Scalia and the Court

Whatever legal justifications may exist for the Scalia tapes incident, The incident is iconic of a judiciary which believes itself to be infallible and beyond question. The members of the Court continue to behave in a manner that resembles nothing so much as a council of haughty prelates.

Indeed, the Court is the true analogue of the papacy in America, both in terms of its relation to the Presidency, its relation to the American federal system as a whole, and its overall posture as a social-reforming moral authority eager in the wake of '37 to wash its hands of this-worldly economic matters.

And yet are not the powers and perogatives of the Court a fiction, blown up from the winds of imagination in Marbury just as the scope and action of the papacy were conjured up ex nihilo in Dictates Papae hundreds of years before? All of the anticlerical arguments in the history of the West can be made equally against this Court and the judiciary that it crowns . . . Protestants speak of the see of Rome as a cabal and a tyranny; they do not see the instant reality that we are all beholden to an American curia which interdicts us from justice, and righteousness, and from kissing the Son of Man?