Scalia: Supreme Court now a 'threat to American democracy'
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia savaged the Court's 5-4 decision on Friday that said same-sex marriage is a constitutional right in all 50 states, by saying it makes the Supreme Court a threat to democracy in the country.
"I write separately to call attention to this Court's threat to American democracy," he wrote in a dissent, just a day after he dissented in a decision that upheld a key part of Obamacare.
Scalia said he didn't care about the substance of the ruling, but said the way the Court ruled means the nine justices are now essentially in charge of Americans.
"Today's decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court," he wrote.
"The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact — and the furthest extension one can even imagine — of the Court's claimed power to create 'liberties' that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention."
"This practice of constitutional revision (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves," he added.
Scalia was referring to what until now had been the right of states to set their own policies on marriage. He said that right was "American democracy at its best," since it let people across the country weigh in and help determine state policies on marriage.
The Court decided 5-4 that the 14th Amendment's requirement of "equal protection under the laws" trumped those state rights. But Scalia said there is "no basis for striking down a practice that is not expressly prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment's text."
"This is a naked judicial claim to legislative — indeed, super-legislative — power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government," he wrote.
Scalia also slammed the "hubris" in the majority decision for discovering the right of people in the 14th Amendment that was overlooked by every state for decades.
"The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic," he wrote.
In a footnote, Scalia wrote that if he ever joined an opinion that started, "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," that he would "hide my head in a bag."
"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," he wrote.
Sent from my iPhone
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