McCain's SCOTUS Model, Scalia, on Torture and "Cruel and Unusual Punishment"
Posted by Matt Ortega on April 28, 2008 at 03:45 PM
John McCain says that, if elected president, he would nominate Supreme Court justices in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito.
On the issue of appointments to the Supreme Court, McCain mentioned that Sam Brownback would play an advisory role in helping decide who he should nominate for the Supreme Court. As models of who he would select, John McCain pointed to Justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia.
In an appearance on CBS' 60 Minutes, Justice Scalia says that torture does not violate "cruel and unusual punishment."
Watch:
Think Progress notes:
Scalia’s parsing of the 8th Amendment blindly ignores reports showing that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was about humiliation and punishment, not information-gathering. In 2004, the Washington Post reported MPs involved in the abuse “said detainees were beaten and sexually humiliated as punishment or for fun.” A recent New Yorker profile of one of the soldiers there confirmed that “mostly what interrogators wanted when they asked for ’special treatment’ was punishment: take away his mattress, keep him awake, take away his clothes.”
Earlier this year, John McCain voted against a ban on waterboarding.
Comments (8) «
What an arrogant slime ball!!! The man should have been disbarred, not raised to the Supreme Court!!!
Can we impeach Supreme Court Justices???
This is sad and scary. I fear for the freedom of this country.
Democratic Party, PLEASE GET US OUT OF THIS MESS!
When a society has to debate the legality of torture, it has ceased to be civilized. Scalia is a symptom of a far more serious problem than any legality.
The country has turned down a road that will insure it's demise if we don't make a course correction soon. Instead of arguing about morals and values, governments should be fixing economic/trade problems and foreign policy blunders.
The longer we procrastinate, the bigger our problems get. It is the height of cowardice to hide behind legal arguments and religious or racial strife. Where have all the adults gone?
Can we impeach Supreme Court Justices???
Posted by Butte on April 28, 2008 at 05:17 PM
Butte,
Yes. But we need a Super Majority in Congress.
I had not planned on it, but I saw this interview and Scalia's comments regarding torture. I am horrified that someone on our Supreme Court could hold such a narrowly defined position on such an important issue. He clearly does not believe we have a constitutional protection from the secret police entering our homes and taking us away as that also is not punishment, just an enthusiastic investigation in the same way the current torture that ruins our national reputation was declared as "okay" because it is not punishment!
Such strict literal re-interpretation of language, the finer than fine hair splitting term parsing, the work of all those spin doctors, has no place in our courts. And definitely not on our highest court!
Whether or not their treatment is cruel and unusual is irrelevant for the simple reason that the captives are innocent.
Please take some more of the Republicans away. I feel fenced in by them and at their mercy to hang me.
I will be glad when we get some more Democrats in office and get a Democrat President in the WhiteHouse
No way, these men need to be permanently disbarred and never allowed to be on the Supreme Court ever and to impeach the judges that allow this to happen. Torture is wrong plain, simple and no matter what the circumstance is. I hope Bush and Cheney get life imprisonment if the international court tries them both because these two have broken numerous international laws as well as domestic laws. With all the laws these two have violated, they should never see the light of day ever again.
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