In 2009 he explained his understanding of the role of a justice in these words:
“We don’t sit here to make the law, to decide who ought to win. We decide who wins under the law that the people have adopted. And very often, if you’re a good judge, you don’t really like the result you’re reaching.”
He was often a beacon of moral clarity. He once advised college students that they should understand a law higher than their own consciences. “More important than your obligation to follow your conscience,” he warned, “or at least prior to it, is your obligation to form your conscience correctly.”
History will record that Antonin Scalia influenced an entire generation of judges and justices and legal theorists. After Scalia, no one could ignore the originalist argument, even if they rejected it. But, at the same time, history may record Scalia’s brilliant effort as a failed project. The political reality is that we are unlikely again to see the appointment and confirmation of an originalist and constitutionalist like Antonin Scalia in the foreseeable future. President Barack Obama, a pronounced advocate of the progressivist cause, is almost sure to nominate a liberal to the vacancy. The Senate, which bears the responsibility to advise and consent, is unlikely to confirm that nominee, given the fact that this is an election year and the Senate is so split along partisan lines.
This sets up a battle royal between Republicans and Democrats in the Senate and beyond. The implications for the 2016 presidential race are urgent and explosive. Given the Supreme Court’s central role in almost every American controversy—part of the inheritance of the progressivist agenda—the future of the Court will be central to the presidential election. It has to be. The stakes for the nation are so very high. Antonin Scalia will be dearly missed and he may be virtually impossible to replace.
Christians must also remember that Justice Scalia’s understanding of the proper reading of the Constitution as a text is directly relevant to the church’s proper reading of Scripture. The same liberal theorists who propose reading the Constitution as a “living” and “evolving” text also propose that the Bible be liberated from its actual text and from the intention of its authors. Ultimately, this approach to the Bible, common to theological liberalism, denies the authority of God as the ultimate author of the Scriptures. It is no accident that liberal theology and liberal theories of the constitution emerged together in American public life.
Scalia’s worldview was shaped by his Roman Catholic faith, and he often scandalized liberals by making clear that he believed in the virgin birth and bodily resurrection of Christ and threw their unbelief back at them:
“For the Son of God to be born of a virgin? I mean really. To believe that he rose from the dead and bodily ascended into heaven. How utterly ridiculous.”
