Opinion
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s unhinged assault on Trump
By Seth Lipsky
No wonder they call her Notorious RBG. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has just declared war against Donald Trump, announcing that if he is elected president, she’d consider moving to New Zealand.
It
would be a good place for her. I haven’t done a double-blind study, but it’s
hard to recall — or find on the Web — an instance of another Supreme Court
justice diving into politics quite the way Ginsburg has just done.
Ginsburg’s
comment came in an interview with The New York Times’ Supreme Court scribe,
Adam Liptak. He was so astounded that he warned his readers before he
reported her comments that normally justices “diligently avoid political
topics.”
Ginsburg,
Liptak notes, “takes a different approach.” Then he quotes her as saying in her
Supreme Court chambers: “I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t
imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president.”
The
justice said something similar to the Associated Press the day before. But it
was to Liptak that she said she was reminded of what her late husband would have
said: “Now it’s time for us to move to New Zealand.”
As
she said it, according to Liptak, she was smiling “ruefully.”
It
wasn’t the only line she crossed in the interview.
Ginsburg also daydreamed-out-loud about overturning the gun-rights case known as
Heller. The Times even 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.
The
Trump comments are even more controversial. Imagine if one of the conservative
justices had said such a thing about the prospect of, say, a President
Hillary Clinton. There’d be a cacophony of calls for impeachment. Or at least
demands that the justice recuse herself in cases involving Clinton.
Remember
what happened when Justice Antonin Scalia, on a hunting trip in Louisiana,
fetched up in a duck blind with Vice President Dick Cheney? Even though
Scalia never made any political comments, the controversy rattled on for weeks.
The
New York Times got so upset about it that it demanded that the other eight
justices on the Supreme Court step in and remove Scalia from a case involving
the vice president. The court ignored the Gray Lady’s advice.
So
far, Ginsburg’s electioneering hasn’t been met with even a peep of protest from
the editorial board of the Times — or any other Democratic Party-aligned paper.
Then again, she’s a liberal.
When
Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court, the left even tried to make
an issue of his wife’s job in the Bush administration’s Labor Department. Not
only must a conservative judge stay out of politics, the left reckons, but so
must his spouse.
It’s
not my purpose here to belittle the heroic side of Ginsburg, who rose by dint
not only of her great intelligence but a fantastically strong character.
Yet
she has a whacky side. Four years ago she fetched up in Egypt during the
so-called “Arab Spring” and gave an interview to Al-Hayat television, which
asked her for advice in forming the country’s new constitution.
“I
would not look to the US Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the
year 2012,” she said. She went on to suggest that Egyptians might look at the
constitution of South Africa.
“That
was a deliberate attempt to have a fundamental instrument of government that
embraced basic human rights, had an independent judiciary,” Ginsburg said (as
if this were not the case with the Constitution she is bound by oath to
support).
To
Egypt the justice also commended Canada’s new Charter of Rights and Freedoms and
Europe’s Convention on Human Rights. “Yes,” she said, “why not take advantage
of what there is elsewhere in the world?”
All
those constitutions dole out rights like peanuts. South Africa’s grants people
the right to a name, an occupation, a labor union, a clean environment,
housing, health care, education, language and culture.
Ginsburg
failed to mark for Egypt a difference with America’s Constitution: Ours grants
almost no rights at all. What it does is prohibit the government from
interfering with pre-existing rights that come from man’s — and woman’s —
creator.
So
maybe there’s a certain logic to Ginsburg jumping into the political fray.
Maybe the other justices will follow. Chief Justice John Roberts could give a
nominating speech for Donald Trump.
And
if Trump manages to win the presidency, maybe Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will
move to Auckland. She’d be right at home there. It turns out that New Zealand
doesn’t even have a constitution.
Ginsburg Goes Rogue
By Editorial Board
Some
things are better left unsaid. Exhibit A:
In
recent interviews,
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg expressed horror at the prospect of a
Donald Trump presidency: “I can’t imagine what this place would be -- I can’t
imagine what the country would be -- with Donald Trump as our president,” she told
a reporter. “For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it
could be -- I don’t even want to contemplate it.”
Ginsburg
has earned a reputation
for delivering sharply pointed opinions. It’s no
secret that her politics are liberal, just as it’s no secret that Clarence Thomas’s
are conservative. Despite the court’s partisan divide, however, tradition holds
that justices stay above the political fray. And there’s much to be said for
keeping up appearances.
The
Founding Fathers gave justices lifetime
appointments to ensure that they could remain impartial, and the court
likes to be seen as studiously neutral in political matters. When the president
delivers a State of the Union address, justices sit on their hands in the front
row, refusing to applaud anything he says.
It’s
a charade, of course, but an important one. The public expects justices to
decide cases on the legal merits. And the court’s legitimacy rests on public
acceptance of its rulings. The more people see the court as arm of a political
party, the more likely they are to resist or ignore its decisions.
To
sustain the rule of law, members of the court must respect the public’s
expectation of judicial neutrality. If justices wish to increase public
transparency of the court’s workings, there are better
ways to do it.
Many
Republicans are rightly outraged at Ginsburg’s comments, but Democrats should
be, too -- and they surely would be if the situation were reversed.
Ginsburg’s
loose lips should not set a precedent for the court. Publicly or privately,
Chief Justice John Roberts ought to make that clear to all current and future
members.
