The naked partisanship that Justice Scalia has displayed in the Supreme Court cases revolving around the Presidential election have been most disheartening to me. I don’t agree with him a lot of the time, but I’ve respected him as a principled jurist. At this point, the idea of his becoming Chief Justice in the future completely outrages me. I really think the court is, in general, best served by a moderate Chief Justice (in terms of the debate between strict construction and judicial activism), so from that standpoint Scalia’s strict constructionist stance is a bit unnerving. Unfortunately, Scalia’s partisanship is an even bigger problem. His attacks on the Florida Supreme Court rulings have shown that even his beloved federalism is less dear to him than the political outcomes that he desires, and that’s completely unacceptable. (I removed the link to the Jim Dwyer column from the New York Daily News that was here earlier because a friend sent me a criticism of the column that I agreed with, and the column wasn’t the basis for my distaste for Scalia.)