(updated)
Basically, what Antonin Scalia is saying is that the pool of eligible voters can be divided into "makers" and "takers":
There were audible gasps in the Supreme Court's lawyers' lounge, where audio of the oral argument is pumped in for members of the Supreme Court bar, when Justice Antonin Scalia offered his assessment of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. He called it a "perpetuation of racial entitlement."Right -- the rest of us deserve to be registered to vote, but these parasites and leeches get their voting rights handed to them by a government that's therefore depriving the rest of us of ... um, something. I'm not sure what. But we're definitely getting a raw deal. And they're getting special rights.
I'm reminded of something Atrios wrote in response to a Jon Stewart segment:
... I like the inclusion of Craig T. Nelson saying, "I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No." Because I think that quote really gets to the true core of bullshit mountain. One can never be quite sure how much conservatives believe their own bullshit, but my longstanding theory is that they believe there's some secret super generous welfare system that only black people have access to. When they had hard times, got their government handouts, their government handouts sucked. But the blahs are out there buying their t-bones and driving their cadillacs, so they must be getting the really good welfare. Nobody helped poor Craig out, because the food stamps and and welfare sucked....Scalia's little quip is just a non-economic corollary to that belief system.
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ALSO: The quote above comes from Think Progress, which elaborates on Scalia's "racial entitlement" remark:
The comment came as part of a larger riff on a comment Scalia made the last time the landmark voting law was before the justices. Noting the fact that the Voting Rights Act reauthorization passed 98-0 when it was before the Senate in 2006, Scalia claimed four years ago that this unopposed vote actually undermines the law: "The Israeli supreme court, the Sanhedrin, used to have a rule that if the death penalty was pronounced unanimously, it was invalid, because there must be something wrong there."Really, Tony? If something passes unanimously, that means it's more controversial than if there was dissent?
You know what else the Senate approved unanimously, Tony? Approved 98-0, in fact? Your nomination to the Supreme Court. By your logic, shouldn't that have meant your nomination was rejected?