Some of the harshest judgments on the legacy of Justice Antonin Scalia have come from the pens of Jeffrey Toobin and Katha Pollitt. Toobin says of Scalia that he "devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy." "Scalia represents a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid is a successor." "Scalia helped gut the Voting Rights Act, overturn McCain-Feingold and other campaign-finance rules, and, in his last official act, block President Obama's climate-change regulations." "The public wants diversity, not intolerance; more marriages and fewer executions; less money in politics, not more." [1]
Katha Pollitt describes Justice Scalia as a justice set in cement. "He was in the minority voting against the Affordable Care Act and same-sex marriage, and in favor of people being executed for crimes they committed as children. In his world, women would be barred from the Virginia Military Institute (and who knows where else), Roe v. Wade would be long overturned, and Miranda warnings would be history. The list goes on and on."
Katha Pollitt continues: "Today, his writings on gay rights sound like the ravings of a radio shock jock: In his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which struck down that state's anti-sodomy law, he wrote of 'the homosexual agenda.' Over the years he compared homosexuality to murder, polygamy, bestiality, child abuse, prostitution, the 'recreational use of heroin,' and 'working more than 60 hours a week in a bakery.' "
"His [Scalia's] racism could be breathtaking: The Voting Rights Act was 'a racial entitlement'; black students might do better at 'a slower-track school.' His final vote, issued just four days before his death, was to join yet another 5-4 majority to thwart President Obama's Clean Power Plan -- even as the country finally accepts the fact of climate change. Citizens United has produced an uproar in both parties, leading directly to insurgent campaigns by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump." [2]
Another contributor to The Nation magazine refers back to Scalia's dissent in Romer v. Evans, a 1996 case concerning discrimination against LGBTQ people, Scalia wrote: 'It is our moral heritage that one should not hate any human being or class of human beings.' "But in the same dissent, he attacked same-sex attraction as 'reprehensible' and compared it to 'murder,' 'polygamy,' and 'cruelty to animals. ' [3]
ADDENDUMS:
*"Many corporate CEOs now earn more than 300 times the pay of average workers, up from 30 [times] only a generation ago." Executive pay accounts for roughly 40 percent of the income growth enjoyed by America's top 1 and 0.1 percent from 1977 to 2005. [4]
*"Student debt now tops $1.3 trillion, and the burden weighs heaviest on black and Latino students. Young, low-income African-American families are twice as likely to have student debt as their white counterparts." "Taxing the wealth of our richest 1 percent at a mere 1 percent would raise some $280 billion annually." [5]
*A recent Center for Effective Government and Institute for Policy Studies report states that 100 major corporate CEOs have individual savings equaling the savings of 41 percent of American families. Another finding was that nearly 70 percent over 65 will need at least three years of long-term care.
*Overall, 42 percent of U.S. workers make less than $15 an hour; but according to the National Employment Law Project, 54 percent of African-Americans earn less than that. "Between 1983 and 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research reports, the share of black workers represented by a union fell by 16 percent. The decline for white workers was only about half that: 8.7 percent." "Recent polling shows that about 87 percent of low-wage black workers approve of labor unions, a level of support almost 20 percent higher than among white workers." [6]
*"Wealthy Americans pay just $23.80 in federal income tax on every $100 of their 'capital-gains' income." The income of ordinary Americans, by contrast, can face a tax rate as high as 39.6 percent. "In other words, the capital-gains tax preference shears about $160,000 off their tax bill." [7]
*The Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman has calculated that public investment in early-childhood programs generate a 7 to 10 percent return to society.
*According to a recent Institute for Policy Studies report, the billionaires on the Forbes 400 list now, own about as much wealth as the entire U.S. African-American population, plus more than a third of the U.S. Latino population combined.
*Our nation's 20 richest individuals -- a group small enough to fit in a single Gulfstream jet -- have more wealth than the bottom half of the entire U.S. population. [8]
Footnotes
[1] Jeffrey Toobin, "Looking Back," The New Yorker, February 29, 2016.
[2] Katha Pollitt, "The Justice Set in Cement," The Nation, March 7, 2016.
[3] Natalie Pattillo, "Homophobe Supreme," The Nation, March 7, 2016.
[4]; [5]; [6]; [7]; and [8] The Nation, March 7, 2016.
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