For better, and oftimes worse, our fair burg is the kind of place everyone eventually visits.
Yesterday, we were, um, honored to host America’s most influential jurist, purveyor of often startling nuggets of legal and constitutional theory. And, boy, did he drop a load of ‘em while he was here.
Scalia criticizes other justices over meaning of religious freedom
Speaking Saturday at a Catholic high school in Metairie, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia criticized other members of the court for what he said is a false understanding of the nature of religious freedom and the relationship between church and state.
He said the idea that government must be neutral between religion and unbelief is not grounded in the country’s constitutional traditions and that God has been good to the United States because Americans honor him.
Let that sink in. The single most powerful justice of the Supreme Court of the United States has declared that government neutrality in religion “is not grounded in constitutional traditions.”
If, like me, you’ve read the document referenced (or even a Wikipedia entry on same), reading that sentence made your head hurt. There’s a pretty specific amendment covering the issue, and the fine folks who wrote it probably thought it was significant, as they made it the very first one.
Such amendments are, in the mind of Mr. Scalia, divorced from “constitutional traditions,” as he made a point of dismissing another of them in the same speech.
Moving to another constitutional issue, he said courts continue to insist that search and seizure is unconstitutional unless a warrant is obtained. “We made that up,” he said, adding that many exceptions allow searches without warrants, including so-called search-and-frisk stops and traffic stops. “It would be more accurate to say that a warrant is generally required for a home and sometimes required elsewhere,” he said.
Got that? The only part of the Fourth Amendment that the Framers really meant was the “houses” bit. They only added “persons,” “papers” and “effects” because the sentence looked too short and they were afraid posterity would think they were lazy writers.
This law-as-art (“It’s whatever I say it is!”) is fairly common among those who title themselves (irony alert) “conservatives” and “strict constructionists.” You probably heard someone disgorge similar opinions around the holiday table or down the bar just last week. And, if you did, you likely thought, “Thank god my brother-in-law isn’t a judge.”
Well, your brother-in-law isn’t a judge. He is a justice. On the Court that acts as the final arbiter of law in this country.
And, if the next president of the United States is a Republican that Court will be packed with a solid majority of your brothers-in-law. For the rest of your life.
Just a thought. We’ll now resume our regularly scheduled pie fight already in progress.