at the Oxford Union, Scalia told the students, “You think there ought to be a right to abortion? No problem. The Constitution says nothing about it. Create it the way most rights are created in a democratic society. Pass a law. And that law, unlike a Constitutional right to abortion created by a court can compromise. It can…I was going to say it can split the baby! I should not use… A Constitution is not meant to facilitate change. It is meant to impede change, to make it difficult to change.”
[…]
“The public sense of you is that [you] make your decisions based on your social beliefs,” Stahl says, with Scalia shaking his head. “That is the perception.”
“I’m a law-and-order guy. I mean, I confess I’m a social conservative, but it does not affect my views on cases,” Scalia says. “On the abortion thing for example, if indeed I were, you know, trying to impose my own views, I would not only be opposed to Roe versus Wade, I would be in favor of the opposite view, which the anti-abortion people would like adopted, which is to interpret the Constitution to mean that a state must prohibit abortion.”
Scalia says he’s against that.
Scalia says that his social conservatism doesn’t effects his views on cases. He later says that his Catholicism doesn’t effect how he rules. Yet he admits to having an “interpretive philosophy” that people don’t understand. It would be of no concern to them except that it is the driving force behind his rulings. I found him very dishonest on these points and Stahl doesn’t challenge him on this.
He also commented about his fellow justices that he would not be able to change their legal philosophy which they have held for many years.
There’s an admission that philosophy influences their decisions while he’s denying it at the same time. That’s the kind of contradiction that you get from mystical thinking.
Religion allows people to make up their own self-serving reality. It allows them to discard evidence. This same type of mystical thinking is the foundation of our government and legal system. In the end, those who believe they have a right to impose their own philosophy on others by law at the point of a gun will inevitably trample on basic human rights whether they do it through a legislative or judicial mandate. Once individuals have granted themselves that power over others they can justify just about anything, especially when they get a majority of people to agree with them. (For more, read my book.)
It also makes no difference if an individual has his rights stripped away by a federal court or a state court or whether he has his freedom taken away by national vote or state vote. That is just a matter of scale. The important thing is to protect individual liberty. Voting and laws tend to strip freedom from the individual to serve the whims of some majority. The job of the courts in a free country is to prevent that.
In applying his philosophy of originalism to the Constitution, Scalia asks himself whether a particular right exists in the document or not. He’s making binary judgments about what exists and what doesn’t exist in the Constitution.
As a thinker influenced by mystical premises, Scalia and the other justices do not apply the same process to reality as a rational thinker does. A rational thinker asks himself if something exists in reality, in nature, or not. He knows that if it doesn’t exist in reality, there’s nothing that can be known about it and therefore it cannot be discussed rationally. A rational is an “originalist” when it comes to reality.
Allowing premises rooted in the supernatural and superstitious to serve as the foundation for our legal system makes it a religion, which is prohibited by the Constitution.
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