Scalia-flavored lemonade...
That's a phrase that I never would have expected to see. Anywhere. It's in the second-to-last paragraph of an article in Slate entitled Nutty for Nino: Antonin Scalia for chief justice. Seriously. The article attempts to persuade liberals that Scalia is a good choice for chief justice. The reasons seem to boil down to:
- Scalia is super-smart, and writes fantastic opinions, no matter how angry they make you, and it is a Good Thing™ for the chief justice to be respectable
- Chief Justice is more or less an honorarium anyway -- the chief justice gets a lot more publicity than everyone else, but doesn't have all that much more real power than any of the other eight most powerful people in the country. So it doesn't matter so much who is the titular chief
- There's no getting around Rehnquist's replacement being a Bush nominee, and agreeing to support Scalia for chief gives the Democrats some bargaining power to insist that the new justice be a moderate.