Bush's Favorite Justice

[stdesjardins]

Antonin Scalia doesn't actually say he's in favor of keeping the handicapped out of polling places, he just says it's all right: "An inaccessible voting place means nothing at all. It merely means the state didn't go out of its way to accommodate the handicapped." Rehnquist thinks it would only be voting discrimination if "a person is not allowed to vote, as opposed to not being facilitated in being allowed to vote." I hadn't heard being allowed in the building called "facilitation" before.

This in the oral arguments to what two lower courts thought was an easy question: Is it all right for states to force a paraplegic to crawl up two flights of stairs to get to the courtroom where he's on trial? George Lane did that. Then he said he wasn't going to do it a second time, so the judge had him arrested. It's hard to believe the facts in this case, even when you learn the judge was in Tennessee. So don't take my word for it; read this piece from the New York Times, or this piece from Slate, and come back here.

Scalia is even more emphatic that Congress couldn't have meant to require state-funded hockey rinks to be handicapped-accessible, which suggests that he's not a guy in a wheelchair who wants to cheer on his daughter's high school team--but you probably guessed that. One suspects that if he were, he would be a trifle more sympathetic to the idea that the handicapped shouldn't be taxed to build facilities they can't use.

Comments

[aka-tippi.livejournal.com]

Wow that's even more blatantly horrible than usual. Scumbags.

[gentlyepigrams]

I wonder whether Scalia's ever crawled up stairs? I have. It's a whole lot of no fun, and very undignified.

[spiderfarmer.livejournal.com]

Un.freaking.real.

So disappointing

[rebbyribs.livejournal.com]

I can't comprehend how the justices came to that decision. It's completely apalling. What do conservatives have against the handicapped anyhow? Any one of them could have a stroke, get into a car accident, or otherwise become disabled any day of the week.

Re: So disappointing

[stevendj.livejournal.com]

This was oral arguments, not a written decision, fortunately. My guess is that O'Connor and Kennedy are reasonable enough human beings to make this a 5-4 decision the right way.

Most conservatives are actually pretty supportive of the handicapped--the ADA was signed during the first Bush administration. It's the "I'm on top, and will always be on top" conservatives who have the real streak of meanness to them. You can bet that nobody's ever going to make a rich paraplegic crawl up two flights of stairs.