Thoughts on Scalia: Conspiracy and Consistency

When my husband came home yesterday afternoon, he asked me if I'd heard that there's now suspicion as to whether Supreme Court Justice Antonin "Nino" Scalia died of natural causes. I began typing "Scalia death" in Google on my phone.

"Oh," I said, "apparently the conspiracy theory is that he was smothered with a pillow."

It appears that in one interview the owner of the ranch where Justice Scalia was found dead said that Justice Scalia was found "with a pillow over his head." Add to that a Texas law which allows justices of the peace to declare cause of death without seeing the body, a family who turned down an autopsy, and a picture of the ranch owner shaking hands with President Obama, and you've got a conspiracy theory on your hands.

For the record, I actually know a dude who sleeps with a pillow on his face.

Mother Jones has an excellent guide to the assassination theories. I haven't seen anyone try to suggest that he arranged his own death yet, so I'm going to have a go at it.

Let's say that, knowing he wasn't in the best of health and was at risk of dying in the foreseeable future, Justice Scalia decided to make a sacrifice. After retreating to a remote area where records would necessarily be sketchy, he arranged to die peacefully, but with just enough suspicious circumstances to get people talking. This will drive conservative conspiracy theorists to the polls when they otherwise may not vote, and tip the presidential vote in the conservatives' favor.

Or how about this? Justice Scalia's arranged his own death in a manner similar to the above, but instead for the purpose of distracting attention from some nefarious conservative scheme (insert secondary conspiracy theory here).

My personal theory, though? Scalia was an elderly man not in the best of health who died at a pretty reasonable time under pretty reasonable circumstances. May he rest in peace.

The funny thing is that some of the outrage is directed at the fact that a Justice of the Peace was allowed to declare the cause of death without seeing the body. That's due to state and local law, i.e., Federalism principles. I'd like to ask the murder conspiracy wingnuts what they would like to be the response to that. Should the Feds step in and review every locality's regulations regarding death investigations? I hear Scalia argle-bargling from his grave at that suggestion.

Or maybe not. Just over a decade ago, the United States Supreme Court decided Gonzales v. Raich. It was a "strange bedfellows" case, with Justice Scalia joining the lib parade of Ginsburg, Stevens, Souter, and Breyer (plus Kennedy) to rule that the Federal Government had authority under the Commerce Clause to prohibit medical marijuana in California despite California's state law permitting such use.

Justice Scalia filed a concurrence in the case, which reads as an extremely confusing gymnastic interpretation of the Commerce Clause in combination with the Necessary and Proper Clause that somehow allows the Feds to get involved when it's OMG MARIJUANA as opposed to, say, cupcakes for a gay wedding. I think Justice Scalia's dissent is jiggery-pokery sleight-of-hand meant to distract from the fact that he voted one hundred eighty degrees from his stated principles.

I don't consider this some major revelation or anything; it has just bugged me since I learned about it as a first year law student. It has always caused me to twitch when people talked about his principled conservatism.

I'm sure those who loved him are sad, and I feel bad for them. I won't miss him on the Supreme Court, and I hope his successor has little in common with him. I am fascinated to continue to watch how The Death of Antonin Scalia affects the upcoming elections. Thoughts and theories? Discuss in the comments.