“Courting Business”: Scalia Worked Hard To Deny Ordinary Citizens Their Day In Court
In Antonin Scalia’s thirty years on the Supreme Court, his name became a byword for social conservatism. And when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that the Senate would refuse to consider any replacement President Obama nominates it was natural that opponents of same-sex marriage and abortion were relieved. Yet Scalia’s death will have only a limited impact on the culture wars, because regarding many social issues he was already in the minority on the Court. But there is one area where the question of his replacement has huge consequences: business. As a member of the Court’s conservative majority, Scalia played a key role in moving American law in a more corporate-friendly direction. Now that majority is gone, and a huge amount rides on what happens next.
Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court has not gone as far in limiting government power over the marketplace as many conservatives would have liked. But the Roberts Court has been the most pro-business of any since the Second World War, according to a paper by the law professors Lee Epstein and William Landes and Judge Richard Posner that looked at decisions from 1946 to 2011. Its five sitting conservatives, including Scalia, ranked among the ten most business-friendly Justices of that period. The Roberts Court hasn’t just made a lot of pro-business rulings. It has taken a higher percentage of cases brought by businesses than previous courts, and it has handed down far-reaching decisions that have remade corporate regulation and law. In Citizens United, it famously ruled that corporations had free-speech rights and that many restrictions on corporate spending in elections were therefore unconstitutional. It has overturned long-standing antitrust restrictions. It has limited liability for corporate fraud and made it harder for workers to successfully sue for age and gender discrimination. It has made suing businesses and governments more difficult, especially in class-action suits.
This is no accident. Since the Reagan Administration, Republican Presidents have filled the Court with Justices steeped in the ideology of the conservative legal movement. As Brian Fitzpatrick, a law professor at Vanderbilt who once clerked for Scalia, told me, “Conservative Justices start from a world view that says we have too much litigation in general and it’s a sap on the economy.” Conservative nominees to the Court have been far more worried about government overreach than about corporate misbehavior. They have been skeptical of the use of class-action suits to achieve social goals or enforce regulations. And, once corporations recognized that the Court was predisposed to favor their interests, they began pursuing those interests more aggressively. As the legendary N.Y.U. law professor Arthur R. Miller told me, “The business community smelled blood and went after it.” Most notably, the Chamber of Commerce has become assiduous in pushing corporate cases to the Court.
A few of these cases have received a lot of attention, but the most consequential work of the Roberts Court in protecting corporate rights has been in cases that have gone mostly unnoticed, including a pair (A.T. & T. v. Concepcion and American Express v. Italian Colors) in which Scalia wrote the majority opinion. In these cases, both of which turned on an interpretation of a once obscure 1925 law, the Court ruled that companies could require customers to give up their right to sue in open court, with disputes to be settled by a private arbitrator instead. “These cases don’t get people’s attention the way things like abortion and same-sex marriage do,” Miller said. But, if the decisions stand, Fitzpatrick argues, “they have the potential to literally wipe out the class-action lawsuit.”
That might not sound like a bad thing—we’re always hearing that Americans are too litigious—but, in an era when regulators are routinely falling down on the job, lawsuits play a crucial role in deterring corporate misbehavior. Miller calls them a “private enforcement of public policies.” And when it comes to big corporations class-action suits are often the only kind that make any economic sense. If every individual defrauded by a company loses fifty dollars, the collective harm can be immense, but it’s not worthwhile for any single victim or lawyer to bother. Fitzpatrick says that obstacles to filing class-action lawsuits make it more likely that “companies will not be held accountable for hurting people, for cheating people, for defrauding people, for discriminating against people.” In that sense, the battle over access to the courtroom is, as Miller puts it, “a kind of class conflict between ordinary individuals and corporate power.” And in that conflict there’s no question which side Scalia was on.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that his death will change things. But many of the Roberts Court’s most important business cases were decided by a 5–4 margin, with the five conservative Justices voting as a bloc. And, as Fitzpatrick points out, “Scalia has done more than any other justice in making it difficult for consumers and employees to bring class-action suits. So his absence alone may make a difference.” There have already been signs of this: just last week, Dow Chemical settled a major class-action suit, saying that Scalia’s death increased the chances of “unfavorable outcomes for business.” It’s unlikely that Scalia will be replaced anytime soon. But let’s hope that, when a successor is finally appointed, it is someone willing to give ordinary citizens the day in court that Scalia worked so hard to deny them.
By: James Surowiecki, Financial Page, The New Yorker, March 7, 2016 Issue; Posted March 1, 2016
“Scalia’s Death Gets More Intriguing”: Scalia And The Company He Kept
Nothing makes people more suspicious than secret orders and secret societies. I remember reading a lot about how both George W. Bush and John Kerry had belonged to Skull & Bones at Yale. That was supposed to be proof that the game was rigged, as the Bonesmen were going to control the White House either way the 2004 election turned out. Going back a little further, I remember some people freaking out about how many Reaganites belonged to the secretive Bohemian Grove club in San Francisco.
Now, I had never heard of The International Order of St. Hubertus, which was apparently established at the 1966 summer retreat of the Bohemian Grove. Actually, that’s not quite right. The society’s U.S. chapter was launched in 1966, but the organization itself was founded in 1695 by the Habsburg Count, Franz Anton von Sporck.
Members of the worldwide, male-only society wear dark-green robes emblazoned with a large cross and the motto “Deum Diligite Animalia Diligentes,” which means “Honoring God by honoring His creatures,” according to the group’s website. Some hold titles, such as Grand Master, Prior and Knight Grand Officer. The Order’s name is in honor of Hubert, the patron saint of hunters and fishermen.
I’m not sure why a secret hunting society has a website, but what do I know?
In any case, Antonin Scalia was attending a retreat of this St. Hubertus society in Texas when he unexpectedly died in his sleep. As we know, the remoteness of the location combined with the fact that he died over the weekend meant that things were handled in an unorthodox way. His body wasn’t examined by a coroner or other professional before his death was certified as arising from natural causes. Because his family didn’t ask for one, no autopsy was performed. And now we find out that he traveled to this ranch with a member of this secret society.
Cibolo Creek Ranch owner John Poindexter and C. Allen Foster, a prominent Washington lawyer who traveled to the ranch with Scalia by private plane, hold leadership positions within the Order…
…From Houston, Scalia and Foster chartered a plane without the marshals to the Cibolo Creek Ranch airstrip. In a statement after Scalia died, the U.S. Marshals Service said that Scalia had declined a security detail while at the ranch…
…Two other private planes that landed at the ranch for the weekend are linked to two men who have held leadership positions with the Texas chapter of the Order, according to a review of state business filings and flight records from the airport.
And this C. Allen Foster guy? Who is he?
The friend, Louisiana-born Foster, is a lawyer with the Washington firm Whiteford, Taylor & Preston. He is also known for his passion for hunting and is a former spokesman for the hunting group Safari Club.
In 2006, Foster was featured in The Post when he celebrated his 65th birthday with a six-day celebration in the Czech Republic. He flew his family and 40 Washington friends there to stay in Moravia’s Zidlochovice, a baroque castle and hunting park. The birthday bash included “tours of the Czech countryside, wine tasting, wild boar and mouflon (wild sheep) hunts, classic dance instruction and a masked costume ball.”
A secretary at Foster’s law firm said he is traveling in Argentina. The firm’s director of marketing, Mindee L. Mosher, said Foster was traveling and she would try to contact him. A woman answering a phone associated with Foster hung up when asked for comment.
Here’s a link to that 2006 article in the Post about Foster’s lavish trip to the Czech Republic.
This story is pretty much tailor-made for the Alex Jones types. How could Scalia’s death not be suspicious under these circumstances?
Secret society, ancient European order, refused his security detail, no medical examination, no autopsy.
It’s all very intriguing, but it mainly interests me for what it says about Scalia and the company he kept.
He wasn’t exactly a man of the people, was he?
By: Martin Longman, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, February 25, 2016
“The House That Scalia Built”: The Bitter Beginning Of The 21st Century That Scalia And The Bush Dynasty Gave Us
Two waves broke this week: a pair of deaths on our national shore that changed everything. They are inseparable in the annals of our time. Goodbye to all that a Supreme Court Justice wrought, and the House of Bush brought.
If only it were that simple.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is dead at 79, the Dickensian, most opinionated character on the bench. Friends — many of whom knew him as an operagoer, a city denizen, and an avid socializer — called the father of nine children Nino. His burial is Saturday.
The “master of invective,” as one put it, Scalia was considered brilliant, and was often callous in withering dissents on, for example, gay marriage. Taking a dim view of President Obama’s lead in the delicate Paris Agreement on climate change, his last vote was to immobilize the emissions standards. How nice of five Republican men to disrespect the Democratic president in the world’s eyes. As it happens, the Folger Shakespeare Library is staging “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — fitting, considering Titania’s haunting lines that warn of global warming.
Nobody on the creamy marble Court was more polarizing since the Civil War. The unabashed carrier of the conservative cross, Scalia seldom let up on his pounding force and lashings, even in victory.
On “60 Minutes,” Scalia scolded half the American people, saying: “Get over it!” He referred to the infamous 2000 Supreme Court decision that swung the presidency from Al Gore to George W. Bush by one vote. He had a chance to be civil; he didn’t take it.
Meanwhile, the Bush dynasty hangs onto its last breath with Jeb Bush’s floundering presidential campaign. His brother, former President George W. Bush, left Texas to campaign, but the magic was missing. The 43rd president looked aged. Jeb has a penchant for saying their father, Bush senior, is the “greatest man alive,” or some such.
Here’s the double knell: The House of Bush is the House that Scalia built. At least, he was an architect. Now a tragic link ties those names together.
Their historical cadence will join other follies. “Sophocles long ago/Heard it on the Aegean,” English poet Matthew Arnold wrote in “Dover Beach.” Now I know what Arnold meant when he saw an elegiac sadness in ages and armies.
All we need to do is go back to 2000 — when our known world ended — when five Republican Supreme Court justices gave new meaning to “one man, one vote.” The deciding votes were out of the citizens’ hands; nine officials voted 5-to-4 — freezing a close vote count in Florida to determine the true winner. They shut democracy down.
That rude decision changed the course of the 21st century. George W. Bush swerved into war in Iraq, giving rise to ISIS today. Remind me: What were we fighting for? Following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, were the pretext to war, when 19 men (15 Saudis) were hijackers in a clever plot. The unprepared U.S. Army and the American viceroy, Paul Bremer, destroyed civil society in Iraq. What a mess.
The Court outrage for the ages must not be forgot in Scalia’s dramatic death, political to the end. The decision is full of rich contradictions. Scalia, who often mocked “nine unelected lawyers” in democracy, sprang into action by stopping vote counting in Florida. The governor of Florida then was Jeb Bush. In unseemly partisanship, Scalia departed from his so-called “originalist doctrine” to strongly urge the Court to stop counting. He also abandoned his emphasis on states having a say in governance by shortchanging the Florida Supreme Court. Hs loyal colleague, Clarence Thomas, followed him every step — Thomas who was nominated by President George H.W. Bush in 1991.
Justice Scalia died on a West Texas luxury ranch during a hunting trip. His death was apt, given his pugilistic style in upholding gun rights and every conservative cause in creation. Washington can’t get over that he’s gone, friends and foes alike. The senior sitting justice loomed large as the fiercest player, in every word he spoke and wrote. The vacancy gives President Obama one more try to work his will on a hostile Senate.
It will take time for the country to heal from the bitter beginning of the 21st century that Scalia and the Bush dynasty gave us. And for the record, I will never get over it.
By: Jamie Stiehm, The National Memo, February 19, 2016
“It Will Be Easy To Replace Antonin Scalia”: In Terms Of Quality In A Supreme Court Justice, He Will Be Easy To Replace
Antonin Scalia’s unexpected death came as a shock to me—and not just because I had plans until recently to go hiking this weekend in Big Bend, Texas, where the justice died. Scalia has been a fixture on the Supreme Court for my entire legal career, and he didn’t seem to be going anywhere. During Barack Obama’s presidency, he hunkered down: no way would a Democrat appoint his successor. The right adored him as much as the left reviled him. He was the Court’s most colorful personality since William “Wild Bill” Douglas retired in 1975. Scalia’s family will miss him, and they are surely hurting right now. They have my sympathies. But as the tributes roll in and Scalia’s impact on the Court comes into focus, I predict a consensus will emerge that he has damaged the institution he served for so many years.
It is ironic that Scalia died during this particular presidential campaign, because he strongly resembled two leading Republican hopefuls: Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Like Trump, Scalia was larger than life. He took his elbows with him wherever he went. The more outrageous his rhetoric, the more his fans lapped it up. Scalia trashed his colleagues’ writing, calling it “preposterous” and compared it to “the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie”; their reasoning was “patently incorrect” and “transparently false.” With his low punches and salty talk, Scalia coarsened the Court—just as Trump has coarsened the presidency. As the much more restrained John Paul Stevens said to one of Scalia’s biographers, “I think everybody respects Nino’s ability and his style and all the rest. But everybody on the Court from time to time has thought he was unwise to take such an extreme position, both in tone and in the position.”
Like Ted Cruz, Scalia possessed a rare intellect. (Cruz, a former Supreme Court law clerk and appellate lawyer, was a big fan.) Scalia was for a time the Court’s most persuasive voice on technical matters like jurisdiction and procedure. He was an unquestionably talented writer. No justice had a quicker wit. Yet, also like Cruz, Scalia proved ineffective within the constraints of an organization, where cooperation and pragmatism tend to produce results. His strident behavior alienated the people around him. “Screams!” wrote Justice Harry Blackmun on a draft Scalia dissent in 1988. “Without the screaming, it could have been said in about 10 pages.” When a very junior Scalia commandeered an oral argument in 1987, Justice Lewis Powell whispered to a colleague on the bench, “Do you think he knows that the rest of us are here?” Scalia seemed to make a special point of picking on Anthony Kennedy, the Court’s swing voter for the past ten years, and an essential member of any 5-4 coalition. His inability to hold his fire or to build consensus meant that he was assigned few important majority decisions in the later years of his career.
I will remember Scalia mainly for the ugliness that permeated his opinions. He once wrote with astonishing callousness that it is not unconstitutional to execute an innocent person if that person has received a fair trial. He described affirmative action as “racial discrimination,” and mocked the notion that it could help students achieve “cross-racial understanding.” (No one squeezed more sarcasm out of a quotation mark.) A devout Roman Catholic, Scalia harbored a particular scorn for “the homosexual agenda,” writing in a paper-thin third-person: “Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive.”
Scalia had been slipping lately. He made a spectacle of himself before journalists, flipping his chin at them and giving needlessly provocative speeches. He openly flouted the Court’s recusal traditions, going on a hunting trip with Dick Cheney and then refusing to recuse himself from a suit against the vice president. He engaged in an unseemly public spat with Judge Richard Posner, going so far as to call Posner a liar after Posner panned Scalia’s latest book. The invective in his opinions and his behavior at oral argument had become truly outrageous, and caused many a citizen to associate the Supreme Court with cheap partisan point-scoring. It has been a long fall for what had been one of the most trusted institutions in government.
Scalia was a character, and he will be hard to forget. But in terms of quality in a Supreme Court justice, he will be easy to replace.
By: Michael McDonnell, Contributor, Ten Miles Square, The Washington Monthly, February 14, 2016
“Obama Rejects The Rejectionists”: Scalia’s Passing Starts A Court Fight For The Ages
In most presidential elections, Supreme Court nominations are a major issue for elites and a substantial concern for significant parts of the conservative movement. Other voters usually see the future makeup of the court as a side matter, or not essential to their decisions at all.
Justice Antonin Scalia’s death on Saturday will change this.
The issue of conservative judicial activism had already begun to take hold among liberals because of a series of fiercely ideological and precedent-shattering 5-to-4 decisions.
You read that right: After decades during which conservatives complained about “liberal judicial activism,” it is now conservatives who are unabashed in undermining progressive legislation enacted by the nation’s elected branches. Scalia will be remembered fondly on the right as the brilliant exponent of the theory of “originalism” that provided a rationale — or, in many cases, a rationalization — for decisions that usually fit conservative ideological preferences.
In 2010, Citizens United v. FEC rewrote decades of precedent on Congress’ power to regulate how campaigns are financed, facilitating a flood of money into elections from a small number of very wealthy Americans. Three years later, Shelby County v. Holder ripped the heart out of the federal government’s enforcement power in the Voting Rights Act. Last week, conservatives on the court halted the implementation of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, his central initiative on climate change.
This is merely a partial list. The court’s conservatives have also regularly undercut the power of unions and the ability of citizens to wage legal battles against corporations.
Such decisions already had the potential of broadening the range of progressive constituencies invested in making the court a major election issue, including political reformers, African Americans, environmentalists and organized labor.
But Scalia’s death means that Obama or his successor — if that successor is a Democrat — could overturn the current conservative majority on the court, which could lead it to revisit many of the most troubling decisions of recent years.
And Republicans did themselves no favors in the coming argument by moving in a hard political direction even before most of the tributes to Scalia had been published — and even before the president had actually picked someone: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) proclaimed that no Obama nominee would be considered, period.
“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice,” McConnell said. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”
Republicans claimed precedent for ignoring court appointees from presidents on their way out the door. During Saturday night’s debate in South Carolina, Marco Rubio said that “it has been over 80 years since a lame-duck president has appointed a Supreme Court justice.” Ted Cruz made a similar point.
Well. A Senate controlled by Democrats confirmed President Reagan’s nomination of Anthony Kennedy on a 97-0 vote in February 1988, which happened to be an election year. By what definition was Reagan not a lame duck when he put Kennedy forward on Nov. 11, 1987?
Obama rejected the rejectionists. He said Saturday he would name a new justice and that there would be “plenty of time . . . for the Senate to fulfill its responsibility to give that person a fair hearing and a timely vote.”
My hunch is that Obama will try to put the Republicans’ obstructionism in sharp relief by offering a nominee who has won support and praise from GOP senators in the past. Three potential candidates who fit these criteria and won immediate and widespread mention were Merrick Garland and Sri Srinivasan, both judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and Jane Kelly, a judge on the 8th Circuit. (I should note that Garland is a dear friend of long standing.)
Whatever choice Obama makes, he will try to make it as hard as possible for Republican senators — especially those struggling for reelection this year in blue or purple states — to claim that he had picked an ideologue. Obama could also argue he had deferred to the Republicans’ Senate majority by offering a candidate whom many of them had supported in the past.
An extended court fight would allow progressives, once and for all, to make clear it is their conservative foes now using judicial power most aggressively. The partisan outcome of this year’s election just became far more important. This fall, Americans will not just be picking a new chief executive. They will be setting the course of the court of last resort for a generation.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 14, 2016
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