Supreme Court Dissenters Need to Rediscover Their Judicial Temperament
Nancy Wainwright
Alaska Dispatch News
July 1, 2015Summer recess can come none too soon for the U.S. Supreme Court—some of those folks clearly need a timeout.
The dissents of Justices Antonin Scalia and John Roberts to last week’s decision on the same-sex marriage for Obergefell v. Hodges removed any doubt these supposed judicial leaders of our society have fallen into “partisan rancor” that “impedes their ability to carry out their functions.” Ironically, those are the words of Chief Justice Roberts describing the dysfunction of Congress in a speech in 2014.
Scalia sounded like a petulant teenager when he said (because he didn’t like the reasoning of the majority of his colleagues) he would “hide his head in a bag” if he were to join in such an opinion of the court written by five of the nine top jurists in the country. And the learned Scalia wrote “Huh?” in his dissent — expressing his puzzlement with the majority ruling. “Huh” in a U.S. Supreme Court opinion?
Seriously?
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