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AH - Antonin Scalia

Antonin Scalia

 

Antonin Gregory Scalia (1936–2016) was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the Court's conservative wing. For catalyzing an originalist and textualist movement in American law, he has been described as one of the most influential jurists of the twentieth century. Scalia was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018.
In 1986, he was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan and unanimously confirmed by the Senate, becoming the Court's first Italian-American justice.
Scalia espoused a conservative jurisprudence and ideology, advocating textualism in statutory interpretation and originalism in constitutional interpretation. He was a strong defender of the powers of the executive branch, believing presidential power should be paramount in many areas.

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What Was it About George Washington

(On February 14, 2014, Justice Scalia spoke at the Union League Club of Chicago’s annual George Washington’s Birthday Gala. Illinois supreme court justice Anne Burke, in introducing Scalia, praised him as “a product of the great American immigrant experience unique to our nation” and as someone who “embodies the goals and dreams of the Founding Fathers.” In his speech, Scalia lamented that our country has lost the founding generation’s vision of civic education.)

. . . Washington is my favorite of the Founders—the one I would most have liked to meet. Not just because he was the indispensable man—the man without whom the American Revolution would not have succeeded. But also because he is a puzzlement. He was not a great intellect; indeed, he was quite sensitive about his relative lack of formal education. (He was not even, to tell the truth, that skilled a military tactician, as the New York campaign demonstrated.) And he was surrounded by great intellects, who produced great writings—Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson, to name the most prominent. Washington himself wrote not much of note, beyond his famous First Thanksgiving Proclamation and his Farewell Address. (One is reminded of the response of one college professor to the assertion that Jesus Christ was a great man: “Bah, what did he write?”) Yet all those well-published, intellectual geniuses looked up to, deferred to, stood in awe of George Washington. What was there about the man that produced that result?

   It must have been character. Washington was a man of honor, of constancy, or steady determination. A man who could be believed, trusted, counted on. A man who would step down as president after two terms, though he could have been re-elected for life, because that is what he believed a democratic republic required. . . .

   In his Farewell Address, issued before his retirement to Mount Vernon, George Washington famously declared that “Religion and morality are indispensable supports” of “all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity.” . . .

. . . [T]he Founders believed morality was essential to the well-being of the republic, and that religion was the best way to foster morality. Religious values were therefore central to the Founders’ aspirations for civic education. This is not an anachronistic view, either; it is well reflected in the current sense of society. . . .

   Yet the Supreme Court has adopted the demonstrably unhistorical view that the Constitution forbids not merely the favoring of one religion over another but even the favoring of religion in general over irreligion. In fact, it forbids the former, but not the latter—and to know what that means in practice you need only consult George Washington’s First Thanksgiving Proclamation, issued at the direction of the same First Congress that proposed the First Amendment. It is deeply religious but assiduously non-denominational. . . .

   Nonetheless, despite Washington’s example, the Court repeatedly says the government cannot favor religion over nonreligion. . . .

. . . In short the Court has rejected as an establishment of religion a public preference for religion over irreligion, when a preference for religion over irreligion is central to our history and tradition.

Antonin Scalia
Scalia Speaks (2017 Crown Forum)
pp. 64-65, 70

Paolo DiLucaComment