Highlights of the dissent opinion on the ACA ruling....
"" (CNN)— Justice Antonin Scalia wasn't going
to go down without a fight -- a colorful one
at that.
Scalia, joined by conservative Justices
Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito,
lambasted the majority decision with a series
of literary quips and flourishes in a scathing
dissent that may have buoyed the spirits of
conservatives crushed by the Court's ruling.
And in a rare move signaling his intense
opposition to the majority ruling -- written by
fellow conservative and Chief Justice John
Roberts -- Scalia voiced his dissent aloud
from the bench for the Court to hear.
Here are the most quotable lines from his
written dissent:
1. "This Court, however, concludes that this
limitation would prevent the rest of the Act
from working as well as hoped. So it re-
writes the law to make tax credits available
everywhere. We should start calling this law
SCOTUScare."
2. "The Court's next bit of interpretive
jiggery-pokery involves other parts of the Act
that purportedly presuppose the availability
of tax credits on both federal and state
Exchanges."
3. "Pure applesauce. Imagine that a
university sends around a bulletin reminding
every professor to take the "interests of
graduate students" into account when setting
office hours, but that some professors teach
only undergraduates. Would anybody reason
that the bulletin implicitly presupposes that
every professor has "graduate students," so
that "graduate students" must really mean
"graduate or undergraduate students"? Surely
not."
4. "The somersaults of statutory
interpretation they have performed ... will be
cited by litigants endlessly, to the confusion
of honest jurisprudence."
5. "It is bad enough for a court to cross out
"by the State" once. But seven times?"
6. "The Court's decision reflects the
philosophy that judges should endure
whatever interpretive distortions it takes in
order to correct a supposed flaw in the
statutory machinery. That philosophy ignores
the American people's decision to give
Congress "[a]ll legislative Powers"
enumerated in the Constitution."
And from Scalia's oral dissent from the
bench:
7. "The Court solves that problem (believe it
or not) by simply saying that federal
exchanges count as state exchanges only
(and this is a quotation from the opinion)
"for purposes of the tax credits." How
wonderfully convenient and how utterly
contrary to normal principles of
interpretation."""
http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/25/politics/supreme-court-scalia-obamacare-roberts/
Dissent on Gay Marriage ruling.....
"" June 26, 2015 Same-sex marriage is now a
right in every state in the country, following a
historic 5-4 decision from the Supreme Court
Friday. The four justices who disagreed with
the Court's opinion, authored by Justice
Anthony Kennedy, each wrote their own
dissent laying out just why they believed the
majority to be wrong.
Roberts's argument centered around the need
to preserve states' rights over what he viewed
as following the turn of public opinion. In
ruling in favor of gay marriage, he said, "Five
lawyers have closed the debate and enacted
their own vision of marriage as a matter of
constitutional law."
Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas joined him
in his dissent.
While Roberts said he did not "begrudge" any
of the celebrations that would follow the Court
ruling, he had serious concerns that the Court
had extended its role from constitutional
enforcer to activist.
According to Justice Antonin Scalia, today's
majority ruling represents a "judicial Putsch."
Scalia wrote that while he has no personal
opinions on whether the law should allow
same-sex marriage, he feels very strongly that
it is not the place of the Supreme Court to
decide.
"Until the courts put a stop to it, public
debate over same-sex marriage displayed
American democracy at its best," Scalia wrote.
"But the Court ends this debate, in an opinion
lacking even a thin veneer of law."
Scalia stated he wanted to write a separate
dissent "to call attention to this Court's threat
to American democracy." Justice Clarence
Thomas joined Scalia in this dissent.
Scalia attacked his colleagues' opinion with
his signature flourish. "The opinion is couched
in a style that is as pretentious as its content
is egotistic," he wrote.
In his own separate dissent, which Scalia also
joined, Justice Clarence Thomas pilloried the
majority opinion as "at odds not only with the
Constitution, but with the principles upon
which our nation were built."
Kennedy and the Court's liberal wing are
invoking a definition of "liberty" that the
Constitution's framers "would not have
recognized, to the detriment of the liberty they
sought to protect."
"Along the way, it rejects the idea—captured in
our Declaration of Independence—that human
dignity is innate and suggests instead that it
comes from the Government," Thomas said.
"This distortion of our Constitution not only
ignores the text, it inverts the relationship
between the individual and the state in our
Republic. I cannot agree with it."
In his dissent, Alito argues that gay marriage
is not protected in the Constitution under the
Due Process Clause because "liberty" only
applies to those principles that are rooted in
U.S. tradition. His argument is that the
concept of gay marriage is new and therefore
not included.
"For today's majority, it does not matter that
the right to same-sex marriage lacks deep
roots or even that it is contrary to long-
established tradition. The Justices in the
majority claim the authority to confer
constitutional protection upon that right
simply because they believe that it is
fundamental," Alito writes.
Alito also reaffirms his position that there is
no way to confirm what the outcome of gay
marriage may be on the institution of
traditional marriage and therefore the Court is
and should not be in a position to take on the
topic.""
More on each justice's dissent here:
http://www.nationaljournal.com/domesticpolicy/marriage-same-sex-gay-supreme-court-dissent-20150626
