Law Prof Says Scalia’s ‘Red Meat’ Dissent Makes Court Makeup an Issue
A Harvard Law School professor says the makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court has been thrust back into the spotlight, thanks to a recent dissent by Justice Antonin Scalia.
Scalia’s dissent in Boumediene v. Bush warned of “devastating” and “disastrous consequences” that will result from the majority decision giving habeas rights to detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Referring to released detainees who returned to the battlefield, Scalia wrote that the majority decision “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”
In an interview with the New York Times, Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School said Scalia’s opinion was reminiscent of his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas in which the Supreme Court struck down a Texas criminal sodomy law. Scalia’s dissent warned that state laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage and incest were called into question by the decision.
“His tendency in case after case is to paint his dissenting view in the most inflammatory terms possible,” Tribe said, “giving red meat to those who want to make the Supreme Court their whipping boy.”
Conservatives apparently took the bait. Republican John McCain told a crowd of 1,500 during a campaign town-hall style meeting that the ruling is “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country,” the Times story says.
Representing the liberal view, Kathryn Kolbert, president of People for the American Way, said that if one more Bush justice had been on the court, the decision likely would have gone the other way, the newspaper reports. And Democrat Barack Obama said the decision was “an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law.”
