What Makes Scalia Qualified to Be Chief Justice?
Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, Mark Twain once said, 'the man looked honest enough.' Incoming Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is no Twain, but he could have been paraphrasing America's greatest writer when he weighed in on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's intelligence recently. 'I cannot dispute the fact, as I have said, that this is one smart guy,' Reid told Tim Russert on NBC's 'Meet the Press' a couple of days ago. 'And I disagree with many of the results that he arrives at, but his reasons for arriving at those results are very hard to dispute.' How's that for a critique of right-wing jurisprudence? Reid doesn't agree with Scalia about anything, but he can't muster the brain power it takes to refute him. Oh, I'm feeling really confident about the new Senate minority leader. But as left-handed as Reid's compliment was, it came at the expense of Justice Clarence Thomas, the other ultra-conservative on the United States Supreme Court. The soft-spoken Nevadan told Russert that he considered Thomas an 'embarrassment' to the Supreme Court, citing 'poorly written' opinions and his perception that the moodiest justice simply wasn't doing a good job.It's not that I disagree with Reid on the inappropriateness of Clarence Thomas as chief justice -- I'm just baffled that he considers Scalia so much more qualified to preside over the court than the man who made 'Long Dong Silver' a cult hero in the shameless 1990s. [more]
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