Category Archive 'The Constitutiin'

13 Jul 2016

“Why Not the Third Amendment Too, Justice Ginsburg?”

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RuthBaderGinsburg

James Taranto, in the Wall Street Journal, delivered a devastating rebuke to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent political indiscretions in the course of a New York Times interview.

Ginsburg’s comments about Trump, which were somewhat vague if you read them closely, were less objectionable than many of the other things she said in the same interview. She also damned the Senate for declining to take up the high-court nomination of Judge Merrick Garland: “ ‘That’s their job,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being president in his last year.’ ”

That’s literally true, but there’s also nothing in the Constitution that says the Senate stops being the Senate under any circumstances. Ginsburg is making a one-sided political argument and framing it as a constitutional mandate. Which, come to think of it, isn’t that different from her approach to jurisprudence. National Review’s Ed Whelan offers a backhanded compliment: “Let’s give her credit . . . for exposing, once again, how nakedly political she is.” …

It gets worse still. Liptak asked Ginsburg if there are “cases she would like to see the court overturn before she leaves it.” Her answer: “I’d love to see Citizens United overturned.” In that 2010 First Amendment case, the Federal Election Commission unsuccessfully claimed it had the authority to criminalize the distribution of a film critical of Hillary Clinton, whom Ginsburg has now implicitly endorsed for the presidency.

She also told Liptak that District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), which established that the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the right to keep and bear arms guarantees the right to keep and bear arms, was “a very bad decision,” adding (in Liptak’s words) “that a chance to reconsider it could arise whenever the court considers a challenge to a gun control law.” Lipsky reports that “the Times . . . seemed to want to protect Ginsburg from the fallout from this error of judgment, deleting it from the article until sharp-eyed readers called out the paper and the lines were restored.”

There’s no indication that Liptak asked Ginsburg if she also has designs on the Third Amendment. But if you wake up one morning and find a strange soldier on your couch, don’t say we didn’t warn you.

And that’s not all, folks. Ginsburg went on to reveal confidential information about the court’s deliberations during the term just ended. She disclosed how the late Justice Antonin Scalia voted in two cases on which the court deadlocked, and she asserted that Justice Elena Kagan would have joined the 4-3 majority to uphold racial discrimination in Fisher v. University of Texas, from which Kagan recused herself. “If Justice Kagan had been there, it would have been 5 to 3,” Ginsburg asserted.

So, to sum up: Ginsburg, in an on-the-record interview, took political positions on the presidential election and a Senate confirmation, indicated that she intends in future cases to vote to curtail constitutional rights, and violated the secrecy of the Supreme Court conference room.


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