> At least at the Supreme Court level, whether a justice professes textualism, purposivism, intentionalism, or pastafarianism as a method of statutory interpretation is likely to play less of a role in his or her decisions than ideological druthers. None of these approaches or any other is close to fully determinate, giving a good deal of room for a judge's values to play a major role. Moreover, even when a methodology appears to point reasonably clearly towards a result, judges sometimes disregard their methodological commitments in favor of their ideological ones.
http://www.dorfonlaw.org/2016/06/does-textualism-have-bias.h...
Here's Richard Posner on Scalia:
> Does an ordinance that says that “no person may bring a vehicle into the park” apply to an ambulance that enters the park to save a person’s life? For Scalia and Garner, the answer is yes. After all, an ambulance is a vehicle—any dictionary will tell you that. If the authors of the ordinance wanted to make an exception for ambulances, they should have said so. And perverse results are a small price to pay for the objectivity that textual originalism offers (new dictionaries for new texts, old dictionaries for old ones). But Scalia and Garner later retreat in the ambulance case, and their retreat is consistent with a pattern of equivocation exhibited throughout their book.
> One senses a certain defensiveness in Justice Scalia’s advocacy of a textualism so rigid as to make the ambulance driver a lawbreaker. He is one of the most politically conservative Supreme Court justices of the modern era and the intellectual leader of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court. Yet the book claims that his judicial votes are generated by an “objective” interpretive methodology, and that, since it is objective, ideology plays no role. It is true, as Scalia and Garner say, that statutory text is not inherently liberal or inherently conservative; it can be either, depending on who wrote it. Their premise is correct, but their conclusion does not follow: text as such may be politically neutral, but textualism is conservative.
https://newrepublic.com/article/106441/scalia-garner-reading...