Still Upset We Ended Slavery

As Think Progress reported yesterday, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion claiming that Arizona’s entire harsh immigration law should be upheld sacrifices both factual and mathematical accuracy in order to attack one of the Obama Administrations recently announced policies. Perhaps the oddest part of Scalia’s dissent, however, is the fact that he actually relied on pro-slavery laws excluding free persons of African descent from much of the south to justify allowing Arizona to target undocumented immigrants:

Notwithstanding “[t]he myth of an era of unrestricted immigration” in the first 100 years of the Republic, the States enacted numerous laws restricting the immigration of certain classes of aliens, including convicted crimi­nals, indigents, persons with contagious diseases, and (in Southern States) freed blacks. State laws not only provided for the removal of unwanted immigrants but also imposed penalties on unlawfully present aliens and those who aided their immigration

Yeah, states also enacted numerous laws making slavery legal.  While nobody should be surprised to hear this from a justice of the party of the The Southern Strategy, Scalia should be impeached.  His full-throated endorsement of corruption in Citizens United should have been enough, but this is so far beyond the pale it's not even funny.  Either way, this court and it's five incredibly destructive Republican justices show how important it is that good Americans make sure there are no more Republican presidents to appoint any more corrupt, racist, Republicans to the bench.