I haven't decided whether to recognize the Rev. Pat Robertson or Justice Antonin Scalia as this week's winner of the coveted Grumpy Abe Linguistic Lunacy (GALL) award. Neither is a rising star in his class anymore but both are known to draw extensive media attention when they speak. It's sort of like the NFL referee announcing the crucial decision by the deciders in the booth on high for a disputed play down on the field.
First, Preacher Robertson told his TV audience that people should be careful about wearing second-hand clothes without thoroughly laundering them because it was possible that they may possess "demonic spirits". Prayer, too, would help protect the new wearer, he said, to "rebuke any spirits that happened to have attached themselves to objects". (No, he's not talking about ancient tree spirits!)
Not that he's totally sure about this threat, but "it ain't going to hurt" to be careful.
That seemed to qualify as a winner until along came Scalia - a Supreme Court justice, for heaven's sake - who expressed his distaste for the Voting Rights Act in the case being argued before the court by describing it as a "perpetuation of racial entitlement". The historians are sure to mention this somewhere in their accounts of Scalia, just as they have never let modern readers forget the day in 1857 when Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled in the Dred Scott case that slaves should never-never become citizens, even if they were freed.
It had been a close call, but now that I've revisited the details and the sweeping consequences, the GALL award goes to Scalia. (But I did throw some industrial strength cleanser into the washer!)
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Quite apart from his barely disguised vein of contempt for Congress as being incapable of making rational decisions on voting rights, Scalia revealed himself anew as a hyper-hypocrite on the matter of legislating from the judicial bench. For years, the long-term Justice has railed against the federal judiciary (including the high court on which he sits) for usurping legislative power, particularly on issues of social and macroeconomic importance. Such issues, of course, often reflect liberal points of view -- notions that are anathema to the be-robed "Il Duce." His repetitive tirades in defense of "states' rights" and sovereignty are coded to shield the individual states from congressional laws enacted to preserve or expand the constitutional rights of individuals to perform such things as unimpeded voting and a woman's dominion over her own body. In the 48 years since the Voting Rights Act went into effect, Congress has reauthorized it four times, most recently by a 98-0 vote in the Senate and 390-33 vote in the House. Any unbiased person could reasonably conclude that the members who voted to renew it after exhaustive study and testimony were aware of its import. But not Scalia, who disdained the members' motives and concluded that reauthorization "is not the kind of question you can leave to Congress." In other words, leave it up to the third branch of government -- the Supreme Court (whose own members were not popularly elected and cannot be removed from office short of impeachment). Again, an unbiased observer might consider this to be the "judicial activism" that Justice Scalia has so roundly denounced when it suited his predilections.
Quite apart from his barely disguised vein of contempt for Congress as being incapable of making rational decisions on voting rights, Scalia revealed himself anew as a hyper-hypocrite on the matter of legislating from the judicial bench. For years, the long-term Justice has railed against the federal judiciary (including the high court on which he sits) for usurping legislative power, particularly on issues of social and macroeconomic importance. Such issues, of course, often reflect liberal points of view -- notions that are anathema to the be-robed "Il Duce." His repetitive tirades in defense of "states' rights" and sovereignty are coded to shield the individual states from congressional laws enacted to preserve or expand the constitutional rights of individuals to perform such things as unimpeded voting and a woman's dominion over her own body. In the 48 years since the Voting Rights Act went into effect, Congress has reauthorized it four times, most recently by a 98-0 vote in the Senate and 390-33 vote in the House. Any unbiased person could reasonably conclude that the members who voted to renew it after exhaustive study and testimony were aware of its import. But not Scalia, who disdained the members' motives and concluded that reauthorization "is not the kind of question you can leave to Congress." In other words, leave it up to the third branch of government -- the Supreme Court (whose own members were not popularly elected and cannot be removed from office short of impeachment). Again, an unbiased observer might consider this to be the "judicial activism" that Justice Scalia has so roundly denounced when it suited his predilections.
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