Scalia Can No Longer Call Himself an Originalist

As I blogged last week, the Supreme Court didn’t seem amenable to Privileges or Immunities Clause arguments in last week’s gun rights case, McDonald v. Chicago. This is unfortunate because the alternative, extending the right to keep and bear arms via the Due Process Clause, continues a long-time deviation from constitutional text, history, and structure, and reinforces the idea that judges enforce only those rights they deem “fundamental” (whatever that means).

It was especially disconcerting to see Justice Antonin Scalia, the standard-bearer for originalism, give up on his own preferred method of interpretation — and for the sole reason that it was intellectually “easier” to use the “substantive due process” doctrine.

Josh Blackman and I have an op-ed in the Washington Examiner pointing out Scalia’s hypocrisy. Here’s a choice excerpt:

Without the Privileges or Immunities Clause … the Court must continue
extending the un-originalist version of substantive due process to protect the
right to keep and bear arms. To give original meaning to the Second Amendment,
it must ignore the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment!

Yet this is the line Scalia took last week: Instead of accepting the plain
meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause—which uncontrovertibly protects
the right to keep and bear arms—the justice chose a route that avoids disturbing
a 140-year-old precedent rejected by legal scholars of all ideological
stripes.

In 2008, Scalia wrote, “It is no easy task to wean the public, the
professoriate, and (especially) the judiciary away from [living
constitutionalism,] a seductive and judge-empowering philosophy.” But at the
arguments in McDonald, he argued that while the Privileges or Immunities Clause
“is the darling of the professoriate,” he would prefer to follow substantive due
process, in which he has now “acquiesced,” “as much as [he] think[s it is]
wrong.”

Put simply, if the opinion Scalia writes or joins matches his performance last week, he can no longer be described as an originalist (faint-hearted or otherwise). A liberty-seeking world turns its weary eyes to Justice Clarence Thomas — who has expressed an openness to reviving the constitutional order the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to create — to convince his wayward colleague that the way to interpret legal text is to look to its original public meaning.

Read the whole thing. CP: Cato's blog