Recused

Or

Dissenting In Pine Bin

(Deserved decoration for Don)

Or

Argle Bargled

(Meritorious mention for Mike B)

Antonin Scalia’s lifelong quest to keep the United States bound to the whims of slave-owning men in powdered wigs and breeches who sought to cure disease with bleeding and conflicts with guns that could fire 3 shots a minute (including ample reloading time in between), has ended with his death from “natural causes” while “alone” at a West Texas resort at the age of 79. Scalia was lauded for his entertainingly written opinions, if you consider unfettered access to guns and extremely fettered access to your own body entertaining. After DOMA was overturned, he suggested that the Supreme Court had no more right to determine gays were a minority deserving protection than it would for pederasts. He called the Voting Rights Act the "perpetuation of racial entitlement.” He was a darling among conservatives, who claim to abhor activist judges, yet celebrated his attempts to overturn Miranda v. Arizona and Roe v. Wade. Scalia’s originalist leanings also led him to argue against Gideon v. Wainwright, which established the government’s responsibility to provide indigent defendants with lawyers, and Brown v. Board of Education, as there was no intent in the 14th Amendment to desegregate schools. Ironically for this man of Constitutional purity, the battle over who will name his successor has already started in purely political terms, as Republicans have apparently found a hidden clause in Article 2 "[the president] shall nominate ... Judges of the supreme Court…” unless in an election year with an opposition Congress, ignoring the 17 judges previously nominated in election years, most recently President Reagan’s appointment of Anthony Kennedy. 

Borked

(Kudos to Monty)
Robert Bork, owner of the worst combover in the Western world, has died at the age of 85. Bork was known as a conservative legal theorist who held that the Constitution offered no right to privacy or protection for minority views and groups. He opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, held that 1st Amendment rights only covered discussions related to the business of governing, and as Richard Nixon’s solicitor general (after the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General resigned rather than comply) fired the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate break-in and his entire staff in the Saturday Night Massacre. Bork considered himself an originalist, holding that only those rights explicitly enumerated by the Founding Fathers were constitutional, and that every legal mind in the nearly 200 years that followed was wrong, save himself. Nominated by Ronald Reagan to the United States Supreme Court, he was soundly defeated in his confirmation vote, which some have held set the stage for the denial of confirmation for any nominee with strongly held legal beliefs, but which sounds like prevented 25 years of bad judging from the bench.