Scalia: You Can't Call a Penalty a Pig

Or put lipstick on it.
By Polly Davis Doig,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 29, 2012 10:59 AM CDT
Scalia: You Can't Call a Penalty a Pig
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Thursday, July 26, 2012, at the Supreme Court in Washington.   (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari)

Antonin Scalia is still fired up about the Supreme Court's refusal to overturn ObamaCare, appearing on Fox News Sunday to decry the majority opinion that the individual mandate is a tax. "You don't interpret a penalty to be a pig," he said, according to Politico. "It can't be a pig. And what my dissent said in the Affordable Care Act was simply there is no way to regard this penalty as a tax. It simply does not bear that meaning.” Elsewhere in other Scalia and non-Scalia tidbits from your Sunday dial, as per Politico:

  • Scalia on whether President Obama influenced the ruling: “No. What can he do to me? Or to any of us? We have life tenure. And we have it precisely so that we will not be influenced by politics, by threats from anybody.”
  • Scalia on reports of John Roberts' change of heart: “You shouldn’t believe what you read about internal court proceedings, because the reporter who reports that is either a) lying, which can be done with impunity because as you know we don’t respond. Or b) that reporter had the information from someone who was breaking the oath of confidentiality, which means that’s an unreliable person.”
  • Sen. Kelly Ayotte on Romney's Olympic gaffe: "We all know stuff happens on the campaign trail." But unlike Obama, "Romney is going to be strong on America's exceptionalism and he won't go around and apologize for America."
  • Not so fast, says Robert Gibbs: “Mitt Romney wondered aloud whether London was ready for the Olympics, and I think it’s clear that voters in this country wonder aloud whether Mitt Romney is ready for the world, and I think the world is not yet ready for Mitt Romney."
(More Sunday morning talk shows stories.)

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