Scalia Declares He is Against the 17th Amendment

[thoughtone]

Taking our country back?

source: Think Progress

Scalia Jumps On The Anti-Seventeenth Amendment Bandwagon


One of the most bizarre developments of the last several months is the growing right-wing calls to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment, the provision of the Constitution that empowers voters — as opposed to state legislatures — to elect their senators. On Friday, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia joined Senator-elect Mike Lee (R-UT) and Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) in opposing the century-old amendment:

Scalia called the writing of the Constitution “providential,” and the birth of political science.

“There’s very little that I would change,” he said. “I would change it back to what they wrote, in some respects. The 17th Amendment has changed things enormously.”

That amendment allowed for U.S. Senators to be elected by the people, rather than by individual state legislatures.

“We changed that in a burst of progressivism in 1913, and you can trace the decline of so-called states’ rights throughout the rest of the 20th century. So, don’t mess with the Constitution.“
​

Justice Scalia’s use of extremist “states’ rights” rhetoric is an ominous sign. Although Scalia has a well-deserved reputation as an ultra-conservative, his record on federal/state power issues is surprisingly sensible. Indeed, his concurring opinion in Gonzales v. Raich could have been written as a blueprint for why President Obama’s Affordable Care Act is constitutional.

It’s puzzling why Scalia, or anyone else for that matter, would suddenly take a swipe at this entirely uncontroversial amendment — although the Wonk Room offers one possible explanation. Before the Seventeenth Amendment was enacted, corporate interest groups were able to lean on state lawmakers and thus effectively buy U.S. Senate seats. In other words, repealing the Seventeenth Amendment “would be like Citizens United on steroids.”

 

[Lamarr]

Taking our country back?

We need to take our country back...................from this guy!

"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies"

 

[ronmch20]

What is he now 75??? This obese semi-corpse can't last much longer --- hopefully.
When he goes it would be doubly satisfying if he takes his ass licking toady Thomas with him.

 

[QueEx]

Tea Time for Scalia

<font size="6"><Center>
Tea time for Antonin Scalia</font size></center>

The lecture is going on despite calls from some for Scalia to cancel his commitment. |
AP Photo


P o l i t i c o
By JENNIFER EPSTEIN
January 24, 2011


Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia will speak on Monday on the separation of powers at an event organized by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and her Tea Party Caucus.


Though the Tea Party Caucus is a conservative group, Bachmann’s office confirmed to POLITICO that it invited all members of Congress to attend the lecture and that some Democrats indicated plans to be on hand.

“It is a special privilege to have him address the first of what will be regular seminars featuring constitutional scholars,” Bachmann said of Scalia in December when the event was first announced.

“In his 24 years of service on the high court, Justice Scalia has distinguished himself by his ‘originalist’ approach to constitutional interpretation,” she added.

The lecture is going on despite the objections of some observers. The New York Times editorial board called for Scalia to cancel his commitment.

“By meeting behind closed doors, as is planned, and by presiding over a seminar, implying give and take, the justice would give the impression that he was joining the throng — confirming his new moniker as the ‘Justice from the Tea Party,’” the board wrote in December.

The Times said it would oppose a similar event featuring a liberal Supreme Court justice and targeted at Democratic members of Congress. “The ideological nature of the group and the seminar would eclipse the justice’s independence and leave him looking rash and biased.”

But by offering invitations to all House members and stressing that it is “a bipartisan event that we would love for Democrats and Republicans alike to attend,” as a spokesman did to POLITICO in December, Bachmann is aiming to head off criticism.

Bipartisan caucuses occasionally host members of the judiciary. The Congressional Caucus on the Judicial Branch, led by Reps. Judy Biggert (R-Ill.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), has about 45 members and meets occasionally with Supreme Court justices. Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke to the group in 2009.

Bachmann is using her lecture series to offer instruction for new members of Congress on the Constitution and Declaration of Independence before are “co-opted into the Washington system,” she said.

Possible future lecturers include Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Andrew Napolitano, and evangelical minister David Barton.




http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/48043.html

 

[QueEx]

Justice Scalia’s use of extremist “states’ rights” rhetoric is an ominous sign. Although Scalia has a well-deserved reputation as an ultra-conservative, his record on federal/state power issues is surprisingly sensible. Indeed, his concurring opinion in Gonzales v. Raich<SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00"> could have been written as a blueprint for why President Obama’s Affordable Care Act is constitutional</span>.

<font size="5"><center>What The Tea Party Could Learn
From Justice Scalia Today </font size></center>

Think Progress
By Ian Millhiser
January 24, 2011



Justice Antonin Scalia will speak today to a group of Tea Party Members of Congress organized by ultra-conservative Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), an arrangement that even President George W. Bush’s former ethics attorney finds questionable:

[T]he decision of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to speak at the first class on Monday has raised legal hackles about his participation in what turns out to be a closed-door event in conjunction with Bachmann’s Tea Party Caucus.

One of the most outspoken critics is University of Minnesota law professor Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer under former President George W. Bush. Painter notes that Bachmann is among 63 House members who filed a brief in support of a lawsuit by more than two dozen states challenging President Obama’s health care overhaul. The case could easily end up before the Supreme Court.​

Yet, if Bachmann is expecting Scalia to validate her comically wrong view that health reform is unconstitutional, she’s in for a rude awakening. Like most of the right-wing lawmakers challenging the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Bachmann’s brief focuses its ire on the provision requiring most Americans to either carry insurance or pay slightly more income taxes. <SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">But, in a case called Gonzales v. Raich, Justice Scalia practically drew a roadmap to a future opinion declaring this provision constitutional.</span>

Scalia wrote in Gonzales that <SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">“where Congress has the authority to enact a regulation of interstate commerce, it possesses every power needed to make that regulation effective,” and insurance coverage requirement easily fits this test.</span> The ACA’s provision prohibiting insurers from denying coverage to patients with preexisting conditions cannot function if patients are free to enter and exit the insurance market at will. If patients can wait until they get sick to buy insurance, they will drain all the money out of an insurance plan that they have not previously paid into, leaving nothing left for the rest of the plan’s consumers.

Bachmann’s Tea Partying friends could also learn a lot about the Second Amendment from Justice Scalia. Although Scalia authored D.C. v. Heller, the first Supreme Court opinion ever to hold that individuals have a right to own firearms, Scalia also placed very real limits on that right. Among other things, Scalia said that it is perfectly constitutional to ban “weapons that are most useful in military service.”

Yet, during Justice Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearing, many of Bachmann’s right-wing allies in the Senate claimed that Kagan should be disqualified from the Supreme Court because she once worked on a presidential memorandum preventing foreign gun manufacturers from importing military-grade firearms such as Uzis into the United States. If Kagan’s belief that the Second Amendment allows an Uzi-ban disqualifies her from the Supreme Court, than Scalia is also disqualified.

Let’s be clear. Scalia is hardly a stalwart defender of the Constitution. Recently, Scalia has deservedly been under fire for his misguided claim that the Constitution does not protect against gender discrimination. He’s an outspoken defender of torture and once wrote that mere innocence is not a good enough reason to let an innocent man go free. Scalia voted with the majority in the egregious Citizens United decision that unleashed billions in corporate dollars upon American elections, and he once voted to give drug companies sweeping immunity from the law when their defective products poison a patient.

But it is a testament to how far off the deep end the Tea Party has fallen that they now accept as constitutionally orthodoxy views that make the Supreme Court’s most outspoken conservative cringe.





http://thinkprogress.org/2011/01/24/scalia-bachmann/

 

[deputy dawg]

One question; as the Tea Party adheres strictly to Constitutional guidelines, where is the provision that obligates TV/radio/internet to give the opposing party time for an opposing view of the SOTU speech?

Giving an opposing speech or two as we will have tonight, is another violation of their "follow the Constitution" directive the GOP likes to say they heard from the voters back in November.

 

[Fuckallyall]

One question; as the Tea Party adheres strictly to Constitutional guidelines, where is the provision that obligates TV/radio/internet to give the opposing party time for an opposing view of the SOTU speech?

Giving an opposing speech or two as we will have tonight, is another violation of their "follow the Constitution" directive the GOP likes to say they heard from the voters back in November.

There isn't one. The media does it by "choice".

And I agree with the call to repeal the 17th amendment. The States themselves really do not have a say in how the federal government does them. I think it's obvious.