Here's the deal. I think Justice Antonin Scalia isn't even really trying any more. It's been clear for some time now that he's short-timing his job on the Supreme Court. The job bores him. All these inferior intellects coming before him. All those inferior intellects on the bench with him, now with some other Catholics who aren't even as Catholic as he is, Scalia being the last living delegate who attended the Council of Trent. Inferior Catholics with inferior minds. What can a fellow do? He hung in there as long as he could, but he's now bringing Not Giving A Fuck to an almost operatic level.

His "originalism" was always a shuck, even if it was consistent, which it rarely was, and even if it was principled, which it never was. Bush v. Gore was proof enough of that. More often, it was just an excuse for Scalia to be an arrogant bully to the people appearing before him, and to the clients out in the world that those people were representing, most of whom were unworthy of the time that Scalia and his mighty mind had to devote to their petty little grievances. But at least, for a while, he actually tried to act like a judge in a democratic republic, and not the lost Medici pope. Reports pop up periodically that he's bored, that he's unsatisfied, that he knows he'll never be Chief, so he'd rather just chuck it all and go teach, and write, and flip off the occasional tabloid reporter. Now, though, it appears that the man has pretty much checked out without going through the formality of resigning from the bench.

It is plain now that Scalia simply doesn't like the Affordable Care Act on its face. It has nothing to do with "originalism," or the Commerce Clause, or anything else. He doesn't think that the people who would benefit from the law deserve to have a law that benefits them. On Tuesday, he pursued the absurd "broccoli" analogy to the point where he sounded like a micro-rated evening-drive talk-show host from a dust-clotted station in southern Oklahoma. And today, apparently, he ran through every twist and turn in the act's baroque political history in an attempt to discredit the law politically, rather than as a challenge to its constitutionality. (What in hell does the "Cornhusker Kickback" — yet another term of art that the Justice borrowed from the AM radio dial — have to do with the severability argument? Is Scalia seriously making the case that a banal political compromise within the negotiations from which bill eventually is produced can affect its ultimate constitutionality? Good luck ever getting anything passed if that's the standard.) He's really just a heckler at this point. If he can't do any better than that, he's right. Being on the court is a waste of his time.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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