The Conservative Movement Was Ready For Antonin Scalia's Death - Balls and Strikes

[In It to Win It]

Balls and Strikes Substack
https://ballsandstrikes.substack.com/p/the-conservative-movement-was-ready

In retrospect, the wildest thing about Justice Antonin Scalia’s death ten years ago today is that, for about 45 minutes, it really seemed like the good guys were going to win. Over the preceding 47 years, Democratic presidents had appointed exactly four justices to the Supreme Court, compared to 12 for Republican presidents. As a result, conservatives had comfortably controlled the Court throughout that period. Only the ideological defections of Justice John Paul Stevens and David Souter—Republican appointees who turned out to be staunch liberals, to the everlasting fury of Federalist Society types everywhere—kept the Court from morphing from a reliably conservative institution into a reactionary juggernaut.

Scalia’s sudden departure, both from the bench and from this mortal coil, was poised to change everything. With President Barack Obama set to replace Scalia with a fiftysomething liberal lawyer to be named later, the Court would have a solid liberal majority for the first time since the Warren Court era ended almost five decades earlier.

I was still working as a law firm associate then, so I don’t have a good journalism war story to share from that day. But I could do basic math, and the penciled-in results looked promising: Roe v. Wade was safe. So was affirmative action. The Voting Rights Act, which Chief Justice John Roberts had gutted in Shelby County v. Holder, seemed on the verge of making a dramatic comeback. The conservative push to rewrite the Second Amendment to comport with the gun lobby’s financial interests was over. Citizens United, which the Republican justices had used to open up corporate spending in elections in 2010, was surely on borrowed time.

Before most people even saw the New York Times push alert announcing Scalia’s death, though, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made his move, announcing that the Senate would not consider any potential replacement until after the 2016 election, which was set to take place in nine months. At the time, most Democratic politicians were still cobbling together statements extending their condolences to Scalia’s family. McConnell, meanwhile, managed to unite his entire caucus around a rule he’d invented out of thin air: that the Senate need not fulfill its constitutionally prescribed duty to provide “advice and consent” on a Supreme Court nomination if Republicans don’t like the president who made it.

The conservative legal movement spent decades preparing to capture the Court. Scalia's death gave them the chance they needed

— Balls & Strikes (@ballsandstrikes.org) 2026-02-14T21:22:00.791Z

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Obvious CT: Conservatives were responsible for Scalia's death.

I know, the timing's not quite right, but it takes more than that to stop a CT.