St. Antonin Scalia

Chief Justice Rehnquist is not even gone yet, but the canonization of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has already begun.

Dick Cheney's duck-hunting buddy Scalia, of course, is the classic "interpretivist"; the perfect fundamentalist judge who doesn't believe that the last 200 years happened or, rather, that it doesn't matter whether or not anyone had any ideas in the last 200 years.  The U.S. Constitution in his own words, is a "dead" document.  It is not to be degraded by anything that may have transpired since the day it was written.

“It means today not what current society (much less the Court) thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.”

He made these comments in a very scary piece of writing entitled “God’s Justice and Ours,” the main point of which was that

“[t]he reaction of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be resignation to it, but the resolution to combat it as effectively as possible.”   

So, not only does the public law of 2004 and beyond have to meet the political tests of the 1780s, but it also needs to be made to fit Scalia's interpretation of what God says.

Of course, if Matt Drudge is to be believed, it is Clarence Thomas who holds the inside track for the Chief's job.  Either way, it is certain that American society is about to undergo a thorough purging.