Judges who accepted bribes are to be punished by losing all knowledge of divine law.
—Rabbi Shlomo (b. 1040–1105)
The following quote is from the National Review—one among the many tributes paid to Justice Scalia after his death: “. . . so consistent, so powerful and so penetrating in their devotion to the rule of law are Scalia’s judicial opinions that one may take one or two almost at random and catch a glimpse of the great patterns of his jurisprudence . . .”
That same issue contains, coincidentally, a two-page ad offering a 2016 postelection Caribbean cruise (sponsored by the magazine) hosted by its contributors and editorial staff, along with various Right-Wing, unemployed politicians.I
The cruise features these attractions:
• two fun-filled night-owl seminars
• a late-night smoker
• three revelrous poolside cocktail receptions and intimate dining on at least two occasions with a guest speaker or editor
I mention this fun-filled cruise because it is the last place on Earth that Scalia would have found himself. Scalia, as it turns out, was given to more exclusive, less plebian entertainments. Like the hunting trip he was on when he died unexpectedly on February 12, 2016.
According to Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker, this was no ordinary hunting trip. The hunt—for quail, duck, and other birds—took place on the 30,000-acre Texas resort owned by John Poindexter, a Republican industrialist who recently had a case before the Supreme Court.
Scalia was flown to the secluded ranch on the private plane of his good friend C. Allen Foster,II a prominent Washington lawyer whose clients have included the Republican Party (in redistricting cases) and Blackwater, the paramilitary organization that supplied “contractors” for the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The thirty-odd attendees at the ranch, including Scalia, belonged to a secret hunting fraternity called the International Order of St. Hubertus.III
Their motto is Deum Diligite Animalia Diligentes, which loosely translates to “We honor God by killing His creatures.”IV
Members of this fraternity wear “dark green robes emblazoned with a large cross.” Their officers hold such titles as Grand Master and Knight Grand Officer.
Its current leader and Supreme Grand Master is His Royal Highness, the Archduke of Austria.
All of which might explain the mystery surrounding Scalia’s death. Some on the Right suspected he was assassinated. Perhaps a professional hit man from the Occupy Wall Street movement?
What other secret organizations Scalia belonged to we will never know, but publicly he was an admitted Right-Wing, ultraconservative Roman Catholic ideologue.
A sample of Scalia’s theology can be found, in his own words, in this interview with the reporter Jennifer Senior:
My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.
Celebrated on the Right for his “penetrating” and “powerful” reasoning, Scalia was especially clever when denouncing homosexuality. Here are just a few examples:
If we protect gays, why not child molesters?
The Texas statute [banning homosexual acts] undeniably seeks to further the belief of its citizens that certain forms of sexual behavior are “immoral and unacceptable”—the same interest furthered by criminal laws against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity.
Men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals, are all subject to [Texas’s] prohibition of deviate sexual intercourse with someone of the same sex.
His words practically sing off the page. About women’s rights, Scalia claimed that:
. . . women’s equality is . . . one of the “smug assurances” of our time.
Scalia’s cultivated vision of the Constitution made him unquestionably one of the great minds of the thirteenth century.
• • •
Scalia called his method of interpreting the Constitution Originalism. He defined it this way: “I consult the writings of some men who happened to be delegates to the Constitutional Convention—Hamilton and Madison’s writings in The Federalist, for example. I do so, however, not because they were Framers and therefore their intent is authoritative and must be law, but rather because their writings, like those of other intelligent and informed people of the time, display how the text of the Constitution was originally understood.”
It’s a neat trick Scalia had: locking into rules he can hide behind so that his every decision seemed untainted by his partisan prejudices.
To see exactly how he did this, let’s consider the famous case of Citizens United v. The Federal Election Commission (2010), in which the Supreme Court, by a 5–4 decision, ruled that billionaire donors can legally give unlimited and anonymous amounts of money to political candidates under the protection of “free speech.”
On behalf of the government, the Solicitor General cited Supreme Court precedents to show that “corporate political speech can be banned [by the government] in order to prevent corruption or its appearance.”
Scalia disagreed, saying that because big donors can write massive checks to political campaigns, there is no more risk of corruption than there would be from “limited” donations by individuals.
To paraphrase Scalia’s ruling: $50 million from the Koch brothers has the same “influence” as $250 from Joe Schmuck.
My question is, who exactly of the “intelligent and informed people of the time” did Scalia read to support his claim that massive amounts of money are not a corruptive force in the democratic process?
Certainly, he couldn’t have read any of the following:
I hope we shall . . . crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and to bid defiance to the laws of our country. —Thomas Jefferson
If we do not provide against corruption, our government will soon be at an end. —George Mason, delegate from Virginia
Look at Britain . . . see the bribery and corruption defiling the fairest fabric that ever human nature reared. —Patrick Henry
One of the weak sides of republics . . . is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption. —Alexander Hamilton
There are two passions which have a powerful influence on the affairs of men. These are ambition and avarice: the love of power, and the love of money . . . But when united in view of the same object, they have in many minds the most violent effects . . . —Benjamin Franklin
The stockjobbers will become the pretorian band of the Government, at once its tool and its tyrant; bribed by its largesses and overawing it, by clamours and combinations. —James Madison
. . . the danger may be . . . the rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. —Gouverneur Morris, delegate from Pennsylvania
And these fears were from rich guys!
And let us not forget this other little fact: Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton all agreed to move the nation’s capital from New York to remote lands in Virginia to keep the big-money boys away from those doing the country’s business.
So I have to ask again: What exactly did Scalia read? Did he read these “intelligent and informed people of the time,” then forget about them? Or did he just choose to ignore what they wrote as an inconvenient fact in order to align himself with those hunting buddies he so loved to kill little birds with?
Scalia has to be the 1 percent’s favorite judge since Pontius Pilate.
I. It was on a similar cruise to Alaska in 2007 that William Kristol, neocon intellectual, discovered Sarah Palin.
II. In his biographical essay for the Princeton class of ’63, Foster brags of killing more than 150,000 birds of various species. He also wrote: “It won’t surprise anyone that I still rail against liberals, the academic kleptocracy, and feminazis.”
III. St. Hubertus is the patron saint of hunting and fishing. No connection to the word, which means arrogance resulting from excessive pride.
IV. My translation. But then, I was never very good at Latin.