"Maybe we should just suspend the Confrontation Clause in spousal abuse cases."

Said Justice Scalia, sarcastically, at oral argument yesterday. The case, Davis v. Washington, is about about whether 911 recordings can be used at trial in place of the testimony of a witness who no longer wants to cooperate with the prosecution, as often happens in domestic violence cases. Linda Greenhouse reports:

Two years ago, however, the Supreme Court issued an unmistakable warning that these efforts were likely to collide with the Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause, which guarantees to a criminal defendant the right "to be confronted with the witnesses against him."

In Crawford v. Washington, the court laid down a new rule: a "testimonial" statement made out of court cannot be used at trial unless the person who made the statement is available for cross-examination....

[Adrian M.] Davis's lawyers argued on appeal that the admission of the 911 tape violated his right to confrontation, but the Washington Supreme Court said the call was not testimonial. It was, the court said, a request for "help to be rescued from peril."...

Mr. Fisher, a Seattle lawyer who successfully argued the Crawford case, said the purpose of the Confrontation Clause was "to bring the accuser and accused face to face and require the accuser to deliver the accusation in court."

But the 911 call was "not just a call," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg objected. It was also "a cry for help." Was it not a "practical reality," she asked Mr. Fisher, "that many women in this situation are scared to death?" She added, "Your neat legal categories don't conform to real lives."

Mr. Fisher responded carefully. "I don't mean to be insensitive," he said. He offered a solution: under a rule known as the "forfeiture doctrine," he observed, a defendant who intimidated a witness lost the right to object to the use of that witness's out-of-court statements.

Justice Antonin Scalia interjected: "Maybe we should just suspend the Confrontation Clause in spousal abuse cases."

The other justices undoubtedly took his point, a reminder that he was the author of the Crawford decision, and that he had persuaded six of his colleagues in that case, including Justice Ginsburg, that the Confrontation Clause should be interpreted literally.

Interpreted literally! That textualist! And yet somehow he persuaded six of his colleagues. Are we to abandon the imaginative interpretative moves that usually work so well to make rights mean whatever we really need them to mean?

In fact, Crawford is no simple-minded literal take on the 6th Amendment. It is an elaborate discussion of text, history, and principle.