from the February 15, 2016 eNews issue

Appoint judges and civil servants according to your tribes in all your cities that the LORD your God is about to give you, so they may judge the people impartially.

— Deuteronomy 16:18 (ISV)

A conservative voice on the United States Supreme Court has been silenced. Associate Justice Antonin Scalia went to the Lord Saturday, Feb. 13 while on a hunting trip in West Texas. He was 79 years old. That he died while on a hunting trip marked a fitting end to an illustrious life.

Appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, he was the longest-serving justice on the high court at the time of his death. Justice Scalia was described as “the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the Court’s conservative wing.” Justice Scalia was an originalist in that he interpreted the U.S. Constitution in accordance with the meanings and intentions that were present when it was first adopted. This legal philosophy is the ideological opposite of a “living, breathing Constitution” (an interpretation endorsed by Justices Breyer and Ginsburg) that evolves by incorporating the contemporary meanings and intentions of society-at-large.

According to a report from the Dallas Morning News, Scalia told a crowd at Southern Methodist University, “The Constitution is not a living document. It’s dead, dead, dead.”

Among other things, Justice Scalia supported state’s rights, believed there is no …

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Categories: Articole de interes general