SCOTUS Care

[l33tminion]

Big news from the Supreme Court this week.

I guess a Scalia/Thomas/Alito dissent is as close to unanimous as you can get on any Supreme Court decision on legislation that's controversial along liberal/conservative lines.

Scalia is big on the Fourteenth Amendment working how those voting on it would have intended, but not so much for the Affordable Care Act.

Scalia's dissent in Obergefell, is pretty entertaining and completely histrionic. He he decries the decision as a "judicial Putsch" by a bunch of east- and west-coast lawyers, and all but exhorts the states to disregard the ruling. (Alito writes something similar, but more calmly. Roberts just wishes the Supreme Court was more conservative. Thomas doesn't think the Fourteenth Amendment protects a class of citizens from being excluded from receiving government benefits at all, only from being restrained or imprisoned.)

Comments

[conuly]

Thomas doesn't think the Fourteenth Amendment protects a class of citizens from being excluded from receiving government benefits at all, only from being restrained or imprisoned.

Fixed that for you.

[l33tminion]

I don't think that's accurate or funny. I find the knee-jerk tendency to insult the intelligence of political opponents troubling and deeply annoying. Thomas is neither stupid nor an automaton. (That doesn't mean he's not subject to ideological bias, but it's a bad idea to pretend that liberals are somehow immune.)

Not that there aren't accurate and/or funny ways to insult Justice Thomas, his politics are so far right of the American political mainstream you need a telescope to make out the craters. If you want to engage in amateur psychoanalysis, you could say his internalized self-doubt about whether his success has been boosted by people who give him extra credit due to his race left him primed for a Randian ideology that says that without government interference, people will succeed or fail exactly on their own merits. He's the most right-wing person with that level of political influence in US politics, a combination which is frankly scary.

And, of course, there's plenty of room for disagreement with his argument in this case. The unconquerability of the human soul or whatever doesn't matter that much when the government can provide a pretty good imitation of depriving someone of their inherent dignity. A conception of liberty that's just "not being imprisoned" misses a lot of what people (Ayn Rand disciples excluded) value about actual freedom. And taking a right turn at "liberty" and completely missing the "property" aspects of the case reeks of ideological blindness. Though that could be because the majority opinion also doesn't discuss the property-rights aspect of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is pretty bizarre given the circumstances of the case. (I'm glad that they wanted to make a broader ruling than that, but the "you pay more taxes because your spouse was a man instead of a woman" is a pretty obvious way Obergefell was harmed by government discrimination.)

Still, I think it's important to keep in mind that very smart, thoughtful people with very different values can come to radically different political views. There are some serious disadvantages from thinking that your political opponents "don't think", it really gets in the way of learning what they do think. I learn a lot more from reading the conservative dissents in cases like this than the liberal majority opinion (because I'm already very familiar with the latter's arguments).