Your point about Scalia supports mine that one cannot draw lines of textualism or intent to explain this given past behavior or it would leave the justices on opposite sides of their more recent decision.
Agreed, which is why I can't figure out why you contested my point in #209. There's no way anyone who reasonably read the court's decision could have thought the majority was using a texualist philosophy to interpret the statute at issue.
I disagree again, their function is to interpret the law - their moral and ethical obligation is justice.
They are a blunt instrument to achieve justice, but if we allow them to lose sight of that and become a grinding machine that kills without conscience because it conforms to their legal logic, then we have failed as a society.
I'm sure they would argue their legal logic is the instrument to reach their moral and ethical obligation to justice. Your argument is a good one, but in practice means little.
The structure of their decision making is supposed to make it such that it errors on the side of freeing the guilty so that the innocent man cannot be persecuted.
Hence, Scalia's chiding of the majority on eschewing the rule of lenity.
Therein lies the explanation of how it has come to be so frequently that the court must decide between maintaining its legal "logic" and meting out an unjust decision for the individual in front of them or justice.
It no longer errors on our side - it has shifted so far toward the agenda of the state that it now errors on the side of accomplishing the current desire of the state rather than even the "intent" of the legislature who wrote the law in the first place.
Again, provided that 1) the legislative intent can even be discerned, and 2) you agree that intent is a valid basis for statutory interpretation.
Legislative intent, particularly given modern politics, can be impossible to ascertain. There was one example a few years back when a bill was passed and politicians on either side of the aisle claimed conflicting purposes for the law. Additionally, the reason statutory purpose/intent is such a dirty phrase in the more conservative and libertarian legal circles is due to the fact we hold citizens to be responsible for knowing the law. Therefore, it doesn't matter what the legislators thought they were doing, but what they actually passed. Additionally, statutory purpose and intent gives judges far more leeway surreptitiously reason-back decisions.
Unlike you, I stop short of asserting that happened here. The reason is because I think if one were to use statutory purpose and intent with all it's flaws, one still could have reached the majority's decision without interjecting their own personal policy preferences. Correlation does not always equal causation, and I believe that's the case here with the court's traditional 5-4 split in this case. The result was using the statutory construction and interpretation methods generally favored to each wing of the court, that just happened to lead them to so-called liberal and conservative results.