Justice Ginsburg Speaks:
In Thursday's New York Times, Linda Greenhouse had a very interesting essay on how outspoken Justice Ginsburg has become in her dissents, particularly in cases that touch on the Supreme Court's role in the political system:
The question is, why? One theory is that Ginsburg's goal is the same as Justice Blackmun's near the end of his career: to influence the outcome of the next Presidential election by rallying the troops. In his Planned Parenthood v. Casey dissent, in 1992, Justice Blackmun seemed to be speaking to voters: "I am 83 years old," Blackmun wrote. "I cannot remain on this Court forever, and when I do step down, the confirmation process for my successor well may focus on the issue before us today." Get the hint? A year later, Clinton was elected, and within two years Blackmun and Justice White had resigned and been replaced with Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. This is just speculation, obviously, but I wonder if Ginsburg has Blackmun's efforts in mind. (Of course, if true, that doesn't mean Ginsburg herself is considering retiring after the next election; she may just want to influence the political system to increase the chances that future colleagues share her views.)
The justice’s acquaintances have watched with great interest what some depict as a late-career transformation. “Her style has always been very ameliorative, very conscious of etiquette,” said Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, the sociologist and a longtime friend. “She has always been regarded as sort of a white-glove person, and she’s achieved a lot that way. Now she is seeing that basic issues she’s fought so hard for are in jeopardy, and she is less bound by what have been the conventions of the court.”I'm just speculating, of course, but my tentative guess is the same as Debra Ness's: "She’s sounding an alarm and wants people to take notice." It's the same reaction I had to Ginsburg's warning about the Term back in January.
Some might say her dissents are an expression of sour grapes over being in the minority more often than not. But there may be strategic judgment, as well as frustration, behind Justice Ginsburg’s new style. She may have concluded that quiet collegiality has proved futile and that her new colleagues, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., are not open to persuasion on the issues that matter most to her.
The question is, why? One theory is that Ginsburg's goal is the same as Justice Blackmun's near the end of his career: to influence the outcome of the next Presidential election by rallying the troops. In his Planned Parenthood v. Casey dissent, in 1992, Justice Blackmun seemed to be speaking to voters: "I am 83 years old," Blackmun wrote. "I cannot remain on this Court forever, and when I do step down, the confirmation process for my successor well may focus on the issue before us today." Get the hint? A year later, Clinton was elected, and within two years Blackmun and Justice White had resigned and been replaced with Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. This is just speculation, obviously, but I wonder if Ginsburg has Blackmun's efforts in mind. (Of course, if true, that doesn't mean Ginsburg herself is considering retiring after the next election; she may just want to influence the political system to increase the chances that future colleagues share her views.)
This is clearly a campaign of public perception, aided by certain members of the press such as Slate's Lithwick. The troubling part for Ginsburg reputation though is that facts and events don't--at least not yet--substantiate her insinuations.
I'm not sure what you mean here. If Ginsburg is trying to affect the political process, it's because she would rather not wait until "facts and events" actually mirrored her concerns.
As a point of contrast, if the defendant in Ledbetter had been a black male, not a female (it was a Title VII case), I sincerely don't think she would have spoken from the bench. But because it was a woman, and she spent most of her practicing life advocating for these causes, it is causing her to speak up now.
As for whether she's trying to drop hints about the upcoming election: probably unlikely. She's no fool, and she knows as well as anyone that Supreme Court nominations are not what ultimately persuade voters in their presidential votes (though they should). With respect to Prof. Kerr, I don't think anybody can seriously claim that Justice Blackmun's passage in Casey influenced the outcome of the 1992 election. Sure, abortion politics played a role (as always), but to assign any influence to Justice Blackmun's statement is to wildly overstate the attention paid by the general public to the actual content of Supreme Court opinions (to say nothing of dissents).
It's remarkable how years and years of Scalia's sniping dissents are not seen as "polarizing" or "campaigning from the bench." But let Ginsburg speak out forcefully on an issue she has championed all her adult life and suddenly she's a partisan hack.
IOKIYAR?
In addition to Blackmun, we saw some of this with Marshall at the end, who was also bitter that he had to go, and (perhaps not so) jokingly said to his aides that if he died, they should just prop his body up and "keep votin'". Not much law being practiced in that seat, I suspect.
These folks just stay too long, and apparently have a sense of entitlement. Rehnquist had to be taken out in a body bag too, so this isn't strictly an ideological phenomenon, but I'd say it's more prevanlent on the Left, who are bitter that the good old days now seem to be passing. They caught a break when Whizzer White stepped down and they picked up that slot, but that doesn't change the longterm movement away from the penumbras and emanations sorta work the lefties were accustomed to, so not hard to see why they're so bitter.
Perhaps she should run for Congress...
Blackdoggerel, I merely said that this was Justice Blackmun's goal in speaking the way he did.
Hewart,
Scalia's been a smart aleck his entire life and career, nothing new there either before or since he's taken on his current assignment.
Madame Ginsberg, on the other hand, is drastically changing her business approach... clearly... which is why Volokh commented on it. The reason? Well as I mentioned above, I think it's got more to do with her PERSONALLY than any particular case. She's seen plenty of cases in her time... but now she knows she's seeing some of the last cases that she'll ever see... and they ain't goin' her way... and she's bitter about it.
Ya' know, Slater, if that's what they truly said, I might have to agree with you. There are many things wrong with what those folks do and how they do it, particularly regarding abortion, but that is certainly an inartful bit of phrasing to say no more.
Well, I'm off to polish my script for "Weekend at Thurgood's."
Hmmmmm, that sounds familiar somehow!
As for attempting to influence an election, I think that Ginsburg is smart enough to know that many of her stands are not great issues for democrats in picking up votes at the margin. But the sex discrimination may very well be a case (remember Aramco?) where she spurs Congress into action. And nothing wrong with that -- a judge is absolutely permitted to draw attention to a legislative need. And a dissenting judge is certainly permitted to say that Congress should act to correct what she sees as the majority's misinterpretation.
Ah. Sorry for misinterpreting the post. And many more apologies for attributing Justice Blackmun's thoughts to you!
Sub in "money" or "schooling" for "abortion" and this pretty much sums up the thrust of the opposition to tax cuts and privatizing Social Security and school vouchers, no?
Ginsburg's theatrics were nothing but an attempt to give Hillary another way to carry out her election strategy, which is to appeal to what she sees as an untapped reservoir of younger female voters. I do believe Sen. Clinton took Ginsburg's advice and introduced the bill Ginsburg asked for the very next day after the opinion. Mission Accomplished.
She doesn't represent women. Since 1/2 of women don't agree with the radical feminist agenda she may represent about 1/2 of women.
As others have pointed out she is far from the first justice to stay on years sometimes decades after their intellect, temperment, and better judgment (assuming they had any to begin with) left them.
Says The "Dog"
Radical, you say?
Firstly (and most superficially), I had the quasi-pleasure of attending Georgetown Law School's graduation ceremony this year, to which Justice Ginsburg was a surprise guest. It was just short of a liberal propaganda rally, especially compared to the other half-dozen law school graduations I have attended. Ginsburg's attendance was, no doubt, both a cause of and due to the left-leaning tone of the event, especially given the rumor that Ginsburg had a hand in the selection of Nina Totenberg as the keynote
propagandistspeaker.Secondly, I thought there were multiple tenable dissents in Ledbetter, but Ginsburg appeared to dissent on the most political of policy grounds. For example, Alito's focus on previous intentional discriminatory pay-setting acts and disregard for the subsequent payment acts appears at odds with how intent elements operate in other legal fields. Torts especially carries the intent element to subsequent acts that were known or intended to occur as a result of an initial intentional act (see the mantrap cases like Katko). If the rule really is "if an employer
engages in a series of acts each of which is intentionally
discriminatory, then a fresh violation takes place
when each act is committed" the Court should be honest that intent functions differently in their Title VII precedents. As for policy arguments, I thought Slate's article by R.T. Ford (www.slate.com/id/2167286/) set out much more persuasive policies against the majority's view, but Ginsburg's dissent looks more toward diaphanous legislative intent and pleads for correction from the political branches.
The objection to vouchers is that they constitute state subsidies of religion and hurt public schools and thus the majority of students; the objection to tax cuts (of the Bush kind) is that they increase economic inequality by favoring the rich and also contribute to budget deficits; and the objections to Bush's privitization proposal for Social Security was that it was obviously unworkable because it didn't make anything like a serious attempt to have the numbers add up.
You may or may not agree with any of those objections (I'm guessing you don't), but be intellectually honest. Those are all very defensible arguments, and they are all quite different from five men telling women as a group that they need to be protected from their own potential foolishness when it comes to their constitutionally protected right to choose to terminate a pregnancy or not. Part -- not all, but part -- of the abortion decision clearly played on sex stereotypes (inconstant woman!) that should have been discarded long ago. That, I suspect, is what prompted Ginsburg reading her dissent.
And even if you don't buy that, as others have pointed out, the vitriolic dissent and the reading the dissent thing has been done more by Scalia. If you don't like Ginsburg, fine, that's your right, but let's not pretend this is something unique to her or particularly objectionable.
wouldn't that have been the point of her dissent? she knew her opinion certainly wasn't going to be the majority one. only legislative action could overrule the opinion...it's not like there is a higher court that can do it.
Yes, of course. If the court had engaged in the practice of law, and not politics, it would have struck down the Act under the Equal Protection Clause, penumbra 78, emanation 62, clause 7.
Well, you didn't defend them, Slater, but I'll go ahead and attack them for you. Competitition generally forces improvement in services. Consumers force competition, if they're allowed to do so. Parents choosing schools benefits their children, and education in general, by forcing that competition. Vouchers can be an important piece to that. This is all pretty basic stuff, if you're not a reactionary looking to protect the status quo... which is failing.
The "Bush tax cuts" have brought in more money... which is the purpose of taxation. SPENDING is driving the deficit, and your friend Bush has jacked spending at least 50% during his time.
Social Security numbers will NEVER add up... as you should know by now. Structural change is necessary, and privitization is likely a necessary component to that, and the 401k system of savings might be a useful model for that change.
Oh, and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Ginsburg is a tired old crab.
You're missing the point. As I said already, the issue here isn't whether vouchers are good policy or not. I was questioning Constantin's analogies to Ginsburg's dissent.
Specifically, I said Ginsburg dissented from the bench in part because of the "we must protect women from decisions they will regret" part of the majority's decision. That's not analogous to critics of vouchers. Critics of vouchers don't care if a woman (or man) sends their kids to a religious school. They're not saying, "we must ban religious schools because parents might regret later sending kids there." If critics were saying that, that would be as insulting as the majority opinion was in the abortion case. But of course that's not what they say. They object to public funds (their own tax dollars) going to what are pretty much always religious schools. So it's not a good analogy, whatever one's position is on the merits.
And this isn't the place to debate the other issues on their merits either.
To get back to the point, when Scalia issues bitter/whiny dissents, including those he reads from the bench, is he a "tired old crab," in your opinion?
Just because something is bad policy is not a reason to dissent. Simply concur saying precedent/statutory analysis compels the result and that result should be superceded by amending the statute. I agree with RallyMonkey that she should have dissented on stronger legal grounds.
I'm sorry for using a phrase that seemed to impugn your motives. It would have been better for me just to say that I thought they were poor analogies.
I still think they are. I understand your point is that there is a common thread: "the government vs. the individual making the decision for the individual." But again, to use vouchers as an example, critics are not objecting to parents choosing to send their kids to parochial school -- critics are objecting to parents using public funds, including the tax monies of the critics, to fund what is practically always religious education. Nobody is saying, "oh, protect those parents from themselves." They are saying, "don't use my tax dollars to support your religion."
Again, I hasten to add, the point here is not to get into the merits of the voucher debate, just to say it's not the same thing as what Ginsburg was objecting to in the abortion decision.
Slater, the funds belong to the taxpayers... the parents... "their own tax dollars" as you put it, and it's only right (and educationally reform-based) that they be allowed to send their kids where they want, and have their money follow that choice. Currently, all kinds of "funds" go to support religious schools (busing, extracurricular activities, and countless others), so obviously, "religious schools" isn't what the voucher opponents are all about... it's about something other than that as I think you'd have to agree (even though a few atheists will be in the mix arguing). IMO, this is a group of reactionaries, seeking to retain the status quo... and their power and wealth.
But I'll skip the analogy to the legal case, you and the other guy can sort that out. Good luck!
As mentioned previously, Scalia does what he's always done, and I can't really see any change in him, not that I pay attention, but I'd notice it if it became apparent as it is now with Ginsberg. This is a change, clearly, from both her own past personal and even (some say) the court's actions, which draws Volokh's curiousity certainly, and begs an explanation. Mine is that she's a tired, old crab, who's watching it all slip away and knows she'll be gone soon (sudden character changes are personal... not political, IMO).
Now, if Scalia does something out of character, why then we'll have to address that too. But he's not a repressed old liberal shrew though, he's a little salty and you can expect the acerbic stuff as a matter of course from him... it's in-character.
I generally dislike courtroom proceedings, however necessary, but there was one moment in the Bush vs. Gore thing that was hilarious (they had audio at the SC, which I believe was unprecedented). One of the lawyers was up on the block and kept addressing a couple of the judges by the wrong names, enough to establish it as a minor communication problem. Anyways, he finally got himself straightened out and the proceeding went on and everybody forgot about it, but a while later brother Tony decides he has a question for the barrister, so he says: "Uh, Mr. Blahblah, I'm Scalia." The whole room broke up!
That's the difference. You can obviously see that Scalia is just gonna let 'er rip, even if the fate of the whole free world and the most powerful office is on the table. He lets it out, and Ginsberg is finally letting it out too, I guess. But it's out of character for her, and thus this discussion topic.
Again, I'm not going to make this into a debate about vouchers, but again, the objection is that while I don't care what school you send your kids to with your money, I don't want to support various religious institutions with my and other people's tax dollars. That is the standard argument by voucher opponents. You don't have to agree with that argument, but I hope you can understand why it's not analogous to "the government needs to protect women from making stupid choices." I don't care if you use YOUR money to send your kid to the local Madrassa -- just don't use my tax dollars.
As to the Scalia comparison, your point is that he's always been a jerk, so that's unremarkable, but when Ginsburg reads two dissents from the bench, that's some huge sign that we should worry about her? In other words, because she's been nicer in the past, you can bash her now, for doing what Scalia has repeatedly done?
It would be fair if you had only said what you said in your last paragraph: it's "out of character" for her. I'll agree with that. But if you're going to judge her negatively for doing certain things, you have to judge other Justicies that do those same things more at least as negatively.
And no, I didn't say Scalia was a "jerk". Heck, I would have thought it clear that I admire the guy's approach to his work, including the salt, but I guess you're reading something else into what I said. Hmmmmm, sounds familiar!
I don't "worry" about her, believe me. Hey, nobody said she broke any laws, she just broke her own mold, is all, with a whiny and emotional rant. That's ok. I'm hoping she gets another bunch of reasons to whine, as a few more of the penumbras are dissolved over the next while.
It's up to her how she wants to be remembered, and if that's how she wants to go out...
I doubt Scalia is worried about that, he'll go out the same way he came in, I suspect.
(Yes, yes, I know; Bolling v. Sharpe and so forth...)
"tired old crab" ... "repressed old liberal shrew" ... "whiny and emotional rant" ... and JYLD chimes in with "bitchy."
Seriously, can't y'all disagree with Justice Ginsburg in a substantive way without making it about her gender? You're almost making me question whether you have any actual understanding of constitutional law...
Go up to that other discussion, and you'll see me calling Stevens whiny, too. If I call him a tired old wrinkled up lemon puss, would you feel better about it all?
She's nearly gone, that's getting clearer and clearer, and she's going out on a bad note it seems, by her choice. You add your adjectives for that departure process, and I'll add mine. Deal?
So I guess it's okay for Scalia to be a jerk, because he's a big ole loveable jerk and always has been. But Ginsberg was so very civilized, and now has turned into a jerk, and, being a gal and all that, that's really bad.