Saturday, September 19, 2020

RBG's activism engendered the current mood

Bookworm Room has a detailed review on Ruth Bader Ginsberg and I could not agree more with point #7:
7. Ginsburg’s politicizing the Court is part of why we’re at the situation we are today, where a Justice’s death can throw an upcoming election into an uproar. When judges legislate, as she and her fellow leftists on the Court have been doing, the Court takes on oversized importance. For decades, leftists who couldn’t get their fellow citizens to vote on their policies were able to use the Court as a super-legislative body. This is not what the Constitution intended, and it means that we Americans are being ruled by a cabal of 9 people who hold their positions for life. They are, in essence, a form of non-democratic absolute monarchy.
To this I would point to her dissent in the 7-2 decision for Masterpiece Cakeshop, a.k.a. the "bake me a cake, hater" case (joined by the worst justice on the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor).  As Bookworm notes, Ginsberg was always portrayed as a "fighter" which means she was a politician and not a jurist sworn to uphold the Constitution.  I'll go a step further: I think RBG got caught up in the hagiography around her and simply tailored legal decisions to burnish her leftist bona fides.  The result was judicial activism that led to decisions away from freedom and towards compulsion.  This is why everybody is up in arms about the Supreme Court and now the election is going to be super-mega-insane.

For contrast, look at the legal reasoning of the late Antonin Scalia who leaned towards individual rights ("go ahead and burn that flag!") and often wondered why the Supreme Court was ruling on issues that should be decided by the people:
The States may, if they wish, permit abortion on demand, but the Constitution does not require them to do so. The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.
People voting?  Like in a democracy?  Scalia and Ginsberg were friends, it's said, but I wonder what Nino would have thought about his good friend forcing a baker to create a cake at the barrel of a gun.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'll make an official prediction - the new Justice will be Amy Coney Barbie.

Anonymous said...

If they werent political then it would not matter what side of the debate they default to. But here we are in a post constitutional republic fighting for the remaining shreds of our civil , moral society against the uncivil and immoral humans that are never going to be happy even if they get their power back.

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