The Obummer administration won a rare Supreme Court victory regarding the rights of the EPA to regulate pollution from coal plants. Instead of the usual 5-4 decision against anything the President wants, this decision was a 6-2 decision. Who the two idiots who opposed it? Well, Clarence Thomas, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s token white male, Antonin Scalia.
The minority dissent opinion was written by Scalia, in typical Scalia flourish tardo prose, and according a report from TPM Scalia really screwed the pooch on the opinion.
“This is not the first time EPA has sought to convert the Clean Air Act into a mandate for cost-effective regulation. Whitman v. American Trucking Assns., Inc., 531 U. S. 457 (2001), confronted EPA’s contention that it could consider costs in setting [National Ambient Air Quality Standards],” Scalia wrote in his dissent, which was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.The problem: the EPA’s position in the 2001 case was exactly the opposite. The agency was defending its refusal to consider cost as a counter-weight to health benefits when setting certain air quality standards. It was the trucking industry that wanted the EPA to factor in cost. The 9-0 ruling sided with the EPA. The author of the ruling that Scalia mischaracterized? Scalia himself.
The conservative justice’s error was noted by University of California-Berkeley law professor Dan Farber, who called it “embarrassing” and a “cringeworthy blunder.”
But wait, it gets better.
“This gaffe is doubly embarrassing because Scalia wrote the opinion in the case, so he should surely remember which side won!…
“It is a mind-blowing misstatement of a basic fact of the American Trucking Association ruling which Justice Scalia himself wrote. And it’s not just a stray passage — it’s the basis for an entire section of the dissent,”
I had to think about this for a minute until I could wrap my head around it. Scalia inverted the 2001 facts to support his 2014 dissenting argument. This wasn’t a typo or a research error by a befuddled law clerk. This was a complete misunderstanding of the essential basis for the dissent. You can transfer authority, but you can never transfer responsibility. Antonin Scalia (aka George Zimmerman with a job), a self-proclaimed “faint-hearted originalist, is the “intellectual leader” of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything like this.
Sure, I can’t remember the name of the book I read two days ago, or what I had for breakfast, but when a Supreme Court fucking justice pointedly cites the facts in a decision he wrote, and gets them exactly wrong, methinks it’s time to RETIRE FROM THE BENCH. Former Justice John Paul Stevens said he realized it was time to go when he had trouble reading his own dissents from the bench. Scalia is having trouble recognizing reality. TIME TO RETIRE FROM THE BENCH. Scalia is the Fox News version of a Supreme Court. He only acknowledges the facts that fit the ideology he is trying to promote. Read his dissent in Cruzan. It could have been written by the Vatican. Scalia’s opinions weren’t generally elaborate justifications for his political opinions in the first place. Consistency and intellectual honesty have always seemed to come in second to ideological fealty, from what I’ve seen. Getting’ sloppy in his dotage, although it doesn’t seem all that inconsistent with his past behavior I guess.