RIP Justice Scalia

Antonin Scalia, the last Justice of the Supreme Court to receive a unanimous approval from the Senate, has died.  While I have not always agreed with his decisions, he was one of the very few practicing Originalists on the Court, and his dissents were exceptionally clear, concise and (more to the point) precise.

Take, for example, his dissent in King v. Burwell:

This case requires us to decide whether someone who buys insurance on an Exchange established by the Secretary gets tax credits. You would think the answer would be obvious—so obvious there would hardly be a need for the Supreme Court to hear a case about it. In order to receive any money under §36B, an individual must enroll in an insurance plan through an "Exchange established by the State." The Secretary of Health and Human Services is not a State. So an Exchange established by the Secretary is not an Exchange established by the State—which means people who buy health insurance through such an Exchange get no money under §36B.

Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is "established by the State." It is hard to come up with a clearer way to limit tax credits to state Exchanges than to use the words "established by the State." And it is hard to come up with a reason to include the words "by the State" other than the purpose of limiting credits to state Exchanges. "[T]he plain, obvious, and rational meaning of a statute is always to be preferred to any curious, narrow, hidden sense that nothing but the exigency of a hard case and the ingenuity and study of an acute and powerful intellect would discover." Lynch v. Alworth-Stephens Co., 267 U. S. 364, 370 (1925) (internal quotation marks omitted). Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved.

We've lost one of the five votes that prevailed in Heller and McDonald, and now Obama gets to appoint his successor.

I guess we get to see how much spine the Republican majority in the Senate has.

Oh, wait....


RIP, Tony.  Thanks for everything you did.