Antonin Scalia and What Makes America Great

Below is a presentation by the late Antonin Scalia, two-decade-serving associate justice of the U.S. Supreme court until his death in 2016.  The subject: What makes America such a free country?

He concludes that it’s the separation of powers, especially, the independence of the judiciary, and the bipanel (House and Senate) legislature, which share (roughly) equal powers.

In truth, there is nothing wrong with what he said here; in fact, it’s entirely noncontroversial.

Where Scalia’s influence on our lives gets interesting lies in his belief in “originalism,” the concept that our laws are constitutional if and only if they conform to the explicit ideas that the founders had about them in the late 18th Century.

This makes subjects like the Second Amendment particularly troublesome.  The founders talk about the “right to bear arms, ” but they said nothing about limiting the right to own nuclear weapons, nor the right of mentally disturbed individuals to own weapons of modern-day warfare that are designed to wipe out dozens of people in a matter of a few seconds.

Originalism seems just an indefensible excuse to prohibit the use of reason and common sense that might have been applied to make progress toward a safer, saner, and more just American society.