Matthews: This Supreme Court Would Have Opposed Desegregation

"Does anyone wonder, like I do, what this Supreme Court, the one personified by Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, would have done in the landmarked decisions in the post-World War II era?" MSNBC's Chris Matthews asked on Monday's broadcast of "Hardball." "I wonder if this Court would have backed desegregation in the Brown case. I doubt this pack of conservatives, which includes Chief Justice John Roberts, Sam Alito and Anthony Kennedy would have voted to knock down separate but equal in the 1950s," he said. "Would this Court, voting as it does today, have upheld the 1964 civil rights bill, the statute which declared it illegal to refuse access to someone because of race, at a restaurant, hotel or gas station restroom? Would Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy have approved such a decision or would they have joined in the dissent? Well, maybe Kennedy would have," Matthews said. "The fact is we have the most conservative Court since the 1930s and maybe more conservative than that. These Justices, led by Scalia, believe in original intent. They want to judge cases based on how the Founding Fathers would. Well, the Founding Fathers, need I remind us all wrote in slavery into the Constitution. It took a civil war and a 13th amendment to get it out," Matthews concluded.