Why is everyone just jumping ugly on Justice Nino "Loop-de-loop" Scalia for his big booboo? After all, Justice Clarence AGREED with him

Maybe it comes down to this: Who's the bigger dope, the clown who makes the colossal legal booboo (left) or the one who says, "That goes for me too" (right)?

by Ken

I'm grateful to Daily Kos's Pollwatcher for calling my attention to the story, but I have to take exception with the headline "Uh-Oh, Scalia Screws Up Royally. Time To Retire." Oh, I'm not disagreeing with the part about Justice Nino screwing up royally. That's true and hilarious. I just don't see why he should think about retiring. Just because of the suggestion that he's lost his marbles?

What marbles? He once had marbles?

In between gnashing and cursing, Justice Nino is probably expostulating:

What the eff? So I screwed up the case citation, and maybe got my ruling backwards, or maybe I got my other ruling backwards, or -- who knows? -- maybe both. But it's not as if this Supreme Court-ing is about petty stuff like laws and facts. It's about your gut, knowing in your gut what a crack-addled right-wing mental defective would say about a particular case. The whole time I've been on the Court -- what is it now, 60 years? 70 years? -- I've never let laws and facts get in the way of my gut. It's all a matter of knowing which way your knee jerks. Every time I've voted or written an opinion, I've pulled it all out of my stinking butt.

In case you're coming in late, this is all about a ruling Howie wrote about yesterday ("Koch Brothers' War Against America Sufferes A Setback In The Supreme Court"). Here's how TPM's Sahil Kapur explains, in "Justice Scalia Makes Epic Blunder In Supreme Court Opinion":

It's not often that a Supreme Court justice makes a factual blunder in a formal opinion.

Legal experts say Justice Antonin Scalia erred in his dissent in the 6-2 decision Tuesday to uphold the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to regulate coal pollution that moves across state lines. The Reagan-appointed jurist argued that the majority's decision was inconsistent with a unanimous 2001 ruling which he mistakenly said shot down EPA efforts to consider costs when setting regulations.

"This is not the first time EPA has sought to convert the Clean Air Act into a mandate for cost-effective regulation. Whitman v. American Trucking Assns., Inc., 531 U. S. 457 (2001), confronted EPA's contention that it could consider costs in setting [National Ambient Air Quality Standards]," Scalia wrote in his dissent, which was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.

The problem: the EPA's position in the 2001 case was exactly the opposite. The agency was defending its refusal to consider cost as a counter-weight to health benefits when setting certain air quality standards. It was the trucking industry that wanted the EPA to factor in cost. The 9-0 ruling sided with the EPA. The author of the ruling that Scalia mischaracterized? Scalia himself.

The conservative justice's error was noted by University of California-Berkeley law professor Dan Farber, who called it "embarrassing" and a "cringeworthy blunder."

"Scalia’s dissent also contains a hugely embarrassing mistake. He refers to the Court’s earlier decision in American Trucking as involving an effort by EPA to smuggle cost considerations into the statute. But that’s exactly backwards: it was industry that argued for cost considerations and EPA that resisted," Farber wrote on the environmental law and policy blog Legal Planet.

For cost considerations, against cost considerations, clean air, schmutzy air -- who can keep track of it all? The important thing is, when Justice Loop-de-loop is writing one of his stinging dissents, that everyone know he's mad as hell and he's not going to put up with it anymore. And always we make sure that the American Corporate Elites are having their private parts licked to a faretheewell.

Okay, you're maybe saying, but we wanna hear Justice Loop-de-loop dumped on some more. Fair enough. He's more of what Sahil Kapur quotes that Berkeley law dude Dan Farber saying:

This gaffe is doubly embarrassing because Scalia wrote the opinion in the case, so he should surely remember which side won! Either some law clerk made the mistake and Scalia failed to read his own dissent carefully enough, or he simply forgot the basics of the earlier case and his clerks failed to correct him. Either way, it's a cringeworthy blunder.

Then there's this fellow Doug Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, which has all the earmarks of some group of commie-socialist legal troublemakers. Sahil has this clown saying:

It is a mind-blowing misstatement of a basic fact of the American Trucking Association ruling which Justice Scalia himself wrote. And it's not just a stray passage -- it's the basis for an entire section of the dissent. It is very unusual to see a passage that so clearly misstates the fundamental facts of a prior ruling, especially one written by the justice himself.

Oh, misstates-shmistates! The important point is, Justice Loop-de-loop thinks those other six justices are sniveling dopes. Is that not perfectly clear? Does anything else matter?

Well, maybe just a bit, for the official record. Later yesterday morning TPM added an update:

As of Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court has corrected Scalia's opinion. The relevant passage now excludes his erroneous mention of the EPA and replaces the header with a new one that drops an EPA reference.

The new passage reads as follows: "This is not the first time parties have sought to convert the Clean Air Act into a mandate for cost-effective regulation. Whitman v. American Trucking Assns., Inc., 531 U. S. 457 (2001), confronted the contention that EPA should consider costs in setting NAAQS."

The old header was, "Plus Ça Change: EPA’s Continuing Quest for Cost-Benefit Authority." The new one reads, "Our Precedent."

The case is EPA v. Homer City Generation. The original opinion -- before the corrections -- is available below.

EPA v. Homer

But the other six justices -- remember, that includes Chief Justice Smirkin' John Roberts (Sammy "The Hammer" Alito played dead on this case) -- are still sniveling dopes. So there.

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