STEPHEN L. CARTER: Scalia’s Grave-Dancers Deserve a Harsh Verdict.
When the news broke Saturday that Justice Antonin Scalia had died at age 79, my Twitter feed began to fill with hate. Not disagreement or disrespect — actual hate. He was an ignorant waste of flesh, wrote one young fool. His death was the best news in decades, cheered another. Then there was the woman who just had to tell the world that she felt safer now than she had at the death of Osama bin Laden. And several people expressed the hope — the hope! — that Clarence Thomas would die next.
Thus we see the discursive toll of our depressing Supreme Court deathwatch. We’re actually rooting for people to die.
It’s unusual for a vacancy to occur in the midst of a presidential campaign, but it’s common as cake for activists to dream the hours away speculating on who’ll be next to go, and for journalists to count up the number of appointments they think the next president will get to make. Sometimes in their earnestness the activists of left and right do indeed sound as if they’re rooting for a death or two. They seem to think the justices whose votes enrage them deserve to go.
None of this is entirely new. My mentor, Justice Thurgood Marshall, didn’t die in harness, but I remember the deathwatch all the same. I was serving as one of his law clerks in 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected, and on election night, one of the television networks reported that Marshall had decided to quit the court, in order to give Jimmy Carter the opportunity to make an appointment. The report was false, of course, and Marshall was furious. Some in the building speculated that the story had been planted by activists hoping he would get the message and depart, clearing the way for a younger liberal voice — much as, in recent years, some on the left have openly if cruelly urged Ruth Bader Ginsburg to step down, as though she owes them some special fealty.
To the SJW crowd, everyone owes them special fealty. But read the whole thing.
Plus: “To trash the justices because we don’t like their votes (usually on a handful of issues) is to diminish the majesty of the court itself. The more we do it, the less reason there is for anybody to respect the justices when at last whichever side we’re on has a majority.” But, you know, one reason why people take such a ghoulish interest is because the Court has become so very important, and individual members so very important.