Posted on 09/22/2020 5:29:55 AM PDT by Kaslin
If Ken Starr, in The Wall Street Journal, praises his late friend Ruth Bader Ginsburg as humane, conscientious and just plain nice, that's good enough for me. We can talk later about who's going to take her Supreme Court seat and when.
I am minded, in the meantime, to remember her less as a constitutional bulldozer and more as a jurist cognizant of considerations --tact and caution, chiefly -- that bolster a democratic republic's survival chances.
Down to cases. Roe v. Wade, the 7-2 decision whereby the court turned abortion into a pregnant woman's personal right. A right Ginsburg supported -- only not the way it came to us as a nation, hesitant to declare its unborn just blobs in the womb, pesky little critters who, once fully formed, emerge to demand food, lodging and a college education. She wasn't on the court when Roe came down, 48 years ago next January. She didn't like the court's approach to the job at hand, nonetheless. Here's what she said in a 1993 speech at New York University School of Law:
Roe declared "violative of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment" a Texas criminal abortion statute that allowed abortion only to save a pregnant woman's life. "Suppose the Court had stopped there, rightly declaring unconstitutional the most extreme brand of law in the nation, and had not gone on, as the Court did in Roe, to fashion a regime blanketing the subject, a set of rules that displaced virtually every state law then in force. Would there have been the twenty-year controversy we have witnessed ... ? A less encompassing Roe, one that merely struck down the extreme Texas law and went no further on that day, I believe and will summarize why, might have served to reduce rather than to fuel controversy." Senators considering her nomination to the high court that year didn't know what to make of such a position. She clarified: Her ideal was full autonomy for women and "full equality with men."
You couldn't call her, on such grounds, a sweet little pro-life nun. What you could call her, then and now, is a realist as to the dangers of judicial imperialism. We could use more such realists, by way of ending the hair-pulling, knock-down-drag-out environment in which we consider and vote on Supreme Court nominees. The environment, say, that we're in now, due to her death.
The thought of what lies ahead for the country, amid so much other wreckage in this annus horribilis, makes the flesh crawl. It is, at bottom, about reducing, through conservative appointments, the judicial propensity to pass what are effectively laws of national application rather than adjudicate as cleanly and clearly as possible two parties' fistfights. Roe declared out of the blue a new national policy on the blotting out of unborn life.
The justices in Roe thought to hobble, if not to destroy, state power over abortion. The Ginsburg critique of Roe -- hardly what would be called a pro-life critique -- was that it didn't leave the states free to reach their own solutions. No! We needed, according to the court majority, a national approach. The states' job was to shut up and take the medicine ladled out by Washington -- always a poor approach to the patching up of significant differences among the contending parties.
"OK, let's work things out" was a phrase the Roe majority and its partisans had no need to utter. They had won! Yea! Onward we were to move. Except we didn't, not being ready. The court hadn't reckoned with conscientious and widespread opposition to the taking of unborn life.
Winners and losers make strange and quarrelsome bedfellows in a republic founded on, among other things, the need for thrashing things out, as opposed to thrashing one another with bung starters and baseball bats. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as we will hear frequently in the days leading up to her funeral, had profound beliefs, among them -- you will hear this less -- the belief that judges are not kings, untouchable, unaccountable. She was more at one with Gerald Ford -- "Here the people rule," he said, upon assuming the presidency -- than she likely was with the majority in Roe. It is a point to bear in mind during the hard days ahead.
She always carried a pocket constitution around with her. A South African pocket constitution that is.
Funny but I remember differently. I remember her as the former head Anti American at the ACLU who ruled as such.
Ginzburg openly supported all abortion on demand even late third trimester over baby killing. She also protected and celebrated homosexuality and all its perverse permutations. She distorted and bent the Constitution to weaken and deconstruct the American nation. At her core she hated most Americans. There was nothing “nice” anout her.
She took an oath to uphold the Constitution, and she did not like the Constitution. She was faithless and worked against what this country stands for. She was an awful person.
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and yet, she and justice Scalia were best friendes. So much so the two couples vacationed together.
I will remember her for her lack of professionalism. When she went on her anti Trump rant while a sitting supreme court justice, she should have resigned form the bench. We should never hear that kind of bias from a supreme court justice against a sitting President again.
The press is always trying to depict her as some kind of “women’s rights Maverick”, “tough as nails”, “true leader”, blah blah. She was a POS abortionist who is roasting by an open fire as we speak.
She was openly political in her words and actions. She didn’t even try to hide it and pretend to be apolitical.
Fatal flaw in conservative’s character and especially among most Italians. They tend to be far too tolerant and even become fond of their enemies. They are astonished when at the right moment a knife is plunged deep into their back. It was a character flaw in Scalia to befriend and trust Ginzburg in any way.
my most favorite memory of rbg was her stubborn refusal to retire when it would have been advantageous for democrats to replace her but she held on.. until Donald Trump could replace her. hunger for power did them in. I have to laugh.
I have read and heard people saying she was a trailblazer for women. 1993? Women got the vote in 1920, and many women worked outside the home in factories during WWII. The true trailblazers came before her.
I think she held out to favor her replacement being made by Hitlery as she obviously believed she would win.
I’m best friends with someone whose views are polar opposites... because I like him enough for the one hobby we have in common, and in the hope he may one day convert.
Stopped reading right there.
If this writer is too ignorant to understand that America is a Constitutional Republic then I have no need to read anything else they have to say.
A false premise always delivers a false conclusion.
And that is one thing I will never understand.
Why do you think that our Constitution does not inherently provide for a democratic republic? Please explain.
From whence do the democratic elements of our system of governance derive?
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