Antonin Scalia Instructs

Nina Totenberg has an interview with the "charming" and "voluble" Antonin Scalia this morning,  in which he tells about being assigned to write an opinion about some case but he finds "the law just wasn't there" and he has to write the opinion in the opposite direction, because, as he examines the law, he finds the decision just has to be the opposite of what he originally thought it should be.
This is the most transparent attempt at dissembling.
This is story addresses the very most telling criticism of the court--that the four horsemen of conservative persuasion, the Republican court, which usually includes Anthony Kennedy as the deciding 5th vote, decides cases with any significant social content on the basis of their conservative instinct to deny the powerless any redress of grievance and to decide in favor of authority and vested power.
"The law," has nothing to do with it.
"The law" is simply their excuse.
The ruse is that they sit down and struggle with the sacred texts and these impartial justices just get dragged they know not where--through no fault of their own, to a decision they cannot resist.
The fact is, these justices (Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Kennedy) know exactly where they are going as soon as they hear the first sentence of the description of the case--they are going toward the powerful and against the powerless.
The most egregious example is the strip search case in which the power of jailers to "defend" themselves against the possibility of missing an armed prisoner, who is handcuffed, but possibly concealing a knife in her vagina or his rectum, over rides the protection against unreasonable search. 
There are, of course other examples--the right of the rich to grab the microphone and to command the discussion by simply having more money to spend on mass communications (which our 18th century founders could hardly have imagined) and, of course, my favorite, the Bong Hits for Jesus case, in which a high school student whose instinct was to rebel against his school principal who ordered her students to act as dummy props for the unconscionably jingoistic and commercialized enterprise of the Olympics--during a parade of "the torch" which ran down the road by the school. The justices found that any sort of resistance to this whole fiasco was insufferable and deserved to be suppressed, free speech notwithstanding.
But, oh, the law. The law guides its humble servant, Justice Scalia, he knows not where.
Justice Scalia, the master of mumbo jumbo, along with the rest of this black gowned lot, those high priests, who invoke the sacred text, The Constitution, as if it were engraved in stone tablets, handed down from the Mount, and they mumble words in Latin and are listening to the words tumbling off the lips of gods, and carrying out the orders of their superiors.