Antonin Scalia is dead at 79

Wow. I don’t think I need to explain to any of the people who still check the forums how huge this is.

holy fucking shit!

Hopefully this means the end of Trump’s campaign…right…?

How… how would that mean that at all? I am by no means a Trump supporter, but how would a Supreme Court Justice’s death lead to the Republican front runner (ugh) bowing out?

I’m not saying he’d bow out, so much as his supporters take a moment to stop and think about the idea of what a Trump nominated Supreme Court Justice would look like, and maybe that the position of President of the United States is more than just a winning position of a popularity contest. And that extends to all of the current potential candidates’ supporters for this year’s election, I just singled him out because I feel like his campaign is currently the second biggest running joke.

Of course this is all predicated on the notion that the Senate aren’t collectively obstinate enough to Justice block Obama for an entire year (which would be a ridiculous notion if I weren’t talking about the same congress that’s tried somewhere in the ballpark of 90 times to overturn the most recent healthcare act).

And yeah, my original statement wasn’t quite as well elaborated upon as it should have been. Especially since I was being rather dismissive of the appeal of a candidate that isn’t from some political heavy dynasty or a politically-mired background.

I don’t see why Trump would stop campaigning for anything at this point. American politics are a gigantic joke with incredibly diverse and potentially grave consequences, he’ll fit right in.

I think that we can all agree that what I should’ve posted was “This is the sound of my foot entering my mouth. Hurr Durr”

Because I really don’t have anything to really say about this subject beyond a really lousy ‘joke’. Old guy I didn’t particularly care for and wasn’t associated to in any sort of way died of natural causes.

I think I would’ve had more/better things to say about a thread about David Bowie’s passing or the half a dozen other musicians who’ve died this month.

Well actually, I do have something to say now that I’ve seen other idiots react to this, in that I’m shaking my head at the people who are putting forward the suggestion that filling the vacated Supreme Court seat should wait until after the new president takes office. Even my idiotic, tone-deaf sense of humor isn’t that stupid.

I will agree with that. My politics generally aren’t in line with Obama’s (nor with the current batch of Republicans), but Obama should put forward a candidate. I believe that it is part of the President’s prerogative to put forward judicial nominees whose jurisprudence match theirs. I also think that if I were a Senator (and I gave serious thought about getting my name on the Georgia Republican Senate primary in 2014 (just to “run” by not campaigning and seeing how many votes I got with zero exposure) - until I saw the signature requirement and the filing fee), I would vote for any judicial nominee whom I felt was qualified, almost all ideology concerns be damned. Just professional and academic background. I would only vote against nominees who I felt were unqualified, had ethical issues (see Clarence Thomas or Abe Fortas as possible examples), or whose ideology was so out of line with the spectrum of American thought that there is almost no chance you could expect them to uphold the Constitution (I don’t know if any nominee has been put forward that I could argue was outside the broad spectrum of American thought).

But yes. Obama should nominate someone. And that person should not be filibustered. And that person should get a yay or nay vote.

There’s something morbidly ironic about Republicans honoring a Constitutional originalist like Scalia by asking Obama to give up his Constitutional authority to nominate a successor.

I’d vote for that.

Not knowing anything about anything here, I read today that Obama has nominated someone named “Merrick Garland” to replace Antonin Scalia. Since the deceased is reported to be very conservative, and the nominee is apparently very much a moderate, I will consider this to be a Very Good Thing.

Conservatives are a blight on the face of the earth.

I hated Scalia’s constitutional originalist approach. To me, it contradicts the very nature of the document. It’s hard to deny that Scalia was one of the sharpest legal minds of our time, and a humble man in private.

That and “jiggery pokery” are the greatest seven syllables to ever cross a supreme court dissent.

Scalia was actually very big on criminal rights and First Amendment speech rights. He typically voted with the liberal bloc when it came to those issues. Merrick Garland, if confirmed, would be very much more conservative on criminal rights issues and would be, at best, a wash on speech rights. It’s not a black and white dichotomy.

This. For the disagreements I have with Scalia, I agreed completely his stance on free speech. People frame it as absolutism, which isn’t really accurate. Scalia is actually pretty reflective of the United States’ vigorous approach to protecting free speech. He advocated restricting it in extreme, highly narrow situations such as fighting words, and he was extremely critical of the idea of deciding what speech can be regulated or censored based on a cost benefit analysis of how much “value” it is. That’s an extremely dangerous approach, and in the United States it was used to declare that films don’t deserve free speech protection back in the 1920s. It’s also led to the outlawing of things like blasphemy (laws for which have subsequently been used to persecute religious and ethnic minorities). It’s why Scalia became the game industry’s hero during Brown v. EMA.

If anything, Shinyru, going back to the Brown v. EMA case, Breyer was the biggest proponent of allowing the video game censorship bill to stand and carving out a new exception to the First Amendment based on violence, based on research he admitted was inconclusive in his opinion. So it’s not really a partisan issue.

Prince gets an autopsy day after death. Scalia on the other hand…

Well Zero, what we have here is a classic example of a cuck thinking the Trump can be stumped. But we know better, don’t we Zero?

Actually I don’t think he CAN be stumped, or if he can it seems awfully difficult as his ex-rivals found.

Part of me wants to see Hillary lose to Trump for varying reasons (doesn’t follow security rules, untrustworthy, regularly lying, will flip her position depending of where she is yet keeps trying to pretend to be consistant and so on), but at the same time President Trump (probably) would be awful.

Fuck both of 'em

Wrong country? Don’t care. Do it anyway. He’d be even worse than Trump. :V

I’m glad he’s leaving politics. Not so glad he’s going into consulting.