While the comments from the prison litigation at the Supreme Court seem to indicate that California is headed for a loss, a more interesting side note was the patronizing remark from Justice Scalia to Justice Sotomayor:
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Well, the best interest of the State of California, isn’t it to deliver adequate constitutional care to the people that it incarcerates? That’s a constitutional obligation.
MR. PHILLIPS: Absolutely. And California recognizes that.
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: So when are you going to get to that? When are you going to avoid the needless deaths that were reported in this record? When are you going to avoid or get around people sitting in their feces for days in a dazed state? When are you going to get to a point where you are going to deliver care that is going to be adequate?
JUSTICE SCALIA: Don’t be rhetorical.
How dare she be concerned about people dying in their own feces? Check the audio at ThinkProgress.
It must be nice to always be right. To be smarter than everybody else you know. To be a member of the right club, class, color, gender, and faith. And to be so eager to shove it in everybody else’s face.
I’d really, really like to smack that man and, as my mother used to say, “wipe that smug look off his face.” Too bad his own mother didn’t do it years ago. The country would be a better place if she had.
Here are the certified questions:
http://www.supremecourt.gov/qp…
Clearly, Sotomayor was nowhere near them in her second question. Her first question is utterly incomprehensible.
I scanned the t-script. Kagen, who has far more legal acumen than Sotomayor, chided the appellant for trying to relitigate facts.
Kagen, Thomas, Scalia and Sotomayor owe their appointments, in part,to the fact that each allowed another demographic box to be checked.
Two can engage in legal analysis, two can’t. The only question I’ve got left is whether Sotomayor will “outdumb” Thomas. God, I miss reading Brennan.
Nevermind, I’m tired. Appellate stuff saps my soul.
Scalia only said that in response to Sotomayor’s telling Schwarzenegger’s lawyer to “slow down from the rhetoric” earlier in the argument. Justice Breyer made similarly passionate arguments about the state of California’s prisons and went unchallenged.
I’d say that Sotamayor WAS being rhetorical.
Unless Mr. Philips was obviously evading the question of “when”, I see no reason to scold him in that manner. The state of California certainly deserves to be shamed, but that job belongs to the plaintiffs, not the Justices.