It is said we should not speak badly of the dead. But really, enough about the so-called great Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He was one of the worst things that ever happened to this country and his terrible legacy will be with us for way too long.
Where to start?
Of course he is most responsible for giving us President Bush, as he was the one who stopped the Florida recount, which gave Bush the presidency, even though Al Gore received 500,000 more votes and probably would have won a Florida recount.
And when Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were busy planning the invasion of Iraq and ignoring warnings about the intentions of Osama bin Laden, they helped set the stage for 9/11. And that gave Bush cover for the disaster of the invasion of Iraq. So that goes onto Scalia’s balance sheet.
Scalia has been touted as a strict constructionalist who always tried to see what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the Constitution (called originalism). And yet his famous ruling on gun control seems to be way beyond what the writers of this document had in mind.
The founders of the nation feared the development of a standing army, as they rightfully saw that having such an army leads to war, as had been clearly seen in Europe, a place they wanted as little to do with as possible.
So in order to assure self-defense for their fledgling nation, they put in the Second Amendment. But this amendment clearly states that the right to bear arms was associated with the “formation of a well-regulated militia,” — a militia of neighbors and townsfolk who could grab their guns and defend their lands from Indian attacks and foreign incursions.
What Scalia did was remove the first part of the amendment and therefore enforce a basically unlimited right to bear arms with all of the crazy and terrible consequences we see today, a nation awash in gun violence.
Scalia died at a private ranch owned by one of his billionaire friends, a place where guests shot birds released directly in front of the hunters. This is wrong on so many levels, but it points out who he was in the employ of. He was the tool and enforcer of the gun lobby and the billionaire class.
He was also a man who said, on the subject of affirmative action, that African-Americans should perhaps go to less competitive colleges, a derogatory and racist sentiment.
And he helped block the Obama administration’s latest attempts to regulate air quality and slow global warming, in an unprecedented move to reach down to the lower courts to stop new regulations, which may lead to the U.S. not being able to meet its requirements under the new worldwide agreements on the environment hammered out in Paris. Scalia was on record denying that the globe is warming.
He was also integral in gutting aspects of the Voting Rights Act, which has allowed Republican-controlled state legislatures to enact laws to restrict voting rights due to fabricated fears of voter fraud.
Perhaps the worst of all the cases he sided with is the Citizens United ruling, which has led to an unraveling of years of attempts to restrict the flow of huge sums of money into the political process. Now the use of PACs and Super-PACs has been one of the most terrible developments and has led many to believe our democracy is headed to becoming an oligarchy of the wealthy. By declaring that money equals speech, this justice is probably the one person most to blame for the distortions that unbridled money introduced to our political system.
And now the Republicans won’t allow the president to appoint a successor, as they rightfully fear an Obama appointee will unravel a system that has given them so much political power with so few votes. They fear it will bring an end to Citizens United, allow needed regulations on the environment, bring about much-needed gun control and restore gutted Voting Rights Act enforcement in notoriously racist states.
Let us hope an Obama or Clinton appointee will help restore our nation to its democratic ideals.
Dan Daniels lives in South Hadley.