Over at The Corner Andy McCarthy links readers to a transcript of Leslie Stahl’s interview (telecast last night) with Justice Scalia. If you missed the show the transcript is surely worth a read. The Justice is engaging and unaffected (as always), and is to be especially admired for his willingness to portray himself as an old-fashioned Catholic, with deeply conservative views on some hot-button issues. (He even accounts for his nine children as the payoff for playing what he called “Vatican Roulette”.) Justice Scalia characteristically coupled his confessions of conservatism with the insistence that his convictions about what justice requires — and forbids — do not affect his constitutional rulings. The contrast to the modus operandi of quintessential liberal Arthur Goldberg (described by Ed Whelan and me last week) could not be more bold.
Given John McCain’s professed intention to nominate justices in the Scalia mold — and Barack Obama’s Goldbergian model of judging — we may have here, on Benchmemos in the space of a week, a preview of the Fall campaign.