General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Scalia refused to read the NY Times or the Washington Post. [View all]JHB
(37,158 posts)...is a necessary step in moving on to the next appointee.
Conservatives rail against "judicial activism", but that's a lie: Scalia was a conservative judicial activist, so they loved him and embraced him as a hero.
Scalia claimed to be an "originalist", a conveniently vague and impossible to verify stance that provided an intellectual smokescreen for his partisanship and activism. A stance he was also quite willing to throw overboard when it conflicted with his activism: witness Bush v Gore.
Republicans are going to offer a selectively-edited version of Scalia as the model of why Obama should not be allowed to choose his replacement on the bench. That needs to be pointedly countered by not allowing Scalia's hyper-partisanship to be whitewashed.
A strategy of "look forward, not back" is ill-advised when facing backstabbers. That was true long before President Obama used that particular phrase to describe it. Bil Clinton did the same, and all it did was let conservatives devote more energy to attacks.