RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the Kavanaugh controversy, the acts of three women, all high-visibility national figures, and all of whom have now become the leaders of the Democratic party and the MeToo movement, were central.  In July 2016, Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg injected herself into the presidential elections by the unprecedented declaration of a Supreme Court justice that she could not “imagine” what the country would be like “with Donald Trump as our president.”  She then called Trump a “faker.”  Trump quite correctly responded that she should resign, but no one else at the time seemed to care about the compromise of her “judicial restraint and demeanor” – and her judicial impartiality.

After President Trump’s July nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the 85-year-old Ginsburg reassured Democrats about the future of the Court by announcing her intention to serve “at least five more years.”  Then, one day before Kavanaugh’s Senate testimony, she inserted herself into the proceedings of the Senate by effectively testifying for Kavanaugh-accuser Christine Blasey Ford.  In declaring her support for the #MeToo movement, Ginsburg said “women nowadays are not silent about bad behavior.”  She then emphasized her views by the if-looks-could-kill expression on her face at Kavanaugh’s swearing in.

Topping off all these acts and statements from Ginsburg in the last three months, perhaps, will be the release in November of the movie On the Basis of Sex, a full-length feature film about the early life and litigating career of the justice.  Trailers show that the movie will be worshipful.

Hawaii Democrat senator Mazie Hirono, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee who questioned Kavanaugh at his hearing, expressed her own self-restraint in her calm and rational consideration of Kavanaugh’s nomination by telling all men “in this country” to “shut up and step up.”  Senate Democrats comprehensively denied due process to Kavanaugh; Hirono’s remark extended that to the rejection of the protection of political speech, which was the original purpose of the First Amendment.

It may be appropriate that such a public position has been enunciated by a high-ranking Democrat from Hawaii, which has elected only one Republican Unites States senator in its 59 years of existence.  The question now becomes how this new agenda of the Democratic Party will be proclaimed to the rest of the country, especially if the Democrats win control of Congress.

Finally, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the senior senator from the similar Democratic redoubt of California, who, as a member of the Judiciary Committee, questioned Kavanaugh, held the Ford letter in secret for almost two months before making it public at a strategic time when the Kavanaugh nomination seemed to be assured.  In 2017, Feinstein attacked Trump judicial nominee and Notre Dame law professor Amy Coney Barrett at Barrett’s Judiciary Committee hearing to be a federal appeals court judge.  Feinstein, referring to Barrett’s Catholicism, openly questioned whether Barrett would be impartial as a judge because “the dogma lives loudly in you.”  Thus did Feinstein go on public record in opposition to the prohibition of any “religious test” for federal public office as set out in Article VI of the Constitution.

If the Democrats win control of the Senate, and since Californian Feinstein is certain to be re-elected, Feinstein, who is currently the ranking minority member, will become chairperson of the Judiciary Committee.

Worried about a decline in judicial activism and a possible renaissance in constitutionalism, the Democratic Party and the #MeToo movement could not help but oppose Kavanaugh for political and philosophic purposes.  What rocked the country were the unprecedented and anti-constitutional means by which they did so.

Thomas R. Ascik has written on a wide range of legal and constitutional issues.