Scalia Dismisses ‘Living Constitution’
In typical form, Justice Scalia said that the Constitution isn’t a living document. Speaking at an event in Puerto Rico, Scalia said that the Constitution isn’t a living document, that it’s a legal document.
In a speech Monday sponsored by the conservative Federalist Society, Scalia defended his long-held belief in sticking to the plain text of the Constitution “as it was originally written and intended.” “Scalia does have a philosophy, it’s called originalism,” he said. “That’s what prevents him from doing the things he would like to do,” he told more than 100 politicians and lawyers from this U.S. island territory. According to his judicial philosophy, he said, there can be no room for personal, political or religious beliefs.
To maintain this approach for this long, you have to have incredible discipline. You’d also have to believe strongly in those views. Both are traits you can easily see in Justice Scalia. It’s also obvious that Justice Breyer doesn’t have that type of discipline or the intellectual heft that Justice Scalia has.
It’s also worth noting that Justice Breyer comes from the Democratic side, which believes that justices and judges are there to implement social policies via judicial fiat rather than simply interpreting the Constitution. They see themselves as arbiters of social policy even though the Founding Fathers clearly didn’t envision that being their role.
We hear complaints all the time about having an independant judiciary but when do we hear bipartisan complaints about the judiciary being superlegislators? We hear this complaint from conservatives but you won’t hear it consistently from liberals.
Proponents of the living constitution want matters to be decided “not by the people, but by the justices of the Supreme Court. They are not looking for legal flexibility, they are looking for rigidity, whether it’s the right to abortion or the right to homosexual activity, they want that right to be embedded from coast to coast and to be unchangeable,” he said.
AMEN, Justice Scalia. Since using foreign court rulings is something arbitrary, meaning that they’re used to simply rationalize the outcomes that they want to see. It’s intellectual cowardice, too. It’s like these liberal justices start with an ideological conclusion, then find the rationalization in foreign court rulings or in their own logic that fits the case.
Cross-post at LetFreedomRing
February 14th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
Unfortunately, Bader-Ginzberg doesn’t see the Constitution as a living document, either, and I’m fast coming to the belief that most moonbats don’t. What they, especially her, see it as is dead meat to be rewritten in any way they see fit.
Too bad they don’t have the experience of living under regal fiat as the writers of the document did. Maybe then they’d think seriously about how it stood the test of time until activists and ideologues like them got into it.
We don’t need a communist country, as opposed to what the A.C.L.U. believes and works toward. What we need is to get back to the single document that made more difference than any single person or writing has to make this nation great, and a world leader.
February 16th, 2006 at 5:00 am
[...] The ‘living breathing’ document is the activist code for being able to ignore original intent and to discover new things never envisioned from the document. California Conservative also draws this quote and reveals just how inflexible the activists are once they twist the Constitution to where they want it. Proponents of the living constitution want matters to be decided “not by the people, but by the justices of the Supreme Court. They are not looking for legal flexibility, they are looking for rigidity, whether it’s the right to abortion or the right to homosexual activity, they want that right to be embedded from coast to coast and to be unchangeable,†he said. [...]