Posted on 05/20/2005 8:15:43 AM PDT by LavaDog
Imagine, if you will, that a Democrat President nominated a judge whose constitutional and policy views were, by any measure, on the extreme left fringes of American society.
Lets assume, for example, that this nominee had expressed strong sympathy for the position that there is a constitutional right to prostitution as well as a constitutional right to polygamy.
Lets say, further, that he had attacked the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts as organizations that perpetuate stereotyped sex roles and that he had proposed abolishing Mothers Day and Fathers Day and replacing them with a single androgynous Parents Day.
And, to get really absurd, lets add that he had called for an end to single-sex prisons on the theory that if male prisoners are going to return to a community in which men and women function as equal partners, prison is just the place for them to get prepared to deal with women.
Lets further posit that this nominee had opined that a manifest imbalance in the racial composition of an employers work force justified court-ordered quotas even in the absence of any intentional discrimination on the part of the employer. But then, lo and behold, to make this nominee even more of a parody of an out-of-touch leftist, lets say it was discovered that while operating his own office for over a decade in a city that was majority-black, this nominee had never had a single black person among his more than 50 hires.
Imagine, in sum, a nominee whose record is indisputably extreme and who could be expected to use his judicial role to impose those views on mainstream America. Surely such a person would never be nominated to an appellate court. Surely no Senate Democrat would support someone with such extreme views. And surely Senate Republicans, rather than deferring to the nominating power of the Democrat President, would pull out all stopsfilibuster and everythingto stop such a nominee.
Well, not quite. The hypothetical nominee I have just described is, in every particular except his sex, Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the time she was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993.
President Clinton nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg on June 22, 1993. A mere six weeks later, on August 3, 1993, the Senate confirmed her nomination by a 96-3 vote.
(The source for the information in the second through fourth paragraphs is Report of Columbia Law School Equal Rights Advocacy Project: The Legal Status of Women under Federal Law, co-authored by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Brenda Feigen Fasteau in September 1974. The information in the fifth paragraph can be found in the transcript of Ginsburgs confirmation hearing.)
WOW! Very Interesting.
Do as I say, not as I do.
Very interesting. Please forward your analysis to Fox News and Rush.
This woman was also head of the ACLU prior to her nomination to the SC.
Great article. It appears that decades of Democratic control in congress and often the executive branch have provided an infestation of leftists in the judiciary who are bent on destroying society. It's time to correct the problem.
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1583
During the hearings for her confirmation, Ginsburg's position on Roe v. Wade was a focal point of discussion. Ginsburg had expressed criticism of the Supreme Court's 1973 decision that upheld a woman's right to an abortion, suggesting to some Senators that her support for abortion rights might be less than enthusiastic. Ginsburg's position, however, was not that a woman's right to an abortion was questionable; she merely doubted the legitimacy of the sweep of the Court's decision, arguing that the states would soon have achieved the same result on their own. The Court, she argued, should merely have overturned the particularly restrictive state laws at issue in the case. As for abortion itself, Ginsburg said that a woman's right to choose an abortion was "something central to a woman's life, her dignity. . . . And when government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a full adult human being responsible for her own choices."
Outstanding find!
I remember her outrageous racist history was a significant point of fact during her confirmation but totally neglected by the MSM
Not by the Bush administration.
If I remember correctly some repub senator (Spectre?) DID ask her about her "No Blacks" policy. He then apologized and refrained from asking any more "tough" questions.
You forgot my favorite:
When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an attorney for the ACLU, she co-authored a report recommending that the age of consent for sexual acts be lowered to 12 years of age ("Sex Bias in the U.S. Code," Report for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, April 1977, p. 102). The paragraph reads as follows: "Eliminate the phrase "carnal knowledge of any female, not his wife, who has not attained the age of 16 years" and substitute a federal, sex-neutral definition of the offense.... A person is guilty of an offense if he engages in a sexual act with another person.... [and] the other person is, in fact, less than 12 years old..)"
big bump
big bump
That was Orrin Hatch. He exposed her hypocrisy on this issue, then let her off the hook. He asked her whether a low percentage of minority employees makes an employer guilty of racist hiring practices, and should that employer be sanctioned. When she gave her emphatic yes, he pointed out that she had never once hired a black person, although she had hired many people. Presumably he did it to make a point. I believe he voted to confirm her.
This brilliant article needs more notice!
Bump
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.