It was one of our team's weirder investigative discoveries: The recently departed Justice Antonin Scalia-- aleha hashalom-- in 2011, was ticketed for recklessly driving his black BMW.
To his family, I offer condolences. To my readers, I offer the facts. A man's soul must be laid to rest, but history must not be buried as well, especially now that the Justice's passing has become grounds for stories that border on historical obscenity, cf. the New York Times, "Liberal Love for Antonin Scalia."
Love?? Well, if you want a Valentine, this ain't it.
There's been a lot of gleeful chuckling, for example, about Scalia's courtroom bench "humor." But behind his jokey comments lay a cruelty aimed at the poor, the injured, the Beemer-less class that turns to the Court as the last hope for protection against corporate and state violence.
Here's a telling example of Scalia's humor from a crucial voting rights case. In 2005, Indiana's Republican legislature passed a law barring the vote to anyone without current state photo ID. The excuse: an official ID would prevent voter fraud--despite the fact that the state had not found, in over 100 years, even one case of a voter illegally impersonating another.
The media did get a laugh out of the ten nuns who were turned away from an Indiana polling station because the sisters' driver's licenses had expired. The nuns were in their eighties and nineties. Their licenses had expired, though they had not. Tough luck ladies, you lose your vote.
Bobby Kennedy and I covered the cute story of the nuns; but we also wrote about the unnoticed 78,000 African-Americans in Indiana who lost their right to vote because they did not have the right ID to vote. A disproportionate number of African-American lack cars, and therefore driver's licenses; and only a few, apparently have passports for weekends in Paris,
Antonin Scalia 2010
(Image by (From Wikimedia) Stephen Masker, Author: Stephen Masker) Details Source DMCA
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