Antonin "Ralph Kramden" Scalia

Behind the mystique of the institution of the Supreme Court, behind the gavels, the robes and the fancy law degrees, it's fascinating to discover a Justice who turns out to be something less than what most of us imagine.

I refer, of course, to Justice Antonin Scalia. The same Justice who was taken on a hunting trip by Dick Cheney but refused to recuse himself from legal matters relating to the White House. The same fundamentalist Scalia who famously claimed that the Constitution was not a living document, but rather a static legal instrument needing no interpretation.

And the same Scalia who flew off the handle at a talk on March 8th in Switzerland. When asked about whether Iraqis detained by the U.S. were entitled to protection under the Geneva Convention or other human-rights treaties, a red-faced Scalia responded:

“…I had a son on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son and I'm not about to give this [combatant] who was captured in a war a full jury trial. I mean it's crazy."

But were they all combatants? Or were many just in the wrong place at the wrong time? We may never know. According to the vengeful Scalia, it didn’t seem to matter how they got there. If some of them were innocent, that’s an acceptable price to pay for our goal of sticking Western Democracy up their you-know-whats.

Strange, but I assume Judges to be justice-seeking, not justice-denying. I think of them as merciful and gentle, not screaming for revenge. I expect them to be open-minded instead of assuming that if a person is already in prison, he must be guilty.

Detaining people indefinitely without recourse is exactly what we attribute to monsters like Saddam, Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler, but wanna-be Rambos like Scalia don’t seem to care about the hypocrisy. They’re too busy trying to be tough guys: “hunting” birds that somebody behind a knoll throws into the air for them to shoot; strutting in front of Law Students as they rage against critics of Constitutional “originalism”; banging their fists in front of Swiss audiences like Ralph Kramden--showing the wimpy Europeans who is boss.

And that’s the problem. Justice Scalia is really Ralph Kramden, minus the heart of gold. Despite the robes and a fancy education, he turns out to be a coarse, narrow-minded, angry dinosaur. Not exactly who I want deciding cases.

Should he recuse himself from future cases regarding detention facilities? Only if he has any sense of professional ethics. But like other virtues we might imagine him possessing, it’s becoming extremely difficult to picture.