Gonzales v. Raich

According to Scalia, capital punishment is not “cruel and unusual” because all Americans are Christians. Which implies: nothing which happens before our deaths is of any significance.

I can respect his commitment to reading the damn law and ruling on that, rather than making things up because that’s what he believes the law should say.

You should familiarize yourself with Scalia's past opinions. He's actually really good at making stuff up and being inconsistent and just generally ruling from his (white conservative catholic) bias. He's not some bastion of objectivity. He's an opinionated human being, just like everyone else on the bench.

Reagan’s generation viewed Italians with a lot of suspicion. My grandmother (a generation younger than him) recalled that in the 50s and even into the 60s, in her midwest area they called Italians “garlic-eaters” and found spaghetti to be completely exotic.

Yeah, or like Gonzales v. Raich where he ruled that non-interstate, non-commerce activities were regulated by the Interstate Commerce Clause.

It really was fairly progressive. I am like 1/3 Italian-American and my stepmother refers to me being angry as my “Eyetalian roots showing.” I was an infant when Reagan was elected but as a little kid I remember people referring to Scalia as the “dago wop.”

“You have to have someone willing to be a dick about what the law actually says.”

Scalia was the first Italian-American appointed (2nd was Alito) and the 8th Roman Catholic. With that context, the affirmitative action “Let’s get a person of Italian extraction” makes a lot of sense. It was a great way to appeal to a large group of conservatives.

Seriously, she is the salve for this sucking wound of a judge.

They are actually really good friends (not making this up). They “frequently dine and vacation together...”

Also look up the rhetoric in the south when Mario Cuomo was deciding to run for president. “We don’t want the Godfather in the white House” Yeah, this country.

I don’t think it’s so much that Italian-Americans were oppressed as that working-class urban Catholics traditionally vote Democrat, and outreach to that segment helped produce so-called “Reagan Democrats.”

For a long time, Italian-Americans/Sicilians were barely considered white, along with Jews, Poles, and - before and during the Civil War era - the Irish. They were suspiciously ethnicky, not to mention Catholic. In fact, the first television show to really embrace Irish Catholic culture was the soap Ryan's Hope in the…

No joke - a lot of people of northern European descent honestly think Italians are slightly-less-brown brown people. This was more openly talked about in the 1800s but even today there are WASPy people who consider ethnic-looking Italians to be functionally equivalent to middle easterners.

Probably something like this...

There’s no doubt that Scalia has a fine legal mind

This is the problem with these people. They never recognize that they aren’t self-made. Zero humility.

I wish cameras were allowed, so we could see RBG’s face while he was making all those remarks.

Wow! I had no idea.