The Liberal Gun Club Forum

WASHINGTON -- Do black students matter to Justice Antonin Scalia?

During oral arguments on Wednesday in Fisher v. University of Texas, a contentious affirmative action case, the conservative justice seemed to call their abilities into question.

"There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas, where they do not do well," Scalia said, "as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school ... a slower-track school where they do well."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ant ... n=politics

From other statements he has made in the past about women it is evident that he is a bigot. But to say such on record in the SCOTUS. Itis time the for the bigot to retire.

The MSM and political critters complain about Trump. He is not in office and a good chance he won't be el cited to be dog catcher. But Scalia should be called out cause he does hold one of the most important offices in th nation and can effect millions of people.

I wonder if he was looking at Justice Thomas when he said that.

I struggle to come up with a suitable pejorative that adequately describes my feelings about Nino.

I find this to be an acurate portrayal of what happened.

http://www.mediaite.com/online/media-ju ... -question/

First of all, it’s worth noting that oral arguments are not an avenue for justices to share their views on the case at hand; it’s an opportunity to suss out any holes in the arguments of both parties. To that end, justices often advance arguments and theories they do not necessarily hold. Take for example Chief Justice John Roberts‘ extremely harsh questioning of government lawyers in NFIB v. Burwell, even though he eventually voted to uphold the individual mandate anyways.

Arguing before the Supreme Court is a notoriously nerve-wracking experience, since justices try to find arguments and lines of attack attorneys would never consider. In this case, the transcript make it clear that Scalia was asking a question about a theory put forward by others, not himself:
...
Scalia isn’t citing some crackpot theory that only these two civil rights officers are worried about, by the way. The “mismatch effect” is a pretty common critique of affirmative action in academia that’s based on pretty hard data. The most prominent book on the subject wasn’t written by cranks, it was written by UCLA and Stanford law professors.

http://www.amazon.com/Mismatch-Affirmat ... 0465029965

Doesn't mean Scalia isn't a crank. But it's common for them to question the presenters harshly and pose different scenarios to them in order to try a crack their arguments.

Aww...why ruin a perfectly good smear job, inomaha?

If he had said "it does not benefit THESE African-Americans" perhaps he'd have attracted less attention. I'd be willing to believe that's what he meant, but if he cares about his public perception, he might wanna clarify that.

Twenty years ago, I wanted to take Spanish classes at the university at which I work, which in principle I could do for free, but it was difficult to find a class with space available. The first quarter, I was able to get into a night section. The second quarter, I could only get into a section that had an unusual section number indicating that it was for students with academic disadvantages or special admission or something. It was a bit of a disaster. Most of the students had poor attendance (almost as bad as mine as a freshmen, with probably WAY more reasons not to make it to 8 AM class than I'd had) which makes it hard to keep up in a language class, but a few were clearly out of their league academically in a major way. One guy said "this is too hard" when we were paired up in some basic drill of saying a few words to each other, which basically required that you had learned ANYTHING in the first quarter. It seemed immediately apparent that he had zero chance of making it through four years at the state's flagship university unless they gave him breaks that would make a football coach blush. I sure hope he wasn't going into any debt for school, because that would have been cruel.

Based on that experience, I'm going, for once, to have to cut Scalia just a modicum of slack.

Yeah, what Inomaha said.

In university I took courses in Constitutional law and did Supreme Court mock trials. The professor had us read transcripts of oral arguments and listen to recordings of some (this was before they were made publicly available, not sure how she pulled it off). And it is sometimes surprising what the actual opinion written by the judge is after the questions and challenges he/she raised.

Sometimes I think they try to goad the attorneys into admitting something that would be damaging to their case, or to pick away at the rhetoric to uncover the real purpose of the advocates.

I have no idea if this is what Scalia is actually doing in that exchange. However we can't really know unless that sort of reasoning appears in an opinion/dissent he submits.