The last days of a Supreme Court term rarely show off the Justices to great advantage. Like other mortals, they have put off doing their hardest work, so only the most controversial cases remain. They are tired. They are frustrated. By a vote of 6-3, they need haircuts. (Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan appear recently barbered; Stephen Breyer is bald.) But none of the usual end-of-year excuses explain the behavior in court yesterday of Antonin Scalia.

The Court issued a mixed verdict on the Arizona immigration law known as S.B. 1070. For a 5-3 majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion invalidated three provisions of the law as invasions of federal prerogatives; it also upheld the most controversial part of the law, the so-called “show us your papers” section. The decision was clearly a compromise, which drew the votes of such ideological opposites as Ginsburg and Chief Justice John Roberts; it also prompted both Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and President Obama to claim victory. One might criticize such a result as tepid or inconsistent, but the chorus of endorsers does suggest a reasonable accommodation of various views.

That was not how Scalia saw it. After twenty-five years on the Court, Scalia has earned a reputation for engaging in splenetic hyperbole—but he outdid himself this time. Scalia thought the Court should have approved S.B. 1070 in its entirety, but his opinion, which he read from the bench in his usual clear basso, ranged over several contemporary controversies, whether or not they had any relevance to the Arizona case. He noted, for example, that Obama recently used an executive order to accomplish some of the goals of the DREAM Act, and exempt certain young people from deportation. (This decision came well after the Arizona case was argued and was legally irrelevant to the issue at hand.) “The president said at a news conference that the new program is ‘the right thing to do’ in light of Congress’s failure to pass the administration’s proposed revision of the Immigration Act,” Scalia said. “Perhaps it is, though Arizona may not think so. But to say, as the Court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications of the Immigration Act that the President declines to enforce boggles the mind.” Scalia did not explain how declining to deport these individuals boggled his mind.

“The issue is a stark one,” he went on. “Are the sovereign states at the mercy of the federal executive’s refusal to enforce the nation’s immigration laws? A good way of answering that question is to ask: Would the states conceivably have entered into the union if the Constitution itself contained the court’s holding?” If this had been the original view of the Framers of the Constitution, “the delegates to the Grand Convention would have rushed to the exits from Independence Hall.” In other words, according to Scalia, if Arizona had known what was coming from his colleagues yesterday, they never would have joined the United States. No other state would have either. The Arizona ruling, in Scalia’s telling, would have destroyed the country even before it was born.

And what authority did Scalia cite for his broad conception of the role of the state? He went back into history to examine the role of states in policing immigration. He pointed out that

In the first 100 years of the Republic, the States enacted numerous laws restricting the immigration of certain classes of aliens, including convicted criminals, indigents, persons with contagious diseases, and (in Southern States) freed blacks. State laws not only provided for the removal of unwanted immigrants but also imposed penalties on unlawfully present aliens and those who aided their immigration.

It’s worth pausing to remember what kind of immigration the states (especially the Southern ones) handled in those bygone days; much of it had to do with slavery, of course. To be sure, Scalia is not endorsing slavery, but his invocation of that ugly chapter in American history suggests, at a minimum, a loss of perspective.

All the Justices, over the past quarter-century, have felt the sting of Scalia’s disapproval at one point or another. It bothers some of them. In her early days on the Court, Sandra Day O’Connor, as I wrote in “The Nine,” was wounded by Scalia’s nasty-grams. But over time, O’Connor learned to brush him off. She would say, “Oh, that’s just Nino.” Alas, it is.

Photograph by Bill Haber/AP Photo.