Opus Dei is hardly mainstream religion and it has long been rumored that Justice Antonin Scalia is a member of this secretive extremist cult.
One might make a reasonable assumption that you have a brain if you're reading this and navigating the internet successfully. Do some research about Opus Dei and Hanssen and others.
Interesting!
VIDEO ON LINK: http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/30951-focus-scalia-excoriates-roberts-before-the-court
Crowds in favor of Obamacare outside the Supreme Court. (photo: Bill Clark/Getty)
Scalia Excoriates Roberts Before the Court
28 June 15
It was Roberts vs. Scalia in a legal heavyweight tussle for the ages.
In one corner: conservative Chief Justice John Roberts. In the other: veteran fellow conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. The prize: the fate of Obamacare, centerpiece of the most liberal presidency in decades.
And for the second time, Roberts won on points.
Roberts's ring was the ornate Supreme Court chamber fringed by towering Corinthian columns and red velvet curtains, one of the few venues left in American public life not penetrated by the modern age -- no television coverage, no tweeting, no selfies. The stands were the wooden seats packed with an electrified audience of lawyers, reporters and members of the public.
So the monumental ruling was handed down Thursday in similarly hushed conditions to the great Supreme Court judgments of history -- in contrast to the pandemonium that erupted on the marble plaza outside. There, Obamacare supporters exploded in cheers and started chanting "ACA is here to stay" as news flashed that the law had been saved again.
Roberts led the majority as the court ruled 6-3 to uphold the manner in which the Obama administration is interpreting the law. Doing so preserved health insurance subsidies for more than six million Americans.
The move followed Roberts's casting of the deciding vote in a narrower 5-4 decision in the previous challenge to the Affordable Care Act in 2012. That opinion preserved the most important aspect of Obama's domestic legacy and boosted his reelection campaign.
This time, Roberts again joined with mostly liberal justices to support the law -- in the process infuriating conservatives who revile Obamacare as an overreach by the state and see his double rescue of the law as a disavowal of values they believed he held when he was appointed by Republican President George W. Bush.
Despite being couched in the stately conventions of the court, the explosive legal argument that unfurled between Roberts and Scalia on Thursday amounted to genuine courtroom drama.
Roberts came out slowly, offering a history of the law that has repeatedly defied efforts to kill it, to build a sober rationale for his bombshell judgment.
On one side of him sat Scalia, leaning back in one of the big black rocking chairs the justices use on the bench and looking as if he might at any minute launch himself onto the court.
To his left sat Anthony Kennedy, who many legal pundits had expected to be the star of the show by casting the deciding vote in the case. This in itself would have been dramatic because Kennedy issued his own forthright dissent to the decision that upheld Obamacare three years ago.
Roberts argued that the clause at the center of the suit -- which could be read to say that only those with insurance policies purchased on state exchanges qualify for government subsidies, and not the millions in federally run markets -- was ambiguous and needed to be viewed in the wider context of the law.
"Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter," Roberts wrote in his opinion.
While Roberts was presenting a legal argument, there was no hiding the political context, and he permitted himself a grumble at what he said was "inartful" drafting of the law that forced his court to take up the contentious law for a second time. He also took a shot at the messy legislative device known as "reconciliation" that Democrats used to push the law through a sharply divided Congress in 2011.
When he was done -- in the process, handing a huge victory to Obama, who has made no effort to hide his disdain for the Roberts court -- the Chief Justice casually mentioned that his colleague would offer a dissent.
"Indeed" Scalia replied, in his booming Shakespearean tones, sparking laughter in the court and hinting at the explosive repudiation of the Chief Justice's position he was about to unleash.
If Roberts came out jabbing, Scalia, a pugilistic master of language and a former student debating champion, threw haymakers from the start, slamming the reasoning of the majority opinion as "eccentric," "upside down," as "interpretative jiggery pockery" and "wonderfully convenient."
Cloaked in the dignified language of the Court, Scalia effectively accused Roberts, Kennedy and fellow justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor of saving the ACA for political reasons.
"Today's opinion changes the usual rules of statutory interpretation for the sake of the Affordable Care Act. That, alas, is not a novelty," Scalia steamed from his spot just a couple of feet away from Roberts, who looked out at the court impassively.
Perhaps seeking to defuse the awkwardness with a dose of snarky humor, Scalia did offer the line, "we should start calling this law SCOTUScare," playing on the initials of the court and drawing a chuckle from Roberts.
But Scalia left no doubt about his thoughts on a judgment that he said set a disastrous precedent that would echo down the years.
"The cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites. I dissent," Scalia said, his words ringing in the air as the justices left the bench at the end of a historic half hour.
If nothing else, Scalia's stunning intervention left no doubt that the charismatic 79-year-old, named to the court by President Ronald Reagan, has no intention of hanging up the gloves any time soon in his long fight for the strict interpretation of laws and the Constitution.
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/30951-focus-scalia-excoriates-roberts-before-the-court
Pope Francis Has Antonin "Opus Dei" Scalia's Undies in a Bunch
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
Mon Dieu!
Antonin Scalia is rumored to belong to the secretive Catholic Opus Dei Society, which is said to number about 100,000 world wide. Its main tenets are that God is an authoritarian and, therefore, Opus Dei adherents support dictatorial societies; that women stand behind men in life; that mass should be in Latin; and that God created a natural order of life in which the rich are rich and the poor are poor -- and the divine order of inequality shouldn't be disrupted.
In fact Opus Dei, which is so covert that it won't even reveal its membership, has neither denied nor confirmed if Scalia belongs to the highly conservative theological church within a church.
Nevertheless, these and other beliefs of the renegade right wing Catholic cult are basic to Scalia's rulings on the Supreme Court.
It remains to be seen whether Pope Francis is the "new Coke" of the Catholic Church or an actual agent of change. But clearly, his pronouncements thus far on the potential devastation of capitalism, the needs of the poor to be attended to immediately, his first-ever -- although less than comprehensive amidst an institution that is still gender discriminatory on a massive scale -- words of tolerance toward gay men (The Advocate just named him "Person of the Year"); his pronouncement that some of his good friends are Marxists; his reaching out to other religions; and so on are enough -- even if only words for now -- to make Scalia apopleptic, which warms the cockles of many a heart this holiday season.
Pope Francis is, for the moment it appears, a breath of fresh air in an ossified, archaic religous hierarchy -- and he is using his "bully pulpit" to challenge -- even if fleetingly for now -- a few of the most fundamental tenets of Western society, particularly the ravages and inequality of capitalism -- which he labeled "a new tyranny."
He recently, in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Stampa, denounced the Reagan apostles' evocation of the "trickle down theory":
There is nothing in the Exhortation that cannot be found in the social Doctrine of the Church. I wasn’t speaking from a technical point of view, what I was trying to do was to give a picture of what is going on.The only specific quote I used was the one regarding the “trickle-down theories” which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and social inclusiveness in the world. The promise was that when the glass was full, it would overflow, benefitting the poor. But what happens instead, is that when the glass is full, it magically gets bigger nothing ever comes out for the poor. This was the only reference to a specific theory. (Italics inserted by BuzzFlash at Truthout.)
BuzzFlash at Truthout has written dozens and dozens of columns on the mis-wired circuitry of Antonin Scalia's brain and his bizarre legal pronouncements over the year. In a Supreme Court review of the right of Troy Davis (who was subsequently executed) to receive a new trial due to potentially exonerating evidence, Scalia wrote an opinion which stated that there was nothing in the US Constitution that prevented an innocent man from being put to death by the state. Now, there's little one can do when confronted with such diabolical thinking except pray that Zeus might return and teach a lesson or two to such a destructive mortal.
So now there is a new pope in town. Pope Francis, if he continues on his present course of pronouncements, is going to make life increasingly uncomfortable for the self-appointed Pope of the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia.
A pope who expresses scorn toward capitalism run amok! Scalia's undies are certainly in a bunch.
Poor Antonin! There is only room for one pope, and that one -- the one in Rome -- is endowed with the doctrine of Papal Infallibility: "In Roman Catholic theology, the doctrine that the pope, acting as supreme teacher and under certain conditions, cannot err when he teaches in matters of faith or morals."
There is no doubt that the jury is still out on how much, if any, Pope Francis will change the institutional anachronisms and injustices of Catholicism as a male hierarchy that generally supports entrenched power. But he is certainly providing a lot of lip service leading in that direction, and clearly has taken a position that finds capitalism critically deficient -- specifically targeting the "trickle-down" theory that has been disseminated, institutionalized and become the dominant economic force in the United States for more than four decades.
In this sense, Scalia is going to have to either fight the pope head on or admit that there's a new Pontiff in town.
Author's Note: Inspired by "Pope Francis vs. Rush Limbaugh: Swatting Away the Smack-Down King" by William Berkowitz and posted on BuzzFlash at Truthout.
(Photo: DonkeyHotey)
No comments:
Post a Comment