Scalia is a Scoundrel

I'd stick with scoundrel. I disagreed with you about the reasoning in the OP but not your overall call. The article I referenced goes through Scalia's book on being a judge/justice. Although Scalia does not use legislative intent, he does use a number of 'canons' (57 according to the article) all of which give various results in different situations and from which Scalia can choose in order to reach what will inevitably the most conservative view of any situation.It is also the case that his approach to Constitutional interpretation is so close to 'legislative history' as to demonstrate that his principled stance on textualism is fraudulent. In particular, Scalia completely mangles history in order to come up with his verdict in DC vs Heller. Exactly. The problem here is not that Scalia is too idiotic to see that issue. The problem is that he just does not give a crap. He thinks that the errors are what we should be stuck with. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

And so in this case he gets an answer which he knows to be wrong.If I insist on estimating people's weight from their shoe size, then if I see with my own eyes a very fat man with very small feet and insist that he is very thin, then I am a liar, because I can see that he's very fat. It is no defense of my integrity to say that I habitually estimate people's weight from their shoe size.

Well, yeah. Scalia does not like Obama or Obamacare. Scalia is, in fact a scoundrel. Perhaps we are nitpicking about exactly what variety of scoundrel Scalia is. I think this remark does not get to the point. Scalia simply does not care what the legislators thought or actually meant. I don't believe there is any doubt about that regardless of what you can read from his explanation. Scalia is not using the text to discern what was meant, but instead to determine the meaning of what was actually written. Unless there is a facial ambiguity, Scalia would end his inquiry at that point.