Sunday, March 17, 2013

In an Orwellian Column, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank Describes Sonia Sotomayor’s Attempts to Bully Antonin Scalia, Says Scalia Frequently Gets “His Comeuppance,” Yet Speaks of Scalia as Supreme Court’s “Reigning Bully”

Posted, with running commentary, by Nicholas Stix

I left the following comment:

Wow, Mr. Milbank. Everything in this story is about the bullying, unprofessional behavior by Sonia Sotomayor, yet you claim, with no basis whatsoever, that Antonin Scalia is the High Court’s “reigning bully.” For you, “bully” clearly means anyone who refuses to submit to racial socialism.

* * *
Milbank: Justices Sotomayor, Kagan take on high court's bullies
By Dana Milbank
March 2, 2013
(Washington Post) The Columbian

For a quarter-century, Antonin Scalia has been the reigning bully of the Supreme Court, but finally a couple of justices are willing to face him down. As it happens, the two manning up to take on Nino the Terrible are women: the court's newest members, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

[Translation: Scalia is the most brilliant justice on the high court, and he has the wrong politics. Thus, any violation of the High Court’s mores that is done to attack him, up to and including lynching him during a hearing, is to be encouraged and celebrated.]

The acerbic Scalia, the court's longest-serving justice, got his latest comeuppance Wednesday morning, as he tried to make the absurd argument that Congress' renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 2006 by votes of 98 to 0 in the Senate and 390 to 33 in the House did not mean that Congress actually supported the act. Scalia argued that the lawmakers were secretly afraid to vote against this "perpetuation of racial entitlement."

[N.S.: “His latest comeuppance”? Milbank gives no examples of Scalia bullying anyone—we are supposed to take his word on faith—yet he gives one example of Sotomayor trying to bully him, and claims that he has been slapped around repeatedly (“his latest comeuppance”). If Scalia is constantly getting smacked down, then he’s no bully. This sort of double talk is what happens when a transparently dishonest person tries to gerrymander language.]

Kagan wasn't about to let him get away with that. In a breach of decorum, she interrupted his questioning of counsel to argue with him directly. "Well, that sounds like a good argument to me, Justice Scalia," she said. "It was clear to 98 senators, including every senator from a covered state, who decided that there was a continuing need for this piece of legislation."

[“In a breach of decorum.” Supreme Court decorum has always been that justices argue with people coming before them, not with each other. What this means is that Sotomayor and Kagan are seeking to sabotage the judicial process by siding with one side, and tag-teaming, to short-circuit the right of more conservative judges to argue with those before them. I am not aware of any history of “conservative” justices doing that to leftist justices. Indeed, Sonia Sotomayor does not have the requisite intellect to be able to handle such treatment. Her entire career is based on racial privilege and racial intimidation, even if she is paler than me.]

Scalia replied to Kagan, "Or decided that perhaps they'd better not vote against it, that there's nothing, that there's no — none of their interests in voting against it."

The styles of the two Obama appointees are different. Sotomayor is blunt and caustic, repeatedly interrupting. In an opinion this week, she harshly criticized a Texas prosecutor for a racist line of questioning. She has been on the interview circuit publicizing her memoir.

[No, as I showed in my VDARE column on her statement, she sought to intimidate all white prosecutors out of vigorously doing their jobs, where they are charged with trying black and Hispanic defendants, in order thereby to aid and abet black and Hispanic criminals.]

Kagan is choosier about when to interject herself, but she's sardonic and sharp-witted.

The two new justices are sending a message to the court's conservative majority: You may have the votes, but you're going to have a fight.

[No; they’re sending the message to the court's four “conservative” justices—with wishy-washy Anthony Kennedy—playing Sandra Day O’Connor’s old role—as the swing vote, no side has a majority. But heaven forfend that Milbank should be honest about that—that they expect to be deferred to, based on their status as affirmative action justices, while at the same time routinely violating decorum towards those justices who earned their way on to the High Court.

Milbank says that a racist thug like Sotomayor is standing up to Scalia the “bully,” what he is saying is that any white man who does not submit to raical socialism is a “bully,” and any racial socialist/feminist/whatever, no matter abusive, is a “hero” standing up to the “bully.”

There are only three reliably conservative justices on the court: Scalia, Thomas, and Alito. After Roberts’ switch on Obamacare, he can no longer be counted on. Some right-of-center observers suspect that Obama’s people may have blackmailed Roberts into changing his vote, at the last minute, a suspicion that I consider eminently plausible. Keep in mind that as part of the Democratic Party’s attempt to steal the 2000 presidential election, Democratic hatchet man Bob Beckel sought to blackmail members of the Electoral College, and that the Supreme Court itself had written up documents Counting Roberts’ vote as going against Obamacare, documents which then had to be changed, when he switched his vote.

Meanwhile there are four sure-fire leftwing justices—Ginzburg, Breyer, Kagan and Sotomayor.]

Wednesday's voting rights case was typical. Surprisingly, the five [sic] conservative justices seemed willing to strike down a landmark civil rights law (the provision that gives extra scrutiny to states with past discrimination) that was renewed with near-unanimous votes in Congress. Conservative jurists usually claim deference to the elected branches, but in this case they look an awful lot like activist judges legislating from the bench.

[All civil rights laws are unconstitutional. Milbank has no problem with leftwing jurists at every level running roughshod over legislators. He’s playing the game pioneered by the New York Times: The only conservative position for a jurist to take is to rubber stamp all leftwing legislation, because to rule against leftwing legislation is to be an “activist.” That entails that to be a “conservative” jurist is to be a eunuch, while to be a leftwing jurist is to be a lawless commissar, which is fine by leftists like Milbank. He’s not very subtle.]

Sotomayor allowed the lawyer for the Alabama county seeking to overturn the law to get just four sentences into his argument before interrupting him. "Assuming I accept your premise -- and there's some question about that -- that some portions of the South have changed, your county pretty much hasn't," she charged. "Why would we vote in favor of a county whose record is the epitome of what caused the passage of this law to start with?"

'A real record'

Moments later, Kagan pointed out that "Alabama has no black statewide elected officials" and has one of the worst records of voting rights violations.

[I’ll deal with this calumny in a separate item.]

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