When actual news happens, writing APR can be a bit frustrating. Like posting a set of Superbowl predictions the morning after the big game, reading the columns put together by the, ahem, cream of beltway journalism several days before the world takes a lurch, offers little more than a forensic level of interest.
In this case, somewhere between now and when Maureen Dowd wrote her six hundredth piece on how upset she is that Hillary Clinton stood by Bill, Atonin Scalia died.
In writing about the Civil War, historian Barbara Fields said that it might have been a “very ugly filthy war with no redeeming characteristics at all” except that the cause of emancipation “ennobled what otherwise would have been meaningless carnage into something higher.”
In more democratic (small d or big D, take your pick) times, we might expect that President Obama nominates a replacement for Scalia, that replacement receives some weeks of Senate review, and is then approved. It’s happened that way just over one hundred times. However, as the howling on the right already indicates, the replacement of Scalia might easily stretch into the election.
In which case, Fields’ quote will have a new use. This election, which has been ugly, filthy, and above all blindingly silly and disheartening, may be elevated into a direct referendum on compelling, divisive issues which have roiled the country for decades. Americans will step into a voting booth knowing that they are as close to voting directly on a woman’s right to choose, on affirmative action, on the right to organize, on the continuation of the Voting Rights Act as we are ever likely to achieve.
Don’t expect the election to stop being ugly, filthy, silly or disheartening. But we just got a reminder: it’s also of staggering import.
The New York Times on this decision...
Justice Antonin Scalia… served on the Supreme Court for 30 years and made as big a mark on the court and on American law and politics as some of the chief justices under whom he served. It took about 10 minutes after the announcement of his death for the right wing to start screaming that the Senate should not confirm a replacement while President Obama is in office.
Given how blindly ideological the Republicans in the Senate are, after nearly eight years of doing little besides trying to thwart Mr. Obama, it is disturbingly likely that Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader and architect of the just-say-no approach, will lead his colleagues in keeping Justice Scalia’s seat open, and the highest court in the land essentially paralyzed, in the hope that one of the hard-right Republicans running for the presidency will win.
Mr. McConnell announced on Saturday night that “this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president,” claiming that he wanted to give American voters the chance to decide.
If you don’t hear the drum-roll and the bugles being sounded, you’re not listening. What’s that tune? This is important. This is important. This is important.
Justice Scalia, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986... was more than any other conservative justice responsible for bringing ideology to the foreground in the court’s deliberations and, sometimes, its decisions. The conservative justices who preceded him, including Justice Rehnquist, and who followed him, like Anthony Kennedy, were not ideological animals in the same sense as Justice Scalia. …
Justice Scalia wrote few of the divided court’s 5-to-4 decisions, perhaps because the chief justices were aware that Justice Scalia’s lack of self-control in his judgments made him unreliable in those cases.
One prominent exception was his majority decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the court ruled for the first time that the Second Amendment granted an individual right to bear arms. But Justice Scalia did say that that right was not absolute, and that certain weapons like assault rifles could be banned, but the case still set the court’s fundamentalist approach to gun rights.
Now. Let’s go inside and see what else is up. But before you do, get Glory playing on the speakers. You’re going to need it.
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