Justice Ginsburg: Poster child for courts gone wrong

By Wes Vernon

Whenever the Democrats regain control of the White House (maybe about 2050) we should hope that the Republicans will at a minimum have a large minority in the U. S. Senate (if not an outright majority) and that they will use their power to take a long hard look at whatever left-wing space cadet the president sends up for nomination to the Supreme Court.

The last time a Democrat president nominated a jurist to the highest court in the land, the Republicans bowed and scraped and rubber stamped it, and we are today paying the price.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg went to South Africa last month and said not only was she referring to foreign laws as an input to her interpretation of American law and the U.S. Constitution, but those of us who have the quaint notion that American judges are bound by the letter of American law and the U.S. Constitution are fuddy-duddies who ought to get with it.

Ginsburg (the former ACLU lawyer who thinks prostitution ought to be a constitutional right and that she is open to considering the question of polygamy as a right) told her audience the following:

"The notion that it is improper to look beyond the borders of the United States in grappling with hard questions...is in line with the view of the Constitution as a document essentially frozen in time as of the date of its ratification."

Justice Ginsburg said she was "not a partisan of that view." That is not news to those of us who have despaired as this woman has presumed to make up her own laws as she goes along.

She went on to say, "U.S. jurists honor the Framers' intent to create a more perfect Union, I believe, if they read the Constitution as belonging to a global 21st Century, not fixed forever by 18th Century understanding."

In other words, those old fogies — George Washington, Ben Franklin Alexander Hamilton — what did they know?

We could go on and on about how Ginsburg and her leftist cohorts of the judiciary have prostituted the law and stretched the Constitution beyond all recognition just because they don't like the laws that were approved by the people's elected representatives or because they can't deal with the plain meaning of the Constitution.

The more relevant question is how these judges get approved in the first place. This outrageous jurist — nominated by President Clinton in 1993, was confirmed by the Senate on a vote of 97 to 3. The dissenters — Senators Don Nickles (R-Oklahoma), Robert Smith (R-New Hampshire), and Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina) are always to be honored. The other Republicans who did not even put up a fight — despite Ginsburg's known left-wing record — might as well have been potted plants.

Not only have Republicans failed to blow the whistle on bad judicial nominees when they are in the minority. What is far worse, GOP senators have not always stood up for good nominees when they are in the majority.

All well and good that they worked successfully to get Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito confirmed. But some lower court nominees are on ice in the Senate, and there is no perceptible movement in this Republican Senate to get them confirmed.

Columnist Robert Novak points out that 11 of President Bush's nominees are languishing on Capitol Hill. The jurist whose nomination has been blocked for the longest period of time is U.S.District Judge Terrence W. Boyle. He was nominated on May 9, 2001 to the U.S. Court of Appeals. Democrats — in the minority — have sat on it and have held it in abeyance under the threat of a filibuster.

Novak says Senator Edward Kennedy's filibuster strategy is "keeping open 20 appellate judgeships for a Democratic president to fill."

This is the fallout from last year's "Gang of 14" deal by 7 Democrats and 7 "moderate" (read liberal) Republicans. Under that arrangement, the Republicans would not break the filibustering of judicial nominees. In return, the Democrats would not support the unconstitutional filibuster of court picks. This column at the time opposed the deal. The Dems essentially said they would start obeying the Constitution if the Republicans would not make them obey it.

There apparently is no sign of action on the above judicial nominations. Why not? There is no "extraordinary circumstance" that would give any of the 7 Democrat senators an excuse to support a filibuster.

Why are the Republicans playing dead on this one? Why were they sent to the Senate? So they could allow Kennedy to reserve seats on the bench for extremists like Ginsburg?

One final note: Last week Justice Ginsburg said that she and former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor have been the targets of death threats from the "irrational fringe of society." This was an implied reference to people who believe the Constitution means what it says, not what Justice Ginsburg thinks it ought to say.

There you have another old chestnut yanked out to be paraded every time some Americans disagree with the left: Tell them to shut up or take responsibility for violence or threats of violence.

That happened in the Oklahoma City bombing which President Clinton and his media echoes blamed on Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. Shades of the JFK assassination when the mainstream media (about the only media there was in those days) hinted in a not too subtle fashion that if you opposed the man politically, you were responsible for his murder.

So we've been down that road before, Justice Ginsburg. We know what you're up to, and we're not stupid. You will not stifle dissent in these United States of America. If some nut case threatens violence, law enforcement authorities can deal with the nut case, not with law-abiding citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. Many judges have the tendency to regard any criticism of their actions as tantamount to insurrection. But in the final analysis, they are politicians in black robes, no more excused from public criticism than the politicians who actually have to answer to the voters.

© Wes Vernon