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Day by day, case by case, the Supreme Court is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize.

Antonin Scalia

On this day, when we’re celebrating our constitutional heritage, I urge you to be faithful to that heritage – to impose on our fellow citizens only the restrictions that are there in the Constitution, not invent new ones, not to invent the right because it’s a good idea.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Celebration Constitution Day Faith Goodness Ideas Invention Restriction
A law can be both economic folly and constitutional.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Constitution Economics Law
If you’re going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you’re not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you’re probably doing something wrong.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Faith Goodness Judgement Reach Wrong
[If critics of the Pledge of Allegiance persuaded the public it should be changed] then we could eliminate under God from the Pledge of Allegiance, that could be democratically done.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Change Democracy Elimination God
Power tends to corrupt. But the power in Washington resides in Congress, if it wants to use it. It can do anything-it can stop the Vietnam War. It can make its will felt, if it can ever get its act together to do anything.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Corruption Politics Power Togetherness War Willing
As long as judges tinker with the Constitution to ‘do what the people want,’ instead of what the document actually commands, politicians who pick and confirm new federal judges will naturally want only those who agree with them politically.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Agreement Confirmation Constitution Document Judgement Politics Thinking
The wise do not investigate such silliness.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Investigation Silly Weird Wisdom
I think the main fight is to dissuade Americans from what the secularists are trying to persuade them to be true: that the separation of church and state means that the government cannot favor religion over nonreligion.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Fight Government Religion Thinking True
A journalistic purpose could be someone with a Xerox machine in a basement.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Basement Journey Machine Purpose
Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Act Case Lose Myself Principle Rule Save Short
But I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not on the streets of our cities.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Believe Hands Ourselves Soldier
Why in the world would you have it interpreted by nine lawyers?
ANTONIN SCALIA

Law World Yourself
Rather than rewriting the law under the pretense of interpreting it, the Court should have left it to Congress to decide what to do about the Act’s limitation of tax credits to state Exchanges.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Credit Decision exchange Law Limitation Tax Writing
The Court today completes the process of converting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from a guarantee that race or sex will not be the basis for often will.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Convert Guarantee Process Race Sex Willing
[The Freedom of Information Act is] the Taj Mahal of the Doctrine of Unanticipated Consequences, the Sistine Chapel of Cost-Benefit Analysis Ignored.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Benefit Consequence Cost Freedom Ignorance
A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Close Search Table
There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Constitution Crime Privacy Protection Realization
If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?
ANTONIN SCALIA

Feeling Moral Murder Sexuality
The principal purpose of stare decisis is to protect reliance interest and further stability in the law.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Interest Law Principle Protection Stability State
It would be gross understatement to say that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is not a model of clarity. It is in many important respects a model of ambiguity or indeed even self-contradiction.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Ambience Contradiction Model Respect Statement
The death penalty? Give me a break. It’s easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the constitution prevented restrictions on abortion. Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Absolution Break Criminal Death State
You could have 50 different states having 50 different regulations until they were all litigated out.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Different Regulation State Yourself
Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is “established by the State”.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Establishment Meaning State Word
The right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children is among the unalienable rights with which the Declaration of Independence proclaims ‘all Men are endowed by their Creator.’
ANTONIN SCALIA

Children Creation Independence Parents Right
Certainly one cannot ban cross burning in the sanctity of his bedroom.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Bed Burn Room Sanity
The attitude of people associating guns with nothing but crime, that is what has to be changed. I grew up at a time when people were not afraid of people with firearms.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Attitude Change Growth Myself People Weapon
The purpose of the Federalist Society was to bring together young people who had this skepticism about what they were being taught and to let them know that there were others who shared this skepticism.
ANTONIN SCALIA

Purpose Share Society Teaching

Day by day, case by case, the Supreme Court is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize.

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Day by day, case by case, the Supreme Court is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize.

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