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U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died

nytimes.com

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Re: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died

#201

Post by dang »

orbitur wrote: post #185
dang wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he's still a terrible person The combination of incivility and internet buzzphrase is toxic for HN. Please don't do this when commenting here, regardless of how you feel about someone. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11096095 and marked it off-topic.

I admit the phrase "terrible person" is uncivil, but where is an internet buzzphrase in my comment?

"You are a terrible person" or "he is a terrible person" is the internet buzzphrase, in the same category as "you are bad and you should feel bad".

I mean, I don't collect data on how often these things appear, but that's the one I was reacting to.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died

#202

Post by waterlesscloud »

akilism wrote: post #200
lotharbot wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's far easier to sell the argument that the voters should decide on who gets to nominate a replacement for Scalia, than that we should shut down national parks or whatever. These aren't remotely the same type of "shutdown".

wait didnt the voters decide when obama got reelected? he's still the president right?

They also decided when they gave Republicans control of the senate.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died

#203

Post by vonnik »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #112
vonnik wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. The stay he supported on the Florida recount was rampant federal interference in a state matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore#Stay_of_the_Flori... Indirectly, he gave us eight years of incompetence and Iraq, a horrible farce of a war.

I wish Gore had won, and I don't know enough about law to have an opinion on the specifics of the case. But I am at peace with it for a simple reason: that election was within the margin of error. We can put a lot of stake into details of state law, but in reality it was a draw. Frankly I think the fairest thing would be a coin flip. In absence of that, I think "play it where it lies" is a fine proxy. I don't think a…

If you consider the recount abstracted from all other phenomena, then this may be a reasonable point of view.

But voter suppression by Republicans in the South is well-known and widespread, because the GOP wins more elections when the turnout, particularly black turnout, decreases. Florida has a long history of voter suppression, which has been documented on numerous occasions: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/05/florida-ho...

So, in the Supreme Court vote, we have a majority conservative court that includes Scalia, a Reagan/Bush era appointee, who happens to favor the side of the coin that puts another Bush in the White House.

Scalia admitted that a recount was potentially prejudicial to Bush, and decided it was best to quash it. His action takes place in a sequence of many actions designed to bolster the GOP. Coincidentally, Scalia helped roll back the Voting Rights Act, once a milestone for Civil Rights.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jun/25/local/la-me-ln-scali...

Every single one of his positions may be impeccably argued, but it's a striking coincidence that he toed a clear ideological line on abortion, gun control, affirmative action and gay marriage, among many other issues.

I do not believe his stance on Bush v. Gore was neutral. He had a horse in the race; his horse won; and America was the worse for it. Good riddance.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died

#204

Post by ErikVandeWater »

vonnik wrote: post #30
nemo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Scalia was foremost an advocate of judicial restraint When convenient.

Totally agree. The stay he supported on the Florida recount was rampant federal interference in a state matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore#Stay_of_the_Flori... Indirectly, he gave us eight years of incompetence and Iraq, a horrible farce of a war.

This comment needs to be better supported. It is intuitive that votes for POTUS would be a federal matter, and Wikipedia does not mention a jurisdictional issue for that case, nor any other federal interference conflict whatsoever.

Also, singling out Scalia when four other justices voted with him is biased. It is also an incredible stretch to cast responsibility for an incompetence in handling an unanticipated war on any individual (especially in the judiciary!).

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died

#205

Post by icebraining »

lazyant wrote: post #65

isn't this the judge that said that torture is not "cruel and unusual punishment" because the Constitution applies to persons and suspects conveniently labeled "enemy combatants" were not persons? good riddance

From what I understand, that's not his argument. His position was that torture was only unconstitutional when used as punishment (and not for extracting information or other purposes).

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died

#206

Post by KMag »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #177
ianamartin wrote: post #133

I usually disagreed with Scalia, but I have tons of respect for the man. He's always struck me as one of the best examples of the idea that two intelligent, educated people with reasonable minds may legitimately come to different conclusions about the same set of facts. I also found when reading transcripts of oral arguments that Scalia was really terrifically funny pretty often. Once, I was doing some computer repai…

> You will find that there is a hell of a lot of thought that goes into opinions, and there is much less predetermined ideology than the way these things often get painted. Yeah, retconning to twist everything that seeks to disturb one's bigoted and repressive worldview does take an extraordinary amount of thought, credit where it is due. I encourage everyone to not just read the opinions, but to be vigilant of this…

> I encourage everyone to not just read the opinions, but to be vigilante of this when doing so.

Vigilantism, particularly against judges and justices for written opinions, is not the way to deal with laws and interpretations you find unjust. We must not fight the unjust with injustice.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died

#207

Post by geofft »

wildmusings wrote: post #170
dalke wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your standard and which recount you look at. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_election_recount#Post-... : > under the strictest standard, where only a cleanly punched ballot with a fully removed chad was counted, Gore won by three votes.[38] Under all other standards, Bush won, with Bush's margin increasing as looser standards were used. ... because of the possibility of mistakes, it is difficult…

Very interesting. My own thoughts on this are that we should not be trying to determine intent on improperly filled ballots. In the same way that I'm responsible for getting myself to the voting booth, I am responsible for filling out my ballot properly. If I fail at that, my vote won't be registered. Where ballots aren't sufficiently clear to voters, they should be made so.

Where ballots aren't sufficiently clear to voters, they should be made so.

Well there's the problem. What do you do when you have ballots that are objectively unclear, like the infamous butterfly ballot? You can't invalidate the election and have a new one--apart from the logistical problems, the turnout is going to differ significantly based on the media attention and the knowledge that the cancelled ballots were so close.

The best option you have is to mandate judicial review of ballots well before the election. But even that doesn't save you in the situation Florida actually found itself in.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died

#208

Post by themartorana »

dang wrote: post #159
orbitur wrote: post #43

He didn't actually say that, and I'm not sure how it spread. However, he's still a terrible person, and here's the quote yours spawned from: “There is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough), for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction.” edit: This was originally in reply…

> he's still a terrible person The combination of incivility and internet buzzphrase is toxic for HN. Please don't do this when commenting here, regardless of how you feel about someone. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11096095 and marked it off-topic.

I find the requirement of "civility" over "truth" to be rather off-putting. The direct line here is Scalia's belief that justice is trumped by tradition, and therefore an innocent person has no right to be declared so by new evidence.

This makes him a terrible person, because he is directly standing between an innocent person (or people) and their freedom and the justice this country promises.

It's calling a spade a spade. Civility doesn't (edit: shouldn't) trump that.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died

#209

Post by throwaway43563 »

Why should the death of a Supreme Court Justice matter this much, let alone be a cause for celebration (as it clearly is for some in this thread)?

That unelected, life-tenured judges exercise this much authority over us, that they routinely subvert our collective democratic will as expressed through elections and referendums, that people even defend their votes for President on the basis of what kind of Supreme Court nominations they will likely make, does not suggest a healthy democracy.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died

#210

Post by 17wallpapers »

sandworm101 wrote: post #175
ianamartin wrote: post #133

I usually disagreed with Scalia, but I have tons of respect for the man. He's always struck me as one of the best examples of the idea that two intelligent, educated people with reasonable minds may legitimately come to different conclusions about the same set of facts. I also found when reading transcripts of oral arguments that Scalia was really terrifically funny pretty often. Once, I was doing some computer repai…

>>> I usually disagreed with Scalia, but I have tons of respect for the man. He's always struck me as one of the best examples of the idea that two intelligent, educated people with reasonable minds may legitimately come to different conclusions about the same set of facts. I didn't have much respect for the man or the justice. As a justice, his interpretations were always based on a selectively warped view of histor…

Did you deliberately reverse the quote?
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