About the Supreme Court's "immigration decusuib" -- and Justice Nino's freak-out. Plus: UVa President Terry Sullivan is reinstated!

-- from a WaPo e-newsletter this morning

by Ken

No, I don't want to talk about immigration, at least not right now. I'm more concerned about this "decusuib" the Supreme Court has somehow gotten itself mixed up with.

My first thought was that it's that damned Scalia, showing off how smart he think he is with some goddamn mysterious . . . I don't know what, Latin? My Latin isn't so good, but "decu-" sounded like a Latin prefix that had taken a wrong turn, and ditto "suib" at the root or suffix end. Or maybe it's "Slow Anthony" Kennedy, who must surely know how smart he isn't and is maybe putting on airs in an attempt at cover-up? Then again, I wouldn't put anything past the Court's very own slickster-in-chief, "Smirkin' John" Roberts.

A lot of Latin gets thrown around Supreme Court business, where stare decisis probably finds its way onto the lunch order. (It sure doesn't seem to find its way into deliberations anymore, notwithstanding the crossed-fingers testimony Smirkin' John and "Sammy the Hammer" Alito served up at their confirmation hearings -- those kidders!) Still, I was surprised that the boys and girls at washingtonpost.com thought everyone would be so familiar with decusuibs as to require no explanation.

Until I realized that it's actually something I do all the time -- the right hand perched over the keyboard a whole character too far to the left. Actually, I usually do it in the opposite direction, the computer keyboard having grown so large that my right hand often seems instinctively to land too far to the right. When I've done that a few times is when I'm most likely to overcorrect and land the right hand too far to the left, thereby producing whole sentences made up of words often more mysterious as decusuib. It can look very puzzling indeed when words formed mostly or entirely of left-hand letters butt up against right-hand weirdnesses.



FOOTNOTE: JUSTICE NINO THROWS
ONE OF HIS PATENTED TANTRUMS

One person who's clearly no fan of the Supreme Court immigration decusuib is the Court's own beached blimp, Justice Nino "I'll Huff and I'll Puff and I'll Blow Your House Down" Scalia. As I've pointed out here countless times, one of this loathsome blowhard's two life achievements is creating the reputation for having a "great legal mind." Unfortunately he's exposed himself all too clearly in his quarter-century-plus as a disgrace to our highest court -- not just as having a poorer legal mind than your pet schnauzer for as being even more savage than he is imbecilic. (In case you're wondering what I'm rating as his other life achievement, that would be befouling the Supreme Court for that quarter-century-plus and doing perhaps more than any other individual ever has to undermine not just American justice but American decency.

And yet the doodysack continues to top himself. As Jeffrey Toobin reports in a newyorker.com blogpost, "That's Just Nino: Scalia's Arizona dissent," Doodyman was in high dudgeon over his dim-bulb colleagues' failure to uphold the whole of the Arizona immigrant-bashing law. After noting that "the last days of a Supreme Court term rarely show off the Justices to great advantage" and that Superturd "has earned a reputation for engaging in splenetic hyperbole," "but he outdid himself this time."

[H]is 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.

When Superturd gets around to noting that "in the first 100 years of the Republic, the States enacted numerous laws restricting the immigration of certain classes of aliens, and includes in his list Southern states' restrictions on freed blacks, Toobin notes, "It's worth remembering what kind of immigration the states (especially Southern ones) handled in those bygone days; much of it had to do with slavery, of course."

Toobin concludes with a stroll of his own down memory lane.

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.

BREAKING NEWS: OUSTED U. OF VIRGINIA PRESIDENT
TERRY SULLIVAN IS REINSTATED

"Sullivan had signaled to the board prior to her ouster that she advocated 'incremental' change -- not the bold, swift steps advocated by others such as Rector Helen Dragas, the driving force behind efforts to replace her."
-- from the AP report this evening of the UVa Board of Visitors' unanimous reinstatement of President Sullivan

Man, how do they get away with this crap? Is it any wonder that no one with a lick of interest in journalism takes the Associated Press seriously anymore?

About these famous "bold, swift steps advocated by others such as Rector Helen Dragas," to which now-reinstated President Sullivan was the impediment. As I've kept writing, name one goddamn frigging "bold, swift" step advocated by any of the crowd of scum that now has egg all over its collective face because of the stupidly Stalinist way they engineered Sullivan's ouster.

The closest we have to anything at all actually advocated by Dragas and her verminous coconspirators is their frequent muttering about some delusionally imagined bonanza from peddling phony-baloney online certificates, something that's not only demeaning to the university but indicative of gross financial incompetence. Really, if you're that stupid, you should be hiding out in a cave somewhere, not dictating policy for a major university.

Which is not to say that UVa shouldn't be looking at its online presence. But any dimwit who imagines there are riches in store there, as I've said before, should be barred from any input into the running of any school in the state.

So why is the AP passing on this egregious nonsense? I suspect because at heart it has nothing to fall back on except a set of mind-circumventing knee-jerk right-wing reflexes.

It's probably not entirely the fault of the anonymous AP "reporter" that the fairly length report contains vritually no actual news beyond the board's unanimous vote to reinstate and President Sullivan's victory statement: "'I want to partner with you in bringing about what's best for the university,' she said as cheers erupted from supporters who had gathered outside the Rotunda." Not entirely their fault because clearly nobody directly involved is talking about the actual terms of the reinstatement.

You can be sure that none of the cabalists has retreated from his/her delusional position about "incremental" vs. "radical" change. Which is why it's disappointing that one term of the reinstatement wasn't the resignation of all members of the UVa Board of Visitors who participated in the putsch, who are clearly both dangerous sociopaths and educational and administrative incompetents.

Instead, today's smilefest seems clearly to be an exercise in saving face after the rudely public display of administrative ineptitude. Whether there's anyone on the job with a grain of competence to address the university's future seems as dubious as it's been since the original coup. The right-wing mentality behind the whole exercise has shown itself incapable of actually learning. And yes, Governor Bob pressed hard for a "settlement." Not because he has a clue about the issues, or gives a damn about the university, but because it was so frigging humiliating, and at the top of the news in Virginia every frigging day.

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