OPEN COLUMN
Scalia’s skewed view of law has blind spots

Editor, the Tribune: According to the March 5 Tribune, the Supreme Court jester and funny little fascist Tony Scalia offered University of Central Missouri students a constitutional jurisprudence best put by Humpty Dumpty: "When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less."

True, one’s sense of the world is simpler if one’s word sense is neither ambiguous nor vague; whether that sense is useful in life and law is another matter - but already I might have complicated things too much for his judicial face. Is Da Judge’s sense of stare decisis useful for Brown v. Board of Education, or does it only work for cases he says were wrongly decided? What’s his take on the paper currency cases? Does he uphold "corporate personhood?" Where are the words "navigable waters" or "conscription" or "marriage" or "marijuana" or "corporation" in the text of the Constitution? They are no more there than "torture" or "abortion."

Scalia’s jurisprudence comes to this: He reads the "necessary and proper" escape and precedent to allow all with which he agrees and finds in the text and precedent what will prohibit all that he disapproves (Florida).

Hizzoner missed the day his eighth-grade civics class learned about "tyranny of the majority." His "originalism" reduces to literalism scanned darkly through his cursed common sense - which passes for metaphysics in the Federalist Society.

I need a stamp with indelible ink to mark Da Judge’s forehead: Stupid and Dangerous. Hilarious.

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Dave Raithel

402 Lema Lane

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