Stewart on Stahl on Scalia on 60 Minutes

Jon Stewart’s Daily Show did a segment last night on a 60 Minutes interview with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

I went back to watch the full 2-part profile by Lesley Stahl and found it to be an outstanding piece of television journalism.

Stewart made fun of Scalia on two points. I will do the 60 Minutes journalism no justice by highlighting those same two points here. Bush v. Gore:

“People say that that decision was not based on judicial philosophy but on politics,” Stahl asks.

“I say nonsense,” Scalia says.

Was it political?

“Gee, I really don’t wanna get into – I mean this is – get over it. It’s so old by now. The principal issue in the case, whether the scheme that the Florida Supreme Court had put together violated the federal Constitution, that wasn’t even close. The vote was seven to two,” Scalia says.

Said Stewart, “So the constitutional originalist on the Supreme Court doesn’t want to revisit any Supreme Court decisions made before the year 2000!”

“It ended up being a political decision” Stahl points out.

“Well you say that. I don’t say that,” Scalia replies.

“You don’t think it handed the election to George Bush?” Stahl asks.

“Well how does that make it a political decision?” Scalia asks.

“It decided the election,” Stahl says.

“If that’s all you mean by it, yes,” Scalia says.

“That’s all I mean by it,” Stahl says.

“Oh, ok. I suppose it did. Although you should add to that that it would have come out the same way, no matter what,” Scalia says.

The justice has been explaining his positions publicly more and more, and even delving into some thorny issues, like torture.

“I don’t like torture,” Scalia says. “Although defining it is going to be a nice trick. But who’s in favor of it? Nobody. And we have a law against torture. But if the – everything that is hateful and odious is not covered by some provision of the Constitution,” he says.

“If someone’s in custody, as in Abu Ghraib, and they are brutalized by a law enforcement person, if you listen to the expression ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ doesn’t that apply?” Stahl asks.

“No, No,” Scalia replies.

“Cruel and unusual punishment?” Stahl asks.

“To the contrary,” Scalia says. “Has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.”

Again, says Stewart, after a long, perplexed pause, and sustained laughter from the audience that totally and completely understands well before the words even begin to come out of his mouth… “So it’s not that torture isn’t cruel and unusual, it’s that it’s not punishment.”

Scalia, as contrasted to the far less interesting Clarence Thomas, is the thinking person’s conservative. And much as I stand by and support Stewart’s points, the 60 Minutes piece truly deserves a serious viewing.

RELATED: So long as we’re on the topic of Antonin, I’d point you to a couple of pieces by Cass Sunstein on Scalia. Here he points to Scalia and Thomas as “the successors of the great dissenting pairs [of constitutional visionaries] in the Court’s history.”

And in an LA Times OpEd from last October he runs the numbers and finds Scalia to be the most activist justice on the Supreme Court!