Thursday, July 05, 2012

Sweet Sweet Scalia

You have to have a warm place in your heart for Justice Antonin Scalia.  I have found, while waiting for some of the recent decisions, that Justice Scalia often reads his dissents aloud when the verdicts are given.
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In the Arizona Immigration laws Justice Scalia managed quite a feat.  He believed that Arizona should have the right to limit immigration at a state level, based on the historical precedent that the old South used to outlaw Freed Blacks into the states.
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Really - here is the quote.
In the first 100 years of the Republic, the States enacted numerous laws restricting the immigration of certain classes of aliens, including convicted criminals, indigents, persons with contagious diseases, and (in Southern States) freed blacks. State laws not only provided for the removal of unwanted immigrants but also imposed penalties on unlawfully present aliens and those who aided their immigration.
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He also blasted President Obama's dream act (and here I will quote from The New Yorker)...

After twenty-five years on the Court, Scalia has earned a reputation for engaging in splenetic hyperbole—but he outdid himself this time. Scalia thought the Court should have approved S.B. 1070 in its entirety, but his opinion, which he read from the bench in his usual clear basso, ranged over several contemporary controversies, whether or not they had any relevance to the Arizona case. He noted, for example, that Obama recently used an executive order to accomplish some of the goals of the DREAM Act, and exempt certain young people from deportation. (This decision came well after the Arizona case was argued and was legally irrelevant to the issue at hand.) “The president said at a news conference that the new program is ‘the right thing to do’ in light of Congress’s failure to pass the administration’s proposed revision of the Immigration Act,” Scalia said. “Perhaps it is, though Arizona may not think so. But to say, as the Court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications of the Immigration Act that the President declines to enforce boggles the mind.” Scalia did not explain how declining to deport these individuals boggled his mind.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/06/antonin-scalia-dissent-immigration-arizona.html#ixzz1zkvNIaQm.
That Justice Scalia , he's a charmer