Back at the end of June, when the Supreme Court's long-awaited decision on gay marriage came down, I wrote of Antonin Scalia, "Either he is the worst kind of intellectual coward or else he is simply hideous." Now, upon his death, I back away from that statement not at all. I believe history will judge him harshly, an embodiment of a backward time.
When I opened up the New York Times homepage Saturday afternoon and saw the news of his death, my first reaction was, "Oh my goodness. Game on." It has been no surprise at all that the Republicans, who have asserted ad nauseum that Obama runs roughshod over the Constitution, have already publicly thrown down the gauntlet by insisting that they will do everything in their power to deny the current president his constitutional right to appoint Scalia's successor. Shall I take a moment to point out that today we are still nine months from the election and almost a year from the start of the next administration? It's never about principles in Washington. It's always just politics.
For all its extreme nastiness, there's been something kind of abstract about the presidential campaign thus far. It's felt a little bit as though the campaign were a wargame, with dice and cards and plastic game markers and a gameboard that's a map of the United States, played by people who hate each other.
But now Scalia has died and things just got very, very real. "Game on?" Wrong analogy. Far more accurate to call it the start of a war.