Antonin Scalia - 60 Minutes pt 2 of 4
Transcript here: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/24/60minutes/main4040290.shtmlOn abortion: a woman who is pregnant should not be counted as two, and because the unborn child cannot walk, it is not a person, how about crawl?Then on Gore vs. Bush, he says get over it, get over Roe v. Wade too? Is the Constitution something to get over since it was written long ago?According to the transcript from this interview, he states that the vote was actually 7-2. I've never heard that before.Actually the vote was right down party lines - 5 to 4The difference was that were different legal issues at work in Bush v. Gore. On one of them, the court came down 7-2. On the other, the court was split 5-4.The first issue was whether Florida's recount, as it was being conducted, violated the Equal Protection Clause. The argument the Bush folks were using was that the hand recounts had no standard from county to county. A vote that might have been counted in one county would have be thrown out in another. Moreover, the state of Florida seemed to have no mechanism for ensuring that each person's vote counted equally. Seven of the justices on the court agreed that, as it was proceeding, Florida's vote counting violated the Constitution's protection of the one-person-one-vote rule.Then came the question of what to do about it, and this is where the Court split right down party lines. The left-leaning four (two of whom did not see a problem with the vote count in the first place) said, if there is a Constitutional violation here, the Supreme Court should remand the case back to the Florida courts with directions about how to revamp the vote count in order to make it comply with the Equal Protection Clause.The right-leaning five said, sorry, but we can't do that. The federal government does not have jurisdiction to tell a state how to count its votes. We can only decide that the manner in which it's counting is unconstitutional, but we can't instruct them to do anything.The result: Florida couldn't do anything but stop its recount, and certify the results as they were.That's somewhat of a simplification of the issues involved, but it gets to the heart of the matter. There's a certain rationale to what the Court did, but it's a mind-numbing rationalization, and an exploitation of legal technicalities.Not political? Bullshit. And Scalia knows it. Souter almost quit the Court because of it.The decision also stated that it's decision should not be a precedent meaning it should never be followed by another court in making a decision.Which in my opinion is tantamount to saying, "What we just did has no basis in law and is bullshit!""the decision in the Florida election case may be ranked as the single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history, because it is the only one that I know of where the majority justices decided as they did because of the personal identity and political affiliation of the litigants. This was cheating, and a violation of the judicial oath."The four dissenters argued with what they saw as problems with the ruling, including the principle of fairness, and held that this violated the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution that the people should elect their presidential leaders, not the courts.Seven justices (the five Justice majority and Breyer and Souter in dissent) initially agreed upon review that there might be Equal Protection issues in using different standards of counting in different counties.But the major decision that the Judges decided to replace the vote for the nation by ceasing all recounts and by are criminals and treasonous against the American democratic process. William Rehnquist Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia,Judges that wanted a recount. John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer Scalia also states that torture is NOT prohibited under the 8th amendment of cruel and unusual punishment because the torture of a captured individual to obtain information is not punishment (though the individual is punished or tortured for not talking). The second way he says it's not torture is that the constitution does not apply if it is not done on American soil or to an American. That's what all the prisons overseas are for.http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/04/24/60-minutes-scalia-on-bush-v-gore-2000-get-over-it/Yet, the Supreme Court is deciding on the 2nd amendment instead of never taking up the case because the 2nd amendment is clear, but they are distorting the words and attempting to inject their own interpretation of what the founding fathers meant as if they know better than the words themselves from people who have long passed.
Author: patriotpsyops
Keywords: scalia 60 minutes
Added: April 29, 2008