SUPREME COURT Questions of impartiality don't stop Scalia's fire

The justice is under attack for hunting trips taken with officials.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- In the space of a few days, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia groused when his colleagues overturned a Texas death sentence, needled them about a gay-rights decision and sarcastically suggested their church-state ruling could steal health benefits from nuns.
He found something bad in each of six divided rulings handed down this week, unusually contentious even for a justice known for his volume of passionate dissents.
Justice Scalia seemed to revel in stirring controversy within the confines of the court, even as he quietly weathered criticism from outside about the appearance of conflicts of interest.
The conservative Reagan appointee has been under attack for taking a hunting trip to Louisiana with Vice President Dick Cheney in January, after the court agreed to consider a privacy case involving Cheney's energy task force. Another hunting trip with a lawyer appearing before the court in 2001 was reported Friday.
Still fiery
But his fiery manner hasn't been dimmed.
Justice Scalia was on the losing side in five rulings this week, more than any other justice. And he wasn't fully satisfied with a sixth decision, noting his opposition to one paragraph and a footnote.
In one dissent in a case involving a lawsuit against a Greece-based airline, Justice Scalia used arch language to accuse his colleagues of inconsistency.
Then he reminded the justices of two earlier rulings he opposed: barring states from executing the mentally retarded and from prosecuting gay sex. The sodomy ruling last June energized the movement for gay marriages, just as Justice Scalia had warned it would.
'Freedom' in dissents
"Justice Scalia's voice has always been clearest when he dissents," Washington lawyer Thomas Goldstein said. "You almost get the sense that he prefers the freedom to cut loose."
The church-state decision, a loss for the Bush administration and other conservatives, prompted another strongly worded dissent in which Justice Scalia warned that his colleagues were inviting state control of religion.
"What next? Will we deny priests and nuns their prescription-drug benefits on the ground that taxpayers' freedom of conscience forbids medicating the clergy at public expense?" asked Justice Scalia, a Roman Catholic and father of a priest.
When the court ruled 7-2 that Texas woefully failed to give death row inmate Delma Banks a fair trial, Justice Scalia agreed with Justice Clarence Thomas' assessment that a jury had all the evidence it needed to sentence him to death.
Of a 6-3 ruling that blocked reverse age-discrimination lawsuits from workers in their 40s, Justice Scalia wrote that the court's reasoning was "anything but regular."
Conflict-of-interest cases
For all the volume of dissents, Justice Scalia had nothing to say about the Sierra Club's request that he step down from hearing the case that will determine whether names and details of the vice president's energy task force must be released to the environmental group.
Twenty of the country's 30 largest newspapers have called on Justice Scalia to remove himself from the case because of the vacation the justice and Cheney took, the Sierra Club told the court in a filing earlier this week that included a sampling of editorials.
On Friday, the Los Angeles Times reported details of a separate pheasant-hunting trip to Kansas that Justice Scalia took when the court was considering public policy appeals involving that state.
The Kansas governor accompanied Justice Scalia, flying to a hunting camp in November 2001 aboard a state plane, a trip arranged by Stephen R. McAllister, the dean of the University of Kansas School of Law who was the state's lawyer in the cases, the newspaper reported.
In a response, Justice Scalia said: "I do not think that spending time at a law school in which the counsel in pending cases was the dean could reasonably cause my impartiality to be questioned. Nor could spending time with the governor of a state that had matters before the court."
Justice Scalia, who is just a few weeks away from his 68th birthday, had said earlier that his trip with Cheney was not improper and that he did not plan to stay out of the case.