30 Seconds After Denying Court Is Politicized, Scalia Says Democrats Do ‘Not Stick To The Text’ Of The Constitution

THINK PROGRESS

Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia spent much of the last Supreme Court term behaving more like a politician than a judge. His dissent from an opinion striking down much of Arizona’s anti-immigrant law SB 1070 included a rant against an irrelevant Obama Administration policy, and his questions during the Affordable Care Act were laced with conservative talking points more appropriate for Fox News than the Supreme Courtroom.
Yet, in an interview with Reuters yesterday, Scalia said he is “enraged” by suggestions that the Supreme Court has become “politicized.” Less than a minute later, however, Scalia launched into a partisan diatribe, this time claiming Democrats are less loyal to the Constitution than Republicans:
It really enrages me to hear people refer to [the Supreme Court] as a “politicized court.” Neither I nor any one of my colleagues votes a certain way because he or she likes this president or is a member of the party that that president belongs to. I could care less who the president is. They vote that way because that’s who they are. They were selected because of who they are.
So why should it be surprising that when you have a Democratic Party which has been trying for years to appoint people who approve of Roe v. Wade — which means people who are not originalists, who do not stick to the text, who believe in substantive due process or whatever — why should it be surprising when the Democrats have been doing that for 30 years, at least, and the Republicans have been doing the opposite for 30 years — swearing that they are going to appoint people who are not judicial activists, gonna, you know, hew to the text — why should it be surprising that you end up with a Court where the Democratic appointees are quite different from the Republican