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By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Justice Scalia Fandom | Law — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Justice Scalia was the subject of a 60 Minutes profile that was quite fair and exceedingly fascinating. You can check it out here. Read it all and check out the entire videocast. It is very well done.

The only thing that really made me groan was the portion where Justice Ginsburg argued that originalism meant that certain racial classes--along with women--are read out of the Constitution because that was the way the Framers wrote the Constitution. This is only the case if you do not consider the amendments that followed. And failing to consider the amendments that followed is silly beyond measure. The amendments, once ratified, are as much part of the Constitution as any of the sections written in by the Framers in 1787. It was the Framers, after all, who allowed for an amendment process in the first place and the reason that, say, we no longer adhere to the despicable practice of considering African-Americans as slaves, 3/5ths human or disenfranchised is because of the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, along with the enabling legislation that was passed by Congress and that enforces those Amendments. To say that originalism does not consider the amendments as part of the Constitution or that originalism does not give the amendments equal weight to those provisions of the Constitution that were written in and ratified in 1787 "cannot be taken seriously," as Justice Scalia said in another context.

While we are Scalia-watching, be sure to check out this video of a debate between the Justice and Nadine Strossen, President of the ACLU:

I give Strossen a lot of credit for engaging people with whom she disagrees; she is one of the most frequent speakers before panels and meetings of the Federalist Society. But it seems to me that Scalia gets the better of her in this debate.