You don’t have to be a Court junkie

…to appreciate a crisp, clear lambaste involving a false image of a justice.

These days, a lot of political folks have been using the buzz phrase “speak truth to power”.

This law and politics blogger, who has law credentials, seems to be doing that. He’s talking about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The idea that she is some kind of elegant, delicate flower who has been forced by the big, bad conservatives to descend into the hurly burly of the political rough and tumble is a complete fantasy of the New York Times and Linda Greenhouse.  That is to say, utter rubbish.  Justice Ginsburg has been hurly burlying for a long time.  She was a civil rights litigator for heaven’s sake.  She’s an old school feminist…

I make no claim to be hip to the profundities of the jurisprudence of the U.S. Supreme Court.  But can I be the only one whose intelligence is insulted by this attitude of, oh, golly, the Carhart decision is just politics, not law.  You start with Roe v. Wade, a decision that sprang, like Athena from the brow of Zeus, out of Justice Blackmun’s none too cerebrally blessed head, a decision so appallingly made up that those of us who went to law school in the ’80’s had to suffer through years of tendentious theories of “non-interpretive judicial review,” that is, theories about how making it up isn’t really quite exactly making it up, though, in the alternative, it is OK to make things up if you really have to, and then, when decades later, the Court decides, with at least some guidance from Congress, to say, well, abortion is OK, but you know, if it’s a baby already, and half-way out, and Congress says so, then, well, you shouldn’t just, you know, squish its little head, we have to sit here and listen to the paroxysms of indignation that this is politics, not law.  That we run the risk of making poor, old, apolitical, white glove clad Justice Ginsburg descend from the Platonic heaven of pure juridical dispassion, and read her dissent from the bench.  Oh, my, we’ve done it now.

Abortion activists – political, legal, cultural and otherwise – can’t get over what the Court did in the partial birth abortion ban decision. Fine. As long as they’re dwelling on it, maybe they could read Justice Kennedy’s opinion in that decision again. If they can stomach it.

(Tip to Bench Memos for the link.)