People Are Leaving These Strange Items At Scalia’s Memorial – There’s A BIG Reason For It
Their meanings can be found in renowned dissents.
Randy DeSoto
People may wonder why jars of applesauce, heads of broccoli, and fortune cookies have been left amidst bouquets of flowers Friday in a makeshift memorial to Justice Antonin Scalia in front of the Supreme Court.
These items are in tribute to some of the metaphors the late justice chose to make legal points in some of his most recent, renowned dissenting opinions.
The applesauce reference came from his dissent in last year’s King v. Burwell, challenging the federal government’s authority to pay tax subsidies to those who purchased their healthcare through the federal healthcare.gov exchange.
The Affordable Care Act legislation only made provision for payment through exchanges established by the states, and Scalia argued that only Congress, not the executive branch, could change the law to allow money from the Treasury to be spent in a different fashion.
Going after the reasoning of the majority opinion, the justice wrote, “The Court claims that the Act must equate federal and state establishment of Exchanges when it defines a qualified individual as someone who (among other things) lives in the ‘State that established the Exchange.’ Otherwise, the Court says, there would be no qualified individuals on federal Exchanges…Pure applesauce.”
The broccoli reference also relates to Obamacare, but stems (no pun intended) from the original case challenging the constitutionality of the law in 2012. Scalia pressed an Obama administration attorney during oral arguments wondering if the federal government can force Americans to buy health insurance (even if they do not want it), then where would the limits of such an newly found authority end.
“Could you define the market — everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli,” the justice wondered.
Finally, Scalia likened the majority’s existential reasoning in last summer’s Obergefell v. Hodges, a 5-4 decision redefining marriage to include same-sex couples, similar to the intellectual rigor one might find inside a fortune cookie.
“If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: ‘The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,’ I would hide my head in a bag,” the originalist wrote in his dissent. Scalia pointed out that if the court was going to use its own “reasoned judgment” to create rights out of whole cloth, the justices are no longer acting as judges, but lawmakers.
He concluded, “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.”
http://www.westernjournalism.com/people-are-leaving-these-strange-items-at-scalias-memorial-theres-a-big-reason-for-it/
I mean we are watching 2008 all over again.
