New Yorker columnist Jeffrey Toobin wrote in an article published this week that the late Antonin Scalia “devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy.”
“Fortunately, he mostly failed,” wrote Toobin, who also acts as a legal analyst for CNN. “Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor.”
“The great Justices of the Supreme Court have always looked forward; their words both anticipated and helped shape the nation that the United States was becoming. Chief Justice John Marshall read the new Constitution to allow for a vibrant and progressive federal government. Louis Brandeis understood the need for that government to regulate an industrializing economy. Earl Warren saw that segregation was poison in the modern world.”
In contrast, Scalia looked backward, Toobin wrote in a column that will appear in the New Yorker’s February 2016 edition.
“His revulsion toward homosexuality, a touchstone of his world view, appeared straight out of his sheltered, nineteen-forties boyhood,” the columnist continued.
Toobin later accused Scalia of being a fraud, and wrote that the justice’s adherence to “originalism” (the belief that the Constitution is to be interpreted based strictly on the intent of its authors) was little more than a sham, and posited that the conservative judge secretly loved judicial overreach.
In leveling this accusation, the New Yorker columnist also defined “originalism” as a “theory holding that the Constitution should be interpreted in line with the beliefs of the white men, many of them slave owners.”
Prior to his death, Scalia said that he got his news from the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times and talk radio. For Toobin, the fact that Scalia didn’t subscribe to a left-leaning group of media pundits served an excuse to ding the justice for living in a “sealed bubble of contemporary conservative thought.”
Toobin ended his column by taking one last victory lap around what he claims is Scalia’s legacy of backwards-ness and craven politics.
“Scalia … and his allies succeeded in transforming American politics into a cash bazaar, with seats all but put up for bidding. But even though Scalia led a conservative majority on the Court for virtually his entire tenure, he never achieved his fondest hopes,” he added.
“Affirmative action survives. Obamacare lives. Gay rights are ascendant; the death penalty is not,” he added. “The public wants diversity, not intolerance; more marriages and fewer executions; less money in politics, not more. Justice Scalia’s views — passionately felt and pungently expressed though they were — now seem like so many boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
On Friday, Americans lined the streets in Washington, D.C., to view Scalia as he lay in repose in the Supreme Court.
(Examiner/Becket Adams)
Battling falling temperatures and a wait time that lasted up to three hours, the number of those who came to view Scalia “must [have numbered] in the tens of thousands,” a Supreme Court staffer told the Washington Examiner’s media desk, adding that no one anticipated the turnout for the late justice.
Scalia’s funeral was held Saturday at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.
