Remember: Scalia Was a Corporate Life Raft Who Hated Science

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

29 February 16

And his destructive legacy goes way beyond basic human rights.

ell, it's Monday, so that means the quality of political debate will rise again because Young Marco Rubio's new crew of speechwriters will have to be at school early for first-period gym.

The moonpie crossfire in the candidate's cafeteria has obscured even the importance of this election to the future of the Supreme Court, which is still down a justice since the death of Antonin Scalia. (As we noted yesterday, Tailgunner Ted Cruz is the exception. He thinks Judge Dread is coming to make him gay-marry a gun-grabbing abortionist who vandalizes tombstones in his spare time.) However, when nobody was looking, the loss of Scalia has had one whopping (and, I would argue, quite positive) consequence. It scared the bejesus out of Dow Chemical.

Dow, the largest U.S. chemical maker by sales, said Friday the accord will resolve its challenges to a $1.06 billion award to purchasers of compounds for urethanes, chemicals used to make foam upholstery for furniture and plastic walls in refrigerators. The Midland, Michigan-based company disputed a jury's finding it had conspired with four other chemical makers to fix urethane prices and asked the Supreme Court to take the class-action case on appeal. Scalia, one of the court's most conservative members, had voted to scale back the reach of such group suits. "Growing political uncertainties due to recent events with the Supreme Court and increased likelihood for unfavorable outcomes for business involved in class-action suits have changed Dow's risk assessment of the situation," the company said in an e-mailed statement.

No kidding. Get out the checkbook, gang. Keep writing zeroes until I tell you to stop.

Scalia wrote the 5-4 ruling in 2011 that said Wal-Mart Stores Inc. couldn't be sued by potentially a million female workers. Two years later, Scalia was the author of a 5-4 ruling that freed Comcast Corp. from having to defend against an $875 million antitrust lawsuit on behalf of Philadelphia-area customers. "Class-actions is one of the areas where Justice Scalia's absence is likely to have an impact," said Gregory Garre, an appellate lawyer at Latham & Watkins in Washington and previously President George W. Bush's top Supreme Court lawyer. "Companies will have to be careful what they ask for in seeking review, or at least face an added burden in prevailing at the court on class-action issues."

He was reliably a goon on most human rights and criminal-justice issues. But Scalia's legacy as a corporate life raft is sadly unexamined. If you think that the Republican intransigence on this issue is strictly a matter of being against anything the president supports, or that it's strictly a matter of loony constitutional theorizing, you're missing half the picture. They're stalling because the people who write them the checks need a reliable Supreme Court so that they can make more money and write more checks. Scalia was someone they could count on. He also was extraordinarily strange in many ways.

Antonin Scalia generally detested science. It threatened everything he believed in. He refused to join a recent Supreme Court opinion about DNA testing because it presented the details of textbook molecular biology as fact. He could not join because he did not know such things to be true, he said. (On the other hand, he knew all about the eighteenth century. History books were trustworthy; science books were not.) Scientists should be listened to only if they supported conservative causes, for example dubious studies purporting to demonstrate that same-sex parenting is harmful to children. Scientists were also good if they helped create technologies he liked, such as oil drills and deadly weapons.

It's not all about dick jokes. In a country founded by people as driven to explain the physical world around them as they were driven to reconceive the relationship of governments to the people, in a country dedicated to the empirical rules of evidence in conjunction with the rule of law, it's also about how we choose, as a self-governing people, to view the world.