Ruth Bader Ginsburg Didn’t Understand Her Job
Excerpt: Justice Ginsburg’s using her position to try to impose a feminist vision on federal policy ought to be recognized for what it was: an abuse of power. If you want to rewrite the law along feminist lines, that’s a perfectly honorable project — run for Congress. The real fissure running through the Supreme Court is not between so-called liberals and notional conservatives, but between those who believe that judges are superlegislators empowered to impose their own vision on society and those who believe that judges are constrained by what the law actually says. The latter is the position of the Federalist Society and many lawyers associated with it, and that this position — that the law says what it says, not what people with power wish for it to say — should be controversial is an excellent indicator of why faith in our institutions has eroded so deeply. (...) I do not believe that judges are incapable of actually doing their jobs even if that means following the law to results other than the ones they would prefer — Justice Scalia’s account of the flag-burning issue is one example showing that it can be done the right way — but doing so would mean trying to do that job rather than treating the federal bench as a stage for score-settling, advantage-seeking, and constituent-servicing. If you don’t believe that judges should be constrained by the law — that power is power is power and that’s that — then you don’t have much of an argument against Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell filling this seat, which is not “Ginsburg’s seat.” [Williamson is exactly right on this. Ron P.]
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