Justice Scalia Speaks Truth to Power

There are so many sterling nuggets of truth in Justice Scalia's Roper v. Simmons dissent that it is difficult to pick out the finest. Here is a sampling:

"...all the Court has done today...is to look over the heads of the crowd and pick out its friends."

"Because I do not believe that the meaning of our Eight Amendment, any more than the meaning of other provisions of our Constitution, should be determined by the subjective views of five Members of this Court and like-minded foreigners, I dissent."

"Words have no meaning if the views of less than 50% of death penalty states can constitute a national consensus."

"By what conceivable warrant can nine lawyers presume to be the authoritative conscience of the Nation?" (Good question, that!)

"What kind of Equal Justice under Law is it that -- without so much as a "Sorry about that" -- gives as the basis for sparing one person from execution arguments explicitly rejected in refusing to spare another?" (But of course, we all know that consistency is just the hobgoblin of small minds, Justice Scalia. Didn't you go to law school?)

"If juries cannot make appropriate determinations in cases involving murderers under 18, in what other kinds of cases will the Court find jurors deficient?"

"Though the views of our own citizens [who voted in favor of permitting juries to impose the death penalty on murderers under 18] are essentially irrelevant to the Court's decision today, the views of other countries and the so-called international community take center stage."

"...whereas the Court is not content to accept what the States of our Federal Union say, but insists on inquiring into what they do, (specifically, whether they in fact apply the juvenile death penalty that their laws allow), the Court is quite willing to believe that every foreign nation -- of whatever tyrannical political makeup and with however subservient or incompetent a court system -- in fact adheres to a rule of no death penalty for offenders under 18."

"More fundamentally, however, the basic premise of the Court's argument -- that American law should conform to the laws of the rest of the world -- ought to be rejected out of hand. In fact the Court itself does not believe it."

"To invoke alien law when it agrees with one's own thinking, and ignore it otherwise, is not reasoned decisionmaking, but sophistry."

And here is the clincher:

"In a system based upon constitutional and statutory text democratically adopted, the concept of 'law' ordinarily signifies that particular words have a fixed meaning." (How passe, Justice Scalia. How unsophisticated you are! Don't you know that in deconstructed, postmodern America, words have absolutely no fixed meaning? Surely with such plebian views, you are no longer qualified to pass on such important issues.)

Once again, we see that postmodernism carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Once judicial elites arrogate unto themselves power, and in the process rob the People of their God-given rights, the "result will be to crown arbitrariness with chaos," as Justice Scalia puts it in the closing sentence of his dissent.

Then, of course, it is but a short path to brutal tyranny. And, of course, the first act of the tyrant would be to eradicate all traces of postmodernist thoughts and actions. Thus does postmodernism -- like all human philosophies -- self-destruct.