In Montana, more shades of tomorrow

Antonin Scalia, writing for himself and on the temperamental behalf of Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.:

Arizona has moved to protect its sovereignty — not in contradiction of federal law, but in complete compliance with it. If securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign state.

This, from the same Justices who today "effectively overturned a century-old Montana law that prohibited corporate spending on political races in the state."

We know where this Court would go, in terms of the Arizona law's stricken provisions, under one or two President Romney additions. Virtually no one of intellectual integrity any longer views this Court as broadly endowed with intellectual integrity itself; and under Romney's appointment power, the Court's contemptibly selective love of states rights would proceed with accelerating force--crushing those rights whenever favorable to a more egalitarian democracy (as it did to the Montana law), and upholding them whenever favorable to a top-down kind of generic brutality (as the dissenters wanted to do for Arizona).

Today, the media are emphatically concentrating on the Arizona decision--and understandably so, because of the ways in which it might affect the presidential race, as well as dozens of other states and millions of Latinos--yet the Montana decision was of at least equal import. Because in it, the Court demonstrated that it possesses no intention of backsliding on its determination to concentrate ever greater power in the hands of an ideologically friendly few.

Comments

[samcdc]

SCOTUS lives no longer. 'Tis now SCOGOP, a contemptible bunch lacking any moral fiber that has destroyed the basis on which its authority rests, viz., the trust of the People that it will judge fairly, impartially and wisely on our behalf.

[SueMe]

I read Scalia's "rant" from the bench on immigration and could only wish that his ancestor's had been denied entry into the U.S....presuming they came here legally!