Colorado's On Fire

Scalia Agonistes?

I don't really know what that means exactly, but it seemed appropriate and was in my head from a piece on T.S. Eliot I read yesterday.
Anyhoo, so I sent this email to TPM this morning speculating that Roberts had to take control of the court, that if this decision went Scalia's way, he would be effectively the Chief Justice.
Then, an Andrew Sullivan reader threw this into the mix. Wow. Just wow.

There's something quite odd in my view about the Scalia opinion in the back. It's not a Scalia rant by and large; in fact it reads at the outset rather majestically, like he's delivering the opinion of the court. Even more strangely, it refers repeatedly to the "Ginsburg dissent," but Ginsburg is in the majority on most issues. What's all this about? Were the tables turned midway? Did Roberts first sign on to Scalia's opinion and then bail on him? Is that what Ginsburg was ribbing Scalia over in her ACS remarks? I suspect there is an amazing an untold backroom story behind this decision. It may be a while before we learn it. But the sense I have is that Scalia had the votes to take a sledgehammer to ACA, and then lost Roberts. Was it Scalia's overreaching and his overheated rhetoric that did him in? This may make an excellent Supreme Court mystery. But it points in the end to the complicated and rather ornery personality of Nino Scalia as a real burden for the court's conservatives.

I haven't read the opinions and probably won't, I like reading opinions about opinions. But, wow.

House To Try To Repeal ACA. Again

You heard it here first. Politico says the House will take another vote to repeal the ACA on July 9. That's fine. I don't even remember how it went. I think it lost. But I think it's great. I predict it will be a "reverse Wisconsin."
What most voters know is simply that the Supreme Court ruled, case closed, move on. If their House members can't get past it, they'll lose some important seats, maybe the full 25 it takes to reverse the balance. Democratic candidates will wrap the repeal vote around their necks and strangle them. Then drag them over to the bathtub to finish the job, eh Grover?
Of course, that's what I want to believe. I donated a small sum to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee yesterday. Made me feel good.

Headline O' Teh Day

SCOTUS ACA Decision: Take That You Zombies!
TGOP heads exploding across America. What a concept, what execution, coming soon to a voting booth near you. I'm up to my ankles in gore already. Back to you, Walter.

The Auld Sod

(Note to loyalists: I'm sorry I've been so lax. I was afraid for awhile I'd lost interest. But I think it was just indigestion.)
On to Edmond Burke, whose writing I once recommended to a drunken bar manager calling himself a conservative though I, of course, have never read anything by Burke except the occasional apt quote. This part of a piece on Burke just struck home not because of him, but because of the sheer brutality of life in the 18th Century.

On the January day he was born Éamon de Búrca, in the old tongue, in 1729, on Arran Quay on the River Liffey in Dublin, the English penal laws forbade Catholics from holding public office, marrying Protestants, owning weapons, serving in the military or as a lawyer or judge, voting, receiving public education of any sort or redress from arrest without cause by a representative of the king, purchasing land, inheriting land from Protestants, leasing land for more than 31 years, owning a horse worth more than five pounds, speaking their native Irish language, and building churches. (In the few cases where churches were allowed to be built, imperial law forbade the use of stone.)