Over at CBS News, legal analyst Andrew Cohen has used the Uncommon Knowledge interview with Justice Antonin Scalia as an excuse for a rant. As Ed Whelan notes on Bench Memos, “[w]hat is really amazing about…[the post] is that while Cohen features many Scalia quotes from the interviews, not a single one supports any of [Cohen’s] propositions.”

To which I’d add just a couple of notes:

The first concerns Cohen’s inability to follow the interview–to hear what Justice Scalia said. “’As far as I know,’” Cohen quotes Scalia as saying, “‘there is only one element of my faith that has anything to do with my being a judge…. ‘Thou shalt not lie.’ I observe that in all my judicial decisions. I never pretend that a case is not being overruled when in fact it is.’” ”Alas,” Cohen continues, “Robinson didn’t ask Scalia to name names–to identify the judges/Justices he believes are lying in their written opinions.”

Correct. I didn’t ask. Why? Because there was no need to do so. Just a few minutes earlier Justice Scalia had very pointedly described the majority decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey as thoroughly disingenuous. ”Casey, in fact,” the Justice had stated, “while saying, ‘we will never overrule Roe, overruled Roe. It threw out the trimester system.”

The second? Cohen’s ignorance–and, for someone on the CBS payroll as a “legal analyst,” the depth of ignorance here is really astounding–about Justice Scalia’s jurisprudence. ”Scalia,” Cohen claims, “is still a believer in ‘original intent’….” Wrong. Justice Scalia champions originalism–that is, the meaning of the Constitution at the time it was ratified–and most definitely not original intent, which holds that the document should be interpreted according to what the Founders intended it to mean, or (on some readings of original intent) intended it to accomplish.

The words of Justice Scalia himself, in, “A Matter of Interpretation,” an essay so succinct, compelling, and well-known that Andrew Cohen may be the only “legal analyst” in the nation who is unaware of its existence:

It is curious that most of those who insist that the drafter’s intent gives meaning to a statute reject the drafter’s intent as the criterion for interpretation of the Constitution. I reject it for both. I will consult the writings of some men who happened to be delegates to the Constitutional Convention— Hamilton’s and Madison’s writings in The Federalist, for example. I do so, however, not because they were Framers and therefore their intent is authoritative and must be the law; but rather because their writings, like those of other intelligent and informed people of the time, display how the text of the Constitution was originally understood. Thus I give equal weight to Jay’s pieces in The Federalist, and to Jefferson’s writings, even though neither of them was a Framer. What I look for in the Constitution is precisely what I look for in a statute: the original meaning of the text, not what the original draftsmen intended.