Retired New York Times legal reporter Linda Greenhouse believes that Justice Antonin Scalia’s death “saved democracy,” according to her latest opinion column in the paper.
According to Greenhouse, the recent Supreme Court ruling that suspended a voter identification law in North Carolina would not have been possible had Justice Scalia survived the final half of the Court’s 2016 term — and just six months after his death, she thinks its high time America celebrated.
“Would it be unseemly to suggest that only Justice Scalia’s death has preserved democracy in North Carolina? There, I just did,” she wrote.
Technically, Greenhouse is stretching on the court’s ruling: The Supreme Court merely approved an emergency stay on North Carolina’s strict voter identification law, requiring voters to prove residency in the precinct before casting a ballot. Because it was unlikely that plaintiffs suing the state would be able to get a full SCOTUS ruling on their appeal until 2017, the Court said the law should not impact the November 2016 Presidential election.
The vote was 4-4 and Scalia would have likely voted with the Court’s conservatives, against suspending the law, and, apparently, ending democracy as we know it.
This is not the first time Greenhouse has pondered the positive ramifications of Justice Scalia’s death. In March, just after Scalia was laid to rest, Greenhouse mused to an audience at Harvard that Scalia had been largely responsible for the Court’s partisan divide, calling his Textualist constitutional interpretation “counterproductive,” and claiming that Scalia’s opinions “degraded the discourse of the court.”
While still serving as the Times’s chief Supreme Court reporter, Greenhouse was well known for scolding the Supremes over what she felt to be their incorrect rulings (her impact on the court was known in legal circles as “The Greenhouse Effect”), and providing a near-fanatical defense of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, no matter Ginsberg’s apparent failings —though Greenhouse would probably pass on defending Ginsberg’s strong friendship with the NYT’s most-hated Justice, Scalia.