Here’s a flashback to July 2012, when Justice Scalia was on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace — who, truth be told, was kind of a jerk to the Justice. But it’s OK. Nino handled himself just fine. If you didn’t watch this the first time I posted it, treat yourself now.

If you go to 18:30, and watch for a minute, you’ll see a fun little discussion of Scalia’s pique at being criticized by Richard Posner in (I think) an unfair manner. It’s worth it, trust me.

But what really hits home is at 22:25, where we see Chris Wallace asking Scalia if he would time his retirement to coincide with a Republican administration. Scalia says he hasn’t decided. Wallace asks him if he wouldn’t prefer to be replaced by a Republican appointee, given what he says earlier in the interview about Republicans generally preferring originalists and textualists, while Democrats prefer Justices who like Roe v. Wade. Scalia then says:

I would not like to be replaced by someone who immediately sets about undoing everything that I’ve tried to do for 25 years, 26 years. Sure. But I shouldn’t have to tell you that, unless you think I’m a fool.

What a great man. The country will never be able to replace Justice Scalia — but we owe it to ourselves, and to him, to come as close as we can.

[guest post by JVW]

– JVW

[guest post by JVW]

I would almost guess this is a phony story designed to make us small-government type conservatives look bad by spreading it, but it comes from the hyper-leftist UK newspaper The Guardian, not from Brietbart or The Blaze:

Only when Joaquín García, a Spanish civil servant, was due to collect an award for two decades of loyal and dedicated service did anyone realise that he had not, in fact, shown up to work for at least six years – and possibly as many as 14.

García, a 69-year-old engineer, began working for the local authority in the south-western city of Cádiz in 1990, according to el Mundo, and in 1996 was posted to the municipal water board, Agua de Cadiz, where his job was to supervise a waste water treatment plant.

Boy are the authorities steamed about this. So steamed in fact that they have brought down the whole weight of Spanish law on Garcia and fined him severely:

A court this week fined Garcia €27,000 (£21,000), the equivalent after tax of one year of his annual salary, having earlier found that the engineer did not appear to have occupied his office for “at least six years” and had done “absolutely no work” between 2007 and 2010, the year before he retired. [emphasis added]

Proving that we truly do live in the epoch of the shameless, Garcia has a handy 21st century excuse for why he didn’t show up for work for six — or fourteen — years:

García told the court that he had turned up to the office, although he admitted he may not have kept regular business hours. He said he was the victim of workplace bullying because of his family’s socialist politics and had been deliberately sidelined at the water board.

His friends told El Mundo that the engineer had been unwilling to report his allegations of harassment because he “had a family to support” and was worried that he would not find another job at his age. He had been so depressed by his situation that he had seen a psychiatrist, they said.

Yeah, I too was struck by the fact that this guy has socialist politics. Who would have guessed it? But don’t worry, he put all of his taxpayer-paid free time to good use:

The engineer made the most of the confusion, becoming an avid reader of philosophy and an expert on the works of Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher credited with laying the foundations of the Enlightenment.

Baruch Spinoza’s most important work was of course his great treatise, Ethics.

– JVW

The answer is no.

I’ll let the pundits spend hours, days, and weeks arguing out the precedents and making their little partisan cases. I have zero interest in engaging in all that.

My message is very simple: Payback is a bitch. We control the Senate, so you lose.

But look. We’re reasonable people. If you want to appoint an originalist in the mold of Antonin Scalia — a man confirmed by the Senate in a vote of 98-0 — we’ll certainly consider that nomination.

Otherwise, pound sand.