Travesty of a Justice -Ginsburg traduces judicial norms. James Taranto
http://www.wsj.com/articles/travesty-of-a-justice-1468348145
Supreme Court justices have gotten involved in partisan politics before. Charles Evans Hughes even ran for president. But he resigned from the court before accepting the 1916 Republican presidential nomination. (He returned to the court in 1930, when President Hoover appointed him to succeed Chief Justice William Howard Taft, himself a former president.)
Ruth Bader Ginsburg should have resigned before giving her latest interview, to the New York Times’s Adam Liptak. “Unless they have a book to sell, Supreme Court justices rarely give interviews,” Liptak boasts. “Even then, they diligently avoid political topics.” Ginsburg, he gently observes, “takes a different approach”:
These days, she is making no secret of what she thinks of a certain presidential candidate.
“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 said. “For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be—I don’t even want to contemplate that.”
It reminded her of something her husband, Martin D. Ginsburg, a prominent tax lawyer who died in 2010, would have said.
“‘Now it’s time for us to move to New Zealand,’ ” Justice Ginsburg said, smiling ruefully.
“She’d feel right at home there,” quips the New York Sun’s Seth Lipsky. “It turns out that New Zealand doesn’t even have a constitution.” Instead it has a series of statutes called the Constitution Act of 1986. Also New Zealanders drive on the left.
While we’re on the subject, Statistics New Zealand, a government agency, has “busted” the “myth” that the country has 20 sheep for every human inhabitant, a factoid that “adds weight to myriad sheep jokes,” as the Stats NZ website complains. In reality, “the sheep-to-person ratio has fallen and contrary to popular belief there are actually about six sheep per person, not 20.” The site is silent as to how Ginsburg’s immigration would affect the ratio.
Actually, her choice of country is the best thing about Ginsburg’s latest emanations. At least she departed from the tired trope of celebrities’ threatening emptily to move to Canada if a Republican is elected president. But a Supreme Court justice should not be expressing an opinion about an election, unless—as in the case of Bush v. Gore (2000), it becomes necessary for the court to resolve a legal dispute arising from it.
And 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.” We should note that by contrast, we were totally sincere in crediting her for going with New Zealand rather than Canada.
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.
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