Comment by wahern
19 hours ago
In Gonzales, O'Connor dissented and Scalia, who was too afraid of pulling the rug out from under the administrative state, issued a concurrence. So, surprises do happen.
19 hours ago
In Gonzales, O'Connor dissented and Scalia, who was too afraid of pulling the rug out from under the administrative state, issued a concurrence. So, surprises do happen.
Drugs were always a weird exception to what was otherwise pretty consistent jurisprudence on Scalia's part.
I was prepared to excuse his vote as an exceptional situation until Sebelius, when rather than revisit and fix his mistake in Gonzales he chose to embrace the affirmative mandate vs passive prohibition distinction nonsense, a deux ex machina fit for one purpose and one purpose only. Fool me once....
There's a good argument to be made that it was just good luck for Scalia's intellectual legacy that he died before the conservative supermajority on the court got rolling, because he was already well on his way to replacing principles with expediency: https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/03/justice-scalias-uncertain... Like the old saying goes, it's easy to criticize, much more difficult to offer constructive, durable solutions.