Scalia Unleashed

Other blogs have posted short, pithy, pull-quotes.  PowerLine goes a bit deeper into Scalia's dissent.

Happy for us!

...The five Justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding that every State violated the Constitution for all of the 135 years between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts’ permitting of same-sex marriages in 2003. They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a “fundamental right” overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since. They see what lesser legal minds—minds like Thomas Cooley, John Marshall Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, William Howard Taft, Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly—could not.....

There's a proof of something about evolution and natural selection in that, no?

Then an exercise in turgidity from Kennedy, with exasperation growing from Scalia:

...Rights, we are told, can “rise . . . from a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era.” (Huh? How can a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives [whatever that means] define [whatever that means] an urgent liberty [never mind], give birth to a right?) And we are told that, “[i]n any particular case,” either the Equal Protection or Due Process Clause “may be thought to capture the essence of [a] right in a more accurate and comprehensive way,” than the other, “even as the two Clauses may converge in the identification and definition of the right.”

Verily, as Roberts' Rule tells us:  words mean nothing.  And more of them mean less and less, Kennedy, you simpering twit.

Finally, the Quote to Beat All:

...The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie....

Well, for what it's worth, Justice Scalia, out here in reality-land, we have no doubt that Mystical Aphorisms are the inevitable product of sausage squeezed through a sphincter; and since Warren, that sphincter has been, more and more, SCOTUS.

(Added:  Althouse, another somewhat confused lawyer, agrees with Kennedy.  But at least Althouse can write with clarity in her error.)