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the Supreme Court has usurped the functions of state legislatures and juries because their decisions were "out of accord with the perceptions of decency, or of penology, or of mercy, entertained . . . by a majority of the small and unrepresentative segment of our society that sits on the Supreme Court."

At least Justice Scalia has the guts to tell the truth about his colleagues and the way they twist the Constitution to fit their personal feelings. I don't say "their beliefs", because I'm sure they know the real intent of the authors.

What good is a constitution if it can be "interpreted" to mean something other than what it says in plain English? Words and phrases have meaning, if not, of what use are they? If words don't have well defined meanings readily understood by the conversationalists using them, we may as well just babble and gesticulate at one another and each of us decide for himself what message the other means to convey. Certainly not an efficient means of communication.

I believe that anyone with a reasonably good grasp of the English language and an IQ above room temperature in an igloo can "interpret" the Constitution. Sure, there are some archaic terms and phrases used in the old document, but it wasn't written so far back in time that the original meaning of those terms has been lost in the fog of antiquity. How is it that 9 chosen people can decipher the enigmatic code the authors used and the other 280 million of us can't? How is it that they can see that the actual words on parchment are meaningless, and only by means of their superior intellect and finely tuned intuition can the original intent of the authors by determined? Or, are the authors somehow transmitting telepathic revelations to those nine persons from beyond the grave?

If the authors had intended for their work to be interpreted to say whatever the courts decide it says, why did they waste an entire summer in a sweltering room hashing out their differences? If it was their intent to obfuscate the message and confuse the citizenry, they may as well have scrawled out a few pages of random gibberish in the first half hour of the convention and then told the courts to interpret it to say whatever they think, or rather, feel, it should say. The net effect of that process would have left us in pretty much the same situation as the one we are afflicted with now.