Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia seems a little confused. Speaking at Rhodes College on Tuesday, Scalia predictably railed against Supreme Court decisions he doesn't like, such as for marriage equality. But while his argument was intended to explain why he and not the rest of those schmucks on the court was qualified to decide these things, mostly he just
argued against the validity of the court itself:
"They're not adhering to the text, they're operating as policy makers," Scalia, an "originalist," said of believers in a "living" Constitution. "They're not interpreting the constitution. They're writing one, they're revising one."
Later he added: "What is it that I learned at Harvard Law School that makes me peculiarly qualified to determine such profound moral and ethical questions as whether there should be a right to abortion, whether there should be same-sex marriage, whether there should be a right to suicide?" he asked. "It has nothing to do with the law. Even Yale law school doesn't teach that stuff."
I've got news for you, Nino. Unless you can speak to the dead and the framers of the Constitution have yet to get annoyed and stop talking to you, you're revising it, too. And if generations of Supreme Court justices had asked the equivalent questions, the court would have decided neither for "separate but equal" nor against segregation, interracial marriage would have only become legal in Alabama in 2000 (and who knows, the vote then might have gone differently), and on and on.
The world changes! Guns get easier to use and more powerful and you, Antonin Scalia, revise your understanding of the Constitution to shoehorn them into its 18th-century language and technology. Equality advances, even if your understanding of it does not. And storming about the country as the longest-serving justice currently on the court and asking what you learned at Harvard Law School that makes you peculiarly qualified to determine the kind of cases that come before the Supreme Court just raises the question of why you don't retire already.