Mourn the Loss of Justice Scalia - Work to Save the Constitutuon He Protected

When the full weight of the loss of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia again and again envelops me, I weep, as I did for most of Saturday night, not knowing how to console myself. Senator Ted Cruz, when the news of Justice Scalia's death broke the heart of America, said : "He was an unrelenting defender of religious liberty, free speech, federalism, the constitutional separation of powers, and private property rights. All liberty-loving Americans should be in mourning." ~~~~~ We can add to that the reminder that Antonin Scalia completely towered over American law for thirty years. Other Justices have moved the Court to the left or right, chosen states rights or federal powers, preferred criminal justice or minority protection, saved the environment or the outcast -- they have had their day and faded into legal history. Few, perhaps only two, Justices by the force of their intellect, their literary sense of the power of words and their encompassing personalities, have literally changed the course of the law. John Marshall, whose decisions in thirty-hour years as Chief Justice reshaped American government, making the Supreme Court the final arbiter. It was 150 years later when Scalia ended Marshall's reign. As long as American law is studied, and in the distant epoch when it has become the last reminder of a long-dead Republic, Scalia's words and principles will be seen as the body of work of a Judge sent by God to lift the ship of the Constitution up out of the swamp it had been dragged into and reset it on its proper course. ~~~~~ Justice Scalia taught the law, taught that it matters, taught that it is not to be confused under the US Constitution with the law-making power of Congress, taught that it is delivered to us by words, taught that those words do not bend or change or cease to have their meaning because of the whims and sensibilities of succeeding generations of politicians. The law for Scalia was likened to the Ten Commandments, written in stone and with meaning that time cannot and should not change. If the Constitution or a law is silent on an issue, then Scalia taught that the legislature should deal with that silence, if it chooses, but should not ask courts to intervene. That was Antonin Scalia's line in the sand between law and politics and he refused to cross it. ~~~~~ Near the end of his time on the Court, Justice Scalia was in the minority in landmark decisions on issues such as gay rights, which he condemned as “the practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine.” In his dissent to the Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges recognizing a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry, Justice Scalia summed up his objections to this and many decisions : "Hubris is sometimes defined as o’erweening pride; and pride, we know, goeth before a fall....With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them -- with each decision that is unabashedly based not on law, but on the ‘reasoned judgment’ of a bare majority of this Court -- we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence." ~~~~~ Dear readers, that impotence looms infinitely larger with the death of Justice Scalia. Who will replace him? No one. But, we who are conservatives of every party and in every nation that attempts the monumental task of governing by rule of law -- not by force or by preference of class or religion or color or ethnicity -- must pray and work to elect an American President who will not slide farther down that slippery slope toward a nation in which political elites reign by "right" over ever-enlarged chosen clusters of people semi-enslaved by elitist handouts and over worker clusters of people semi-enslaved by the tax burden required to keep the elite system in power. The world looks to America to be that beacon of rule of law. God has taken Antonin Scalia from us because, as the Justice often told us, it is time for us to find the strength he gave us, by his words and example, to stand and defend ourselves and our sacred Constitution. And still I weep.