SCOTUS judge Antonin Scalia passed away last week while on a vacation trip in Texas. His holiday was a freebie from a certain John Pointexter, who (not coincidentally) had business before the Supreme Court. It appears to be a canned quail hunting experience that brought Scalia to the resort. If memory serves, that’s the sort of adventure that brought Harry Whittington’s face in front of Dick Cheney’s shotgun. But I digress. 

There’s an old bromide about not speaking ill of the dead. I think that’s the sort of rule that applies when you’re talking about your recently deceased Aunt Sophie who was a good friend of John Barleycorn. But the damage done by someone who is a Supreme Court Justice goes far beyond the propriety of whether they tippled or engaged in dalliances of the flesh. His day job influenced (and will continue to influence) the lives of Americans for generations. I can go into Justice Scalia’s politics and his lack of interest in preserving the appearance of impartiality. This article does a nice summing up of the damage his career wrought in the US. 

But there’s one decision that sticks out. Bush V Gore, Scalia stopped Florida’s recount of the votes that would’ve awarded the state (and thus the Presidency) to Al Gore. It was a partisan vote on the part of Scalia, O’Connor and Thomas, and it doomed thousands to death. Because W had plans. In his FIRST cabinet meeting in 2001, W was looking for a justification to invade Iraq. The drumbeat for a reason continued throughout the eight months before 9/11. “find me a way to do this”.

At a recent GOP presidential debate, the Donald earned boos from the audience when he called out W for lying about the weapons of mass destruction and the invasion of Iraq. The GOP is not about to re-examine the disastrous legacy of George W Bush. But It’s important to remember that Scalia enabled the presidency of Bush, and (by extension) the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in a war based on lies. Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion on Bush Vs Gore 2000. He is the person who got the ball rolling on a $6 trillion dollar disaster.

UPDATE: Being that I’m something of a Conspiracy theorist, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the conspiracy theories now surrounding Scalia’s death. The family insisted that there be no autopsy, and initial reports indicated that he was found with a pillow over his head. The dominant theory seems to be that this is the work of Hillary Clinton. The narrative is unwound here by one Morgan Mayhew:

Murder you say? Yes . . . Benghazi . . . Waco.

Then tack on Chinagate, Filegate, Whitewater, Lewinski, Emailgate, Pardongate, Hubble Trouble, Cattle futures, Troopergate, etc., etc., etc.

While it is admittedly a massive stretch to believe that Hillary Clinton had Antonin Scalia snuffed out to benefit her presidential endeavors, real life events sound even more absurd.

If you don’t believe that, then you should believe that a YouTube video inspired a spontaneous gathering of terrorists on the anniversary of September 11th, and that spontaneity just happened to lead to the deaths of four Americans.

While I’m always up for a good conspiracy, this one lacks sense. Assuming we get to the First Tuesday in November and Hillary is the nominee for the Dems, the one best lure her followers have is the Supreme Court. The justification Millennials will need to get out of bed and drag themselves to the polling place has up to now been the Supreme Court. Bernie voters are being excoriated for saying they might not pull the lever for HRC. “WHAT? AND LET THE REPUBS CONTROL THE Supreme Court?” And they have a point. But with Scalia gone (and assuming Obama’s able to put a new justice on the liberal side), the psychological pressure will be a bit less. Hillary (and Bernie) NEEDED Scalia sitting on the court. It got them votes from a bitterly divided base. 

Indeed, the people who needed Scalia dead were the Republicans. Scalia’s refusal to recuse himself from cases was starting to anger many around him, and a Cruz presidency might be vulnerable to a campaign for removing Scalia from the bench. Maybe there’s a lot to the stories of impropriety around Scalia’s favoritism of plaintiffs in cases such as Poindexter’s. 

IJS.