Unconventional Wisdom: Scalia on Limited Government

Henry Clay notes a surprising 1982 essay from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on the conservative movement's tendency to oppose government intervention on the conservative blog Frum Forum.

The future Supreme Court justice argued that conservatives, so frequently on the losing end of federal legislation, had unfortunately turned a tactical opposition to federal power “into a philosophy,” and this “anti-federalist philosophy on the part of conservatives seems… simply wrong.” Scalia lamented that “when conservatives take charge, the most they hope to do is to keep anything from happening. I understand that in some of the offices of the current administration there are signs on the wall that read, ‘Don’t just stand there; undo something.’ That seems to me an inadequate approach.”

It was an inadequate approach then, and it remains so today. Scalia understood the “unfortunate tendency of conservatives to regard the federal government, at least in its purely domestic activities, as something to be resisted, or better yet (when conservatives are in power) undone, rather than as a legitimate and useful instrument of policy.” He resisted this “ultimately self-defeating” attitude at the height of the Reagan Revolution. Should Reagan’s heirs find themselves in a position of power next year, it should be resisted again.

Scalia's critics would certainly argue that he has not acted in a manner consistent with this essay on the Court. Still, the words are striking coming from such a conservative judicial icon. The essay also begs the question: if movement conservatives think government is inherently evil, they why are they involved in it at all?

--Ballard Burgher