I agree a bit on Thatcher, after all she was out of politics for ages when she passed away, Scalia though wanted to stay as a judge until the bitter end and with health problems (it seems) only to stop (among other things) the rules changes to deal with CO2 emissions.
A decision that will be with us for several months,if not years, and discourage the changes we needed to have made a long time ago.
At least Thatcher did understood what was at stake.
(Thatcher showing how Ted Cruz and almost all the current Republicans are stupid -even dumber than George Bush the lesser- for willfully ignoring what many past Republicans also understood)
Yes, but the point here is that Scalia with his efforts he ended up making it more likely that we would live in a hell.
Well, I understood that principle. I was wondering about what was the context in which Justice Scalia would have felt called upon to bring it up in a decision (or dissent).
I better go back to earlier in the thread and do some more digging.
I was waiting for a Hitler comparison, but I’ll take Stalin and Pol Pot. Do you put Scalia or Thatcher in the category as those three? (Now you got me defending Scalia whom I didn’t care for)
I’m just old school, I think there should be some sort of grace period.
For my purposes, you can categorize them yourself. But if you concede that Pol Pot and Stalin’s death can be celebrated, why not anyone and everyone’s, with the level of celebration in proportion to their position on whatever scale you care to construct?
My question to you was where do you draw the line and can that line be drawn based on objective principles regarding how the celebrator—rather than you the observer—feels about that person?
I’ve never heard the argument “I’m just old school” without thinking “Well then fuck that,” and that’s more vitriol than I’ve expressed about Scalia’s death. The idea that something is worth doing just because it’s old is more damaging to society than a dead guy.
As to “I’m old school” you cropped my post. Dignity to the dead should be exercised for almost everyone save the most contemptuous in the world. If you say Scalia is in that group, I disagree.
Hmm…you may well be (and probably are ;)) right. I shall have to revisit the history on this matter, and as a result perhaps change my view on the subject. Thanks.
If Freddy Krueger kidnaps you and tortures you, that does not violate the Eighth Amendment either. If the police pick you up, take you to a dark alley, and sodomize you with a two-liter Coke bottle, that’s not a violation of the Eighth Amendment. It’s terrible, to be sure, but Plenty of things are terrible without being violative of the Eighth Amendment.
Torture in investigations is not “punishment” as the term is used in the Eighth Amendment. The Eighth Amendment, as I just recently noted above, prohibits post-conviction or pre-trial confinement penal sanctions that are cruel and unusual. Torture in an investigation is not an Eighth Amendment issue, because it happens prior to any conviction or trial and pointing this fact out is not evil, but simply accurate.
Now, if the prison in which you’re serving time has a disciplinary process that involves the Coke bottle used in the same manner, THAT is an Eighth Amendment violation.
Pointing this out is not virtuous, either, but also simply accurate.
I’m not going to answer, because the point of that was to establish that you do draw a line somewhere. Given that, I want to know what your rubric allows. If it allows celebration of Stalin’s death, but not Thatcher’s, then I want to know what the scale is and I want you to justify objectively where the line is drawn. How much less bad than Stalin does not justify celebration and how much more bad than Thatcher does justify celebration?
If that’s the case, then your lines are only good for judging your own behavior, not someone else’s.
How contemptuous is that? Does it have to be Hitler or is Augusto Pinochet or Baby Doc Duvalier bad enough? What about a common murderer? How many murders do you have to commit before you become “most contemptuous in the world”?
This probably deserves its own thread, but perhaps the fundamental question in play is: what is the proper role of a federal judge?
I sense that some posters here believe that a judge should make right what is wrong, by any means necessary. If torture is happening in investigations, then stop it, by whatever rationale is necessary. If CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions are rampant, then support and strengthen rules to curtail them!
But that’s really the job of Congress, and the President. They make the laws and the regulations. The federal judge is much more the umpire. His job is to read what the law says, and apply it to the facts. He should not reach a decision based on what the best policy outcome is–he should reach a decision based on what the law says, and if that outcome is bad, Congress or the President has the mandate to revise or enforce the law or regulation as needed.
Gigo inveighs against Scalia for not giving CO[sub]2[/sub] regulations a chance. I am pointing out that this is not the right question to ask. “Did Scalia correctly apply the existing law?” is the correct question to ask. Trinopus rails against Scalia for failing to subsume torture during an investigation into the Eighth Amendment. Torture is a terrible thing, but when used during an investigation it’s not an Eighth Amendment thing.
Torture, even when done to gain information, is by its very nature a punishment. It may not be only a punishment, but to me, at least, it’s very clearly a punishment (as well as other things, at least some of the time), and clearly “cruel and unusual”.
As a lifelong Democrat who believes in both respect for those I disagree with and calling out nutballs with crazy or insulting theories about them, I hope you finally come to our side.
IMHO no also to that, or to be more pedantic you are basing this on on argument from ignorance. The decision to stay the rules was given with no justification as to why.
Thing is, knowing how caustic Scalia was and that he was one of the ignoramus votes in the 5-4 decision to stay the rules, one has to note here that when cases of Intelligent Design showed even among conservative judges the result has been for the judges to defer to what the experts and scientists recommend. Same as it was seen in the Terry Schiavo case too BTW.
That is why the White house is confident about the merits, based on recent opinions regarding the issue Scalia was clearly willing to ignore science and even past rulings in favor of the EPA. And it should not be needed here to report that Scalia was part of many of the dissent opinions dealing with the EPA.
It may be a punishment in the general sense of the word, but it’s not punishment within the meaning of the Eighth Amendment.
Well before Antonin Scalia took his seat on the Supreme Court, the Court decided Ingraham v. Wright, in which they clearly and unambiguously said that the term “punishment,” as used in the Eighth Amendment, referred to the penalties imposed on those convicted of crimes:
Powell v. Texas, decided when Scalia was still a law professor at UVA, makes the point as well:
If this is the one I alluded to, it was Scalia, but just in a public speech somewhere, not in an actual ruling. He said that torturing suspects to gain information from them would not be a violation of the 8th, because that’s part of investigating a crime, not part of punishing one, and the 8th only forbids cruel and unusual punishments.
Most jurists hold that the 8th prohibits cruel and unusual treatment of individuals, by the government, in all circumstances. Not only that you may not be drawn and quartered as a penalty for murder, but that the police can’t burn your face with lit cigarettes when asking where you were at two o’clock on last Tuesday.
(This is vaguely moot, as Bricker noted, such treatment violates the 5th, and so the 8th doesn’t need to be invoked there.)
That’s fine, but it just seems like an interpretation, and just as reasonable is an interpretation that would include torture-for-info (which, since it’s torture, is inherently punishing) within the meaning and intention of “punishment” in the 8th.
First off, I don’t think about this too often. I don’t really have a rubric. I didn’t celebrate Bin Laden’s death, but, I was “OK” he was gone. I do tend to consider each circumstance on its own merit. The thought of “yeah that motherfucker is dead” has never really crossed my mind. In my life, I don’t remember being gleeful that any one particular person had died.