NYT Gets Vapors Over Justice Scalia and Tea Party Seminar

The New York Times is all verklemmt over Justice Scalia’s involvement in a tea party seminar:

When the Tea Party holds its first Conservative Constitutional Seminar next month, Justice Antonin Scalia is set to be the speaker. It was a bad idea for him to accept this invitation. He should send his regrets.

The Tea Party epitomizes the kind of organization no justice should speak to — left, right or center — in the kind of seminar that has been described in the press. It has a well-known and extreme point of view about the Constitution and about cases and issues that will be decided by the Supreme Court.

Wait – a publication that has derided the movement is condescending to tell them who they are? The same publication that once called the movement a “minstrel show?” The movement they called racist? So were they purposefully ignorant this whole time so as to present a false characterization of the movement with the goal of persuading their readers to hate it? Or did they just now find the light? Hallelujah! It’s a Christmas miracle.

Now the NYT is terrified that somehow the tea party, so devoted to the Constitution, would influence a Supreme Court justice to be devoted … to … the Constitution. They leapfrog through reasons, trying them on, seeing which has the most affect.

Justice Scalia has been particularly assertive that the American public should trust his ability to handle ethical questions. Incidents like this seminar emphasize that it is in the interest of the Supreme Court to provide him and every justice with more specific guidance.

[…]

By presiding over this seminar, Justice Scalia would provide strong reasons to doubt his impartiality when he ruled later on any topic discussed there. He can best convey his commitment to the importance of his independence, and the court’s, by deciding it would be best not to attend.

The NYT’s assertion that Justice Scalia’s involvement somehow violates the code of conduct for judges (which, to my understanding, doesn’t apply to Supreme Court Justices) is only applicable based on the presupposition that Scalia is influenceable. Considering his past opinions, I would say that the opposite is the most likely: the movement stands to be influenced by Scalia than Scalia by the movement. The NYT’s presupposition is also offensive in that a man of the Constitution and expert on the law such as Scalia would be influenced by a group for whom the NYT has such a low regard.

The NYT’s real worry is that Scalia’s involvement in speaking to a tea party group would lend the movement further credibility and undermine the NYT’s carefully crafted narrative that the movement is nothing but a lot of stupid, racist rednecks. They can’t come out and say that, but suddenly they’re concerned for the man whose decisions and remarks they’ve vilified almost as vigorously as the movement.

The editorial also hits on the lack of a code of conduct for Supreme Court justices who are exempt from such a code governing federal judges.

The court remains the only federal court not covered by the Code of Conduct for United States Judges. The court and the country would be better off if the justices were responsible to the code. Even without a duty to the code, each justice has a duty to its principles. Each has a duty to promote the judiciary’s impartiality.

As for the code of conduct, I reached out to a legal heavyweight for perspective, my good friend and fellow blogger, the law professor and Constitutional scholar Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, who replied:

“Supreme Court Justices have no substitutes. If they recuse themselves, there’s nobody else to take their place; the composition of the Court just changes for that case. Rather than let parties try to manipulate ethics rules to disqualify justices they see as hostile, the justices are the judges of their own ethics.”

It makes perfect sense. Judges are either partial to the Constitution or they aren’t; they either believe that the document is perfect in its form and that rights like free speech don’t ebb in and out of style – or they believe that it’s an anachronistic document in a world that needs a malleable, living Constitution. Each justice enters the Supreme Court possessing a record of opinion by which he or she is measured, and that without threat of election or outside influence, they will apply the Constitution as they always have, thus it’s ridiculous to assert the opposite.

If the NYT was truly concerned about impartiality, they would have had a field day with this:

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Instead the NYT essentially deflected and defended her. Sotomayor is listed by the American Bar Association as a member of the far left extremist group La Raza:

In addition to her work on the bench, Judge Sotomayor is an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law and a lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School. She is a member of the American Bar Association, the New York Women’s Bar Association, the Puerto Rican Bar Association, the Hispanic National Bar Association, the Association of Judges of Hispanic Heritage, and the National Council of La Raza. [my emphasis]

A member of a radical group that opposes the law Sotomayor vowed to uphold. The NYT is worried about Justice Scalia speaking to a group whose expressed purpose is to uphold the Constitution yet says nothing of the justice whose membership – not speaking to a group but membership – is in a group whose expressed purpose is to obliterate the Constitution by staging violent opposition to the laws therein. The discrepancy between these incomparable groups only magnifies the NYT’s bias.

There is nothing like the Tea Party on the left, but if there were and one of the more liberal justices accepted a similar invitation from it, that would be just as bad.

But yet it’s not.

By presiding over this seminar, Justice Scalia would provide strong reasons to doubt his impartiality when he ruled later on any topic discussed there. He can best convey his commitment to the importance of his independence, and the court’s, by deciding it would be best not to attend.

It’s not Justice Scalia’s impartiality I doubt, it’s the New York Times’s impartiality and genuineness that have proven by this instance to be nonexistent.