Temper Tantrum Tony

There’s a new book out by Jeffrey Toobin that confirms what we all think about SCOTUS and some of its right wing, political demagogues.  The most obvious conclusion of the many stories in the book is that Justice Scalia is temperamentally unsuited to be a judge. He should be a precinct boss from some thug district. He appears to actively bully other justices into his way of things and is the enforcer of right wing political correctness. He also throws extreme fits of temper when he doesn’t get his way. Scalia lost it over both the latest immigration suit and the health care law decision.

The book confirms previous reports that Roberts changed his vote in the landmark case over President Obama’s healthcare law after initially siding with the conservative justices. But Toobin reports — as others have implied — that what pushed Roberts away was the conservative justices’ insistence on striking down the entire health law.

“Scalia’s view of the justices as gladiators against the president unnerved Roberts,” Toobin writes.

The book describes Scalia as “furious” and “enraged” at Roberts — contradicting Scalia’s public statements brushing aside any tension.

Evidently Scalia and his cronies are so temperamentally unsuited for their jobs that they are even recognized as being more political hacks than judges by most Republican stalwarts.  This includes retired members of SCOTUS.

Much like the Republican Party, the conservative wing of the Supreme Court has gotten staunchly more conservative over the past several years, Toobin notes. He says the old guard of recent Republican justices has been deeply upset by the Roberts court.

Toobin notes the long, stammering dissent John Paul Stevens wrote and then read for the Citizens United campaign-finance case, which he said “captured everything that offended Stevens most about the Roberts court.”

It had the same effect for Justice David Souter.

“He abhorred the views of Roberts and Alito. Souter didn’t like what the Republican Party — his party — was doing to the court, or to the country,” Toobin writes.

Former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor “had projected onto Roberts her idea of what a chief justice, and a Republica, should be,” Toobin writes, but her reservations grew as she watched the court overturn core pieces of her legacy. Toobin also recounts O’Connor talking to Souter about her decision to leave the court.

” ‘What makes this harder,’ O’Connor told Souter, ‘is that it’s my party that’s destroying the country.’ “

I refuse to call these people deeply conservative.  It runs contrary to the very definition of the word conservative.  These folks are just plain reactionary activists.

Although Toobin says Scalia has descended from scholar to “right-wing crank,” he notes that Scalia came to the court with a unified theory of law — originalism — and has helped recenter important cases and more general discussions around what the Founding Fathers might have intended.

Justice Clarence Thomas, known primarily for his silence during oral arguments, is the court’s “pathbreaker,” always pushing for more, driving the court to the right in much the same way the Tea Party has pushed Republicans, Toobin says.

Justices Thomas and Scalia are clearly candidates for impeachment in their refusal to recognize their conflicts of interest as well as their political thuggery of our law and Constitution. We’ve written about this before as have others.

But that’s what happened at the Supreme Court earlier this week in what Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank described as “an extraordinary display of judicial distemper” — “more campaign speech than legal opinion” – as Antonin Scalia did what Scalia usually does when things don’t go his way: he threw a temper tantrum.

In his scathing dissent in United States v. Arizona, where a 5-3 Court majority struck down that state’s infamous “papers please” immigration statute, Scalia put aside the law and launched into a highly-partisan, ad hominem, rant against the Obama administration over policies, such as the presidential directive on the DREAM Act, totally unrelated to the issues before the Court.

According to Milbank, Scalia thundered that the Obama administration “desperately wants to avoid upsetting foreign powers;” that it was acting with “willful blindness or deliberate inattention” to Arizona’s illegal immigrants; that the majority’s opinion “boggles the mind;” and that the states are “at the mercy of the Federal Executive’s refusal to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.”

Salon’s Nathan Pippenger added that Scalia offered “plenty of FOX News-ready invective” about Arizona residents who “feel themselves under siege by large numbers of illegal immigrants who invade their property, strain their social services, and even place their lives in jeopardy.”

As Scalia’s stunned audience listened to what Pippenger described as Scalia’s “bellowing, bullying and bombastic” screed, the Justice came off sounding like some crazed neo-Confederate re-enactor reminiscing about the Lost Southern Cause and “the jealousy of the states with regard to their sovereignty.”

Scalia also made the astonishing claim, as Pippenger notes, that had the Court issued its decision in the 1780s, the United States might never have happened at all since no state would have been willing to enter the Union under the conditions set by the Court.

Commentators have properly scolded Scalia for displaying an utter lack of judicial temperament, which has once again compromised the Court’s standing with the public.

Dems have been calling out Thomas and his Teabagger wife for some time for both conflicts of interest and gift taking of an extraordinary nature.

As the Supreme Court begins its fall session, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and some of their colleagues are asking the House Judiciary Committee to hold hearings on alleged ethical violations and raising questions on whether the justice can be impartial.

Among their charges against Thomas: that the justice failed to report at least $1.6 million that his wife, Ginni, had earned since 1997; that he might have failed to report gifts from rich supporters; and that he inappropriately solicited donations for favored non-profits, according to their letter sent to Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and ranking member John Conyers (D-Mich.).

“The Supreme Court’s greatest assets are its integrity and the public trust,” Blumenauer said in a statement. “Yet for months now, concerns have been building about the unwillingness or the inability of the Supreme Court to address allegations of potential ethics violations by Justice Clarence Thomas.”

Blumenauer was still collecting signatures on Wednesday night, and told POLITICO that 45 lawmakers have so far attached their names to the letter.

The Democrats’ concern over Ginni Thomas’s income stem from 13 years’ worth of revised disclosure reports that Thomas released in January, which detailed his wife’s earnings from Hillsdale College, the Heritage Foundation, and House Republican leaders, among other sources. Those figures had been left off Thomas’s previous disclosure forms because, the justice said at the time, he had a “misunderstanding of filing instructions.”

Wednesday’s letter is the second time Democrats have taken aim at Thomas in the last week over what they say are troubling ethical concerns. Last Thursday, 20 House Democrats called on the Justice Department to investigate the same allegations into Thomas in a letter to Judicial Conference of the United States, which oversee the federal court system.

“To believe that Justice Thomas didn’t know how to fill out a basic disclosure form is absurd,” Slaughter said last week.

Unfortunately, ideological and cowed Republicans let them slide and Dems never follow through with anything.  So, these guys get to sit in judgement of extremely important things in extremely political and unfit ways.

What on earth would it take to get them both impeached?  I would put this high on any humanitarian and patriot’s wish and activist lists, frankly.