ANTONIN SCALIA

Senior Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia passed away on Friday February 12^th at a ranch in Texas while on a hunt­ing trip , Scalia was 79 years old.
No soon­er had the news of Scalia’s pass­ing hit the air­waves Republican Presidential can­di­date Ted Cruz said that the President of the United States Barack Obama should not appoint a replace­ment for Scalia because a Supreme Court Justice of Scalia’s stature should be replaced by the next President. The oth­er Cuban run­ning on the repub­li­can tick­et Marco Rubio also chimed in with exact­ly the very same arguments.
Now here’s the thing, the President of the United States has a con­sti­tu­tion­al duty to appoint a replace­ment to Scalia .
Failing which he would exact­ly be in direct con­tra­ven­tion of his duties and respon­si­bil­i­ties as president.

President Obama will be in office until January of 2017 a full 11 months away. Nevertheless the old cur­mud­geon Senate Majority leader Mitch McConell was quick to say the Senate would not take up any appoint­ment the pres­i­dent puts for­ward as a replace­ment to Scalia. For those not so famil­iar with the US Constitution the President is duty bound to appoint a replace­ment and the sen­ate has a duty to advise and con­sent on a poten­tial replacement.
To sug­gest that the sen­ate will not even con­sid­er a Obama appointee is sim­ply obstruc­tion­ism in it’s most bla­tant form.

Lets talk about Ted Cruz for a second.
Here is a Cuban Hispanic who has some­how man­aged to trans­form him­self from a Canadian born Cuban to a Southern white Anglo-Saxon who wraps him­self in the American flag under the guise of a Constitutional purist.
Yet the very moment it is con­ve­nient for Cruz and his par­ty polit­i­cal­ly the lit­tle Cuban shreds the con­sti­tu­tion with reck­less abandon.
Even Cruz’s Republican col­leagues crit­i­cize him for being a liar and a pre­ten­tious bas­tard No one is as con­ser­v­a­tive as Cruz. No one is a chris­t­ian as Cruz. No one is more Reagan than Cruz. Only prob­lem is that Reagan could not pass muster as a con­ser­v­a­tive in Ted Cruz’x GOP.

President Obama addressed the nation on the pass­ing of Scalia .

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Good evening, every­body. For almost 30 years, Justice Antonin “Nino” Scalia was a larg­er-than-life pres­ence on the bench — a bril­liant legal mind with an ener­getic style, inci­sive wit, and col­or­ful opinions.

He influ­enced a gen­er­a­tion of judges, lawyers, and stu­dents, and pro­found­ly shaped the legal land­scape. He will no doubt be remem­bered as one of the most con­se­quen­tial judges and thinkers to serve on the Supreme Court. Justice Scalia ded­i­cat­ed his life to the cor­ner­stone of our democ­ra­cy: The rule of law. Tonight, we hon­or his extra­or­di­nary ser­vice to our nation and remem­ber one of the tow­er­ing legal fig­ures of our time. Antonin Scalia was born in Trenton, New Jersey to an Italian immi­grant fam­i­ly. After grad­u­at­ing from Georgetown University and Harvard Law School, he worked at a law firm and taught law before enter­ing a life of pub­lic ser­vice. He rose from Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel to Judge on the D.C. Circuit Court, to Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. A devout Catholic, he was the proud father of nine chil­dren and grand­fa­ther to many lov­ing grand­chil­dren. Justice Scalia was both an avid hunter and an opera lover — a pas­sion for music that he shared with his dear col­league and friend, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Michelle and I were proud to wel­come him to the White House, includ­ing in 2012 for a State Dinner for Prime Minister David Cameron. And tonight, we join his fel­low jus­tices in mourn­ing this remark­able man.

Obviously, today is a time to remem­ber Justice Scalia’s lega­cy. I plan to ful­fill my con­sti­tu­tion­al respon­si­bil­i­ties to nom­i­nate a suc­ces­sor in due time. There will be plen­ty of time for me to do so, and for the Senate to ful­fill its respon­si­bil­i­ty to give that per­son a fair hear­ing and a time­ly vote. These are respon­si­bil­i­ties that I take seri­ous­ly, as should every­one. They’re big­ger than any one par­ty. They are about our democ­ra­cy. They’re about the insti­tu­tion to which Justice Scalia ded­i­cat­ed his pro­fes­sion­al life, and mak­ing sure it con­tin­ues to func­tion as the bea­con of jus­tice that our Founders envi­sioned. But at this moment, we most of all want to think about his fam­i­ly, and Michelle and I join the nation in send­ing our deep­est sym­pa­thies to Justice Scalia’s wife, Maureen, and their lov­ing fam­i­ly — a beau­ti­ful sym­bol of a life well lived. We thank them for shar­ing Justice Scalia with our country. 

God bless them all, and God bless the United States of America.

The Main stream Media did not waste time, it was­n’t long before the wall-to-wall report­ing became cloy­ing. It would be dif­fi­cult to imag­ine from the report­ing that Scalia was­n’t a Saint.
But Scalia was no Saint, while the Main stream media trips over itself in it’s quest t0 gush over Scalia’s life we decid­ed to show that Scalia was any­thing but a Saint.

Not every­one was will­ing to pros­ti­tute the facts on the altar of polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness, one prac­ti­cal observ­er said.….
Quote: Scalia is a pompous, arro­gant, con­ceit­ed man. His ear­li­est days on the Court were marked with bom­bas­tic out­bursts at coun­sel, dis­rupt­ing attempts by very respectable intel­lec­tu­als in the law, that were tru­ly objec­tive and unbi­ased. (Are judges sup­posed to be that way, too?)Unless you know Constitutional law, you won’t under­stand how he and the Rehnquist Court lit­er­al­ly sus­pend­ed the doc­trine of “stare deci­sis,” adher­ence to prece­dent, so they could “decon­struct” decades of well-set­tled American jurispru­dence and “recon­struct” their own Federalist phi­los­o­phy, which claims the author of the Federalist Papers was the sole repos­i­to­ry of the col­lec­tive mind­set of the Founding Fathers.

Before his pass­ing Antonin Scalia did not attend a State of the Union address since 1997. His rea­son for opt­ing out of the State of the Union address ?

“It has turned into a child­ish spec­ta­cle, and I don’t think that I want to be there to lend dig­ni­ty to it.”
What mod­esty ?[sic]
Talk about an inflat­ed ego?

“The State of the Union is not some­thing I write on my cal­en­dar,” Scalia said dur­ing his own remarks in 2013 before the Smithsonian Associates at George Washington University dur­ing President Obama’s State of the Union address. But he quipped, “I did­n’t set this up tonight just to upstage the president.”

1. King v. Burwell, 2015:

When the Supreme Court upheld a major por­tion of Obamacare for the sec­ond time, Scalia unleashed some of his most scathing rebukes, accus­ing his col­leagues of “inter­pre­tive jig­gery-pok­ery” and and writ­ing off its log­ic as “pure apple­sauce” in his dis­sent. He was also clear­ly sick of see­ing the Supreme Court side with Obama’s lega­cy leg­is­la­tion, writ­ing, “We should start­ing call­ing this law SCOTUScare.”

2. National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 2012:

The first time the Supreme Court con­sid­ered Obamacare, Scalia con­densed the entire debate over America’s health care sys­tem using an unlike­ly sym­bol: Broccoli. If the gov­ern­ment could tell cit­i­zens which health care to pur­chase, he argued, could it start enforc­ing our veg­eta­bles, too? “Everybody has to buy food soon­er or lat­er, so you define the mar­ket as food,” he said dur­ing argu­ments. “Therefore, every­body is in the mar­ket; there­fore, you can make peo­ple buy broc­coli.” The veg­gie became an endur­ing sym­bol of the Obamacare debate.

3. Atkins v. Virginia, 2002:

Scalia’s harsh­est put-down of his fel­low jus­tices came in his dis­sent for this case pro­hibit­ing the exe­cu­tion of men­tal­ly dis­abled con­victs. Scalia, one of three dis­senters, thought sil­ly emo­tions got the best of his col­leagues. “Seldom has an opin­ion of this Court rest­ed so obvi­ous­ly upon noth­ing but the per­son­al views of its mem­bers,” he wrote.

4. PGA Tour, Inc. v. Martin, 2001:

The PGA Tour required all golfers to walk between shots dur­ing a qual­i­fy­ing tour­na­ment. The Supreme Court, hear­ing a case from dis­abled play­er Casey Martin, decid­ed this was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. Scalia’s reac­tion? Get deep on the rules of golf, and show some love for Kurt Vonnegut. In his dis­sent, Scalia ref­er­enced Vonnegut’s short sto­ry “Harrison Bergeron,” a satire about a future where the Constitution pre­vents any American from being bet­ter than anoth­er. He also mocked the mon­u­men­tal rul­ing the Court just bela­bored over a game. “Is some­one rid­ing around a golf course from shot to shot real­ly a golfer?” he wrote in his dis­sent. “The answer, we learn, is yes. The Court ulti­mate­ly con­cludes, and it will hence­forth be the Law of the Land, that walk­ing is not a ‘fun­da­men­tal’ aspect of golf.”

5. United States v. Virginia, 1996:

In anoth­er sports unex­pect­ed anal­o­gy, Scalia warned that the rul­ing of a mil­i­tary insti­tute’s gen­der pol­i­cy might as well sig­nal the death of sports. As the lone dis­senter in a case rul­ing against the Virginia Military Institute’s pol­i­cy of only admit­ting men, Scalia wrote: “If it were impos­si­ble for indi­vid­ual human beings (or groups of human begins) to act autonomous­ly in effec­tive pur­suit of a com­mon goal, the game of soc­cer would not exist.”

6. Fisher v. University of Texas ‚2015: A con­tentious affir­ma­tive action case, the con­ser­v­a­tive jus­tice seemed to call the abil­i­ties of African-America stu­dents into ques­tion. “There are those who con­tend that it does not ben­e­fit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas, where they do not do well,” Scalia said, “as opposed to hav­ing them go to a less-advanced school … a slow­er-track school where they do well.”
Even though Scalia used the term “there are those who con­tend” he nev­er argued that those con­tentions con­flict with his own feel­ings. The infer­ence being affir­ma­tive action is bad for black stu­dents because they’re not smart enough to suc­ceed in good schools.

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama went to the Supreme Court and paid their final respects to Scalia whose body laid in repose on Friday .
The President will not be attend­ing Scalia’s funer­al. In my mind regard­less of what guides the President’s deci­sion, it’s a sol­id decision.