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Originally Posted by DuckieTigger
Wow. The late Scalia your hero. The fallacy you are trying to use against us is trying to make us think that Scalia's opinion on how the Constitution should be interpreted ias how it is done "in real life."
But then, of course, you should know that he didn't follow what he preaches. He did whatever was necessary to push his own agenda - whether that be in the best interest of the people or not.
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Not really true, Thomas is a bit closer to my beliefs than Scalia was, but I do think that Judge Scalia was in a better position to know how the legal system in the US works than most here.
Scalia was a textualist, which meant that he tried to apply the law as written. On the flip side, he was a bit more of a follower of stare decisis (let the decision stand, the legal doctrine that one should refrain from disturbing a settled point of law, even if the decision was wrong) than I like.
One should not simply conclude that if one disagrees with you that they have bad intentions. Most of Scalia's decisions were based on one of those two principles.
Most people point to the 1990 decision, Employment Division v. Smith where Scala wrote the majority decision as the decision where Scalia did not "practice what he preaches". That case has been analyzed many times. I'm not a big fan of the result of the decision, I'm a bit more of a libertarian than that, but as Scalia said, just because something is bad policy doesn't make it unconstitutional. The idea that one can restrict certain activities that are associated with a given religion is commonly accepted. None of the Constitutional freedoms are absolute. The question is where do you draw the line.