RIP Justice Scalia

Antonin Gregory Scalia (March 11, 1936 - February 13, 2016) was an Associate Justice of theSupreme Court of the USA, from 1986 until his death in 2016. Appointed to the Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, Scalia was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the Court's conservative wing.

Scalia was born in Trenton, New Jersey. He attended public grade school, Xavier High School in Manhattan, and then college at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He obtained his law degree from Harvard Law School and spent six years in a Cleveland law firm, before he became a law school professor at the University of Virginia. In the early 1970s, he served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, eventually as an Assistant Attorney General. He spent most of the Carter years teaching at the University of Chicago, where he became one of the first faculty advisers of the fledgling Federalist Society. In 1982, Ronald Reagan appointed him as judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In 1986, Reagan appointed him to the Supreme Court. Scalia was asked few difficult questions by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and was unanimously confirmed by the Senate, becoming the first Italian-American justice

Scalia served on the Court for nearly thirty years, during which time he established a consistently conservative voting record and ideology, advocating textualism in statutory interpretation and originalism in constitutional interpretation. He was a strong defender of the powers of the executive branch, believing presidential power should be paramount in many areas. He opposed affirmative action and other policies that treated minorities as special groups. He filed separate opinions in many cases and often castigated the Court's majority in his minority opinions using scathing language.

He died on February 13, 2016, at Cibolo Creek Ranch, a resort in West Texas, "of apparent natural causes."

An epic political battle took shape on Sunday in Washington after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia as Senate Republicans said they would refuse to accept any Supreme Court nomination by President Obama. But the president threatened to nominate someone within weeks.

Many Republican senators have said that they strongly supported the position of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, that the vacancy should not be filled until after the presidential election, denying Mr. Obama a chance to reconfigure the ideological makeup of the court in the last year of his second term. The supreme court can function with just the other 8 justices and at the 9th GOP debate in South Carolina, Senator Marco Rubio said that it has been a long time since "a lame duck president has appointed a supreme court justice.

“I don’t see anyone getting confirmed,” said Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican who sits on the Judiciary Committee, which would consider any nomination. “I suspect that probably means no hearings.” Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida, both Republican presidential contenders, echoed that view in tv appearances.