Say Anything Blog

This excerpt from an Associated Press article about all the “angry dissent” among Supreme Court Justices on the high court’s last three rulings:

WASHINGTON (AP) — For most of the term, Supreme Court justices showed remarkable restraint. They displayed broad agreement even in some volatile areas and refrained from angry dissents.

Then they decided the tough cases. . . .

Giving rights to the detainees “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed,” Justice Antonin Scalia said in a scathing dissent he read from the bench.

No one threw that line back at Scalia in the guns case. But Justice John Paul Stevens, also summarizing his dissent in court, said of Scalia’s majority opinion on gun rights that “adherence to a policy of judicial restraint by this court is far wiser than the bold decision it announced today.”

First, why would anyone throw Scalia’s line back at him in the guns case?  Washington DC has had the most restrictive ban on guns in the nation for decades, yet throughout that time consistently had some of the worst murder rates.  Meanwhile gun-happy places like West Virgina and North Dakota had some of the lowest murder rates in the nation.  Conclusion?  Maybe gun control doesn’t really have an impact on murder rates at all.

As for Stevens’ assertion that Scalia’s majority opinion was a “bold decision,” it’s amazing to me that a ruling which simply affirms a right to bear arms which has been hiding in plain sight for centuries would be described as though it were creating new policy.  Americans have always had an individual right to bear arms.  It’s been the liberal left, over the course of the last couple of decades, which has been trying to change that.

Second, it seems to me that there weren’t a lot of articles complaining about “angry dissent” within the Supreme Court when Sandra Day O’Connor was consistently using her “swing vote” to tip the scales for the liberal justices.  Now that things are kind of tilting the other way (I’d hardly classify the rulings giving habeas rights to Gitmo detainees, a case the Supreme Court wasn’t supposed to hear in the first place, and denying states the ability to put child rapists to death as victories for conservatives) it seems like the media is upset.  The Chicago Tribune is even going so far as accusing Chief Justice Roberts of breaking promises he made during his appointment hearings.

Roberts has consistently voted as we all knew he would vote, and that is generally along the lines of an originalist interpretation of the Constitution.  He’s not been as consistent in that vein as, say, Scalia but certainly more so than liberals like.

That Roberts’ votes are based on what the Constitution actually says and not what liberals want it to mean is neither here nor there.