Scalia is a Scoundrel

Just finished reading the NYT editorial The Roberts Court’s Reality Check, and it contained the following gems. This is Scalia writing last year in his opinion on Utility Air Regulatory Group v. Environmental Protection Agencey et al.: And yet here he is writing yesterday in his dissenting opinion concerning the ruling on the Affordable Care Act: So it seems that if Justice Scalia agrees with the words then they must be interpreted precisely literally, and if he disagrees then they must be interpreted in context. What a scoundrel he is, and a blatant one at that.--Percy

You mean the other Justices have done the same thing as Scalia, chosing their interpretive scheme to fit their desired ends? It would be interesting to see examples of this.--Percy

From the Forum Guidelines:

5. Bare links with no supporting discussion should be avoided. Make the argument in your own words and use links as supporting references.

--Percy

My opening post contained links for references and short precisely relevant excerpts, and I made the point in my own words, which I quote here: Your post, on the other hand, could be paraphrased as, "This link says the liberals on the court are just as bad."--Percy

I can only guess that Marc was trying to argue that Ginsberg was contradictory in arguing both for and against referencing laws or decisions of other nations in Supreme Court decisions, but the speech excerpts Mark chose don't support that interpretation, and the contention isn't comparable to Scalia's scurrilous behavior anyway.I don't know that there's any effective way to have a discussion with a free-association style.--Percy

Hi Marc,You seem to be making up your own topic, so I'll leave you to it. What I said and meant is contained in Message 1, and if you respond to things I actually said in a manner I can make sense of then I'll respond.--Percy

Other than stating your opinion, you didn't say anything that addressed the contradictory behavior of Scalia described in the text you quoted.The forum makes codes available for quoting, see dBCode Help.--Percy

AbE: It occurs to me later that I missed that there's probably a clear distinction between "overall statutory scheme" and "legislative intent". The former only deals with what a bill says, while the latter includes not just the bill but also the prior legislative process and debate. I leave what follows unchanged, but what it should have said is that I think ignoring legislative intent is highly questionable, but it doesn't make Scalia an idiot. But taking the "overall statutory
scheme" into account for bills he likes and not for other bills he doesn't like does make him a scoundrel. When I introduced this thread in Message 1 I quoted Scalia quoting another case that said it must be kept in mind the "fundamental canon of statutory construction that the words of a statute must be read in their context and with a view to their place in the overall statutory scheme."I interpreted "overall statutory scheme" as the overall legislative intent of a bill, and I figured it referred to how to address a very common situation arising when a bill is redrafted, that not every passage that needs to be changed (say, after debate strikes a compromise) is changed or changed properly, which made it seem that Scalia had argued that legislative intent was important, especially given how often the wording of bills must be ambiguous, contradictory or in some way flawed. What's more, that seems the only reasonable position, because people aren't perfect and never will be perfect, and these bills can be massive. HR 3590 is 974 pages (see this PDF of the Affordable Care Act - the portion recently before the Supreme Court is on page 110).What's more, since there were no federal exchanges in the original version of the bill, only state exchanges, having places in the bill that were missed or improperly updated when later revisions were made is precisely the kind of error one would expect.If Scalia's legal philosophy ignores legislative intent then he's less a scoundrel and more an idiot.--PercyEdited by Percy, : AbE.