Conservative lawyer says Scalia should get vote on pending cases despite handicap of being dead

So apparently the new conservative thing is going to be to demand that Justice Antonin Scalia still be allowed to vote on pending Supreme Court cases, even though he is quite dead.

"There’s no Ouija board required to figure out how Justice Scalia would vote on these things, he’s already voted," attorney Kory Langhofer said during a discussion on Phoenix, Arizona, television station KPNX. "We're at the second-to-last step in how these cases unfold when Justice Scalia died."

Langhofer explained that the justices have already heard some cases, discussed them and taken an initial vote. He said that Scalia may have even written a draft opinion before he passed away.

"We know exactly what he thought. And it’s not unprincipled to say we should give affect to that," he said.

That's good ol' Justice Scalia for you. We don't even need him around to know which way he'd vote when it comes to a final decision in those cases, he was that predicable. From now until the time a new justice is sworn in, just tie his mouldering corpse to his chair and ask John Roberts to translate the escaping gasses into properly conservative votes.

All right, this one goes in the bin for the possibly stupidest thing ever said by any lawyer this year. Yes, it's only February. No, I suspect let the dead man vote anyway is not going to be a new conservative rallying cry even in the lowest fever swamps. Being on the Supreme Court is, after all, a lifetime appointment. Dropping dead is the only thing you can do that will get you summarily removed from the position.

Or … it used to be.