Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently joined Hillary Clinton, Janet Reno, anti-Pledge-of-Allegiance Judge Stephen Reinhardt, and other like-mined liberals and feminists to launch a new organization called the American Constitution Society. Its mission is to challenge the Federalist Society, which promotes the nomination of judges who believe in the U.S. Constitution and in America's unique system of federalism.
The left doesn't believe that the Constitution should be the benchmark of court decisions or that we should abide by the its requirement that "all legislative powers" belong to the Congress. Liberals believe that new rights should be invented and public policies dictated by supposedly more enlightened judges.
At any rate, it's easier to get life-tenured judges than democratically-elected legislatures to adopt leftist policies. That's the undercurrent driving the Democrats' filibuster against President Bush's judicial nominees.
Ginsburg's writing and speaking style is usually somewhere between convoluted and obscure, but she delighted the new group with a noteworthy triple entendre. Referring to Supreme Court decisions, she urged us to get rid of "the Lone Ranger mentality."
First, this was clearly a cut at Bush because he is closely associated with the word ranger. His baseball club was the Texas Rangers, and his top-of-the-line fundraisers are affectionately called Rangers.
Second, Ginsburg's remark was a not-so-subtle sneer at President Bush's foreign policy, which has been impudently criticized by the snooty Europeans for its "unilaterialism" and "cowboy" approach. Ginsburg bragged that the Supreme Court is "becoming more open to international law perspectives," looking to United Nations treaties and foreign courts for guidance in deciding gay rights, death penalty and affirmative action cases.
Third, Ginsburg's comment was indelibly characteristic of the biased lingo of the radical feminists who hate everything masculine. The Lone Ranger and the Texas Rangers, God bless 'em, are very masculine.
Because of her low-key manner, many people don't realize what a feminist extremist she is, but she laid it all out before she ascended to the Court in a book called "Sex Bias in the U.S. Code." It was filled with a lot of radical feminist demands, such as assigning women to military combat duty, affirmative action for women in the armed services, federal financing of comprehensive daycare, and the sex integration of the Boy and Girl Scouts.
The real purpose of the new American Constitution Society is to recruit candidates for the federal judiciary who will continue the current Supreme Court's custom of deciding cases on the basis of the justices' own policy preferences rather than by referring to the U.S. Constitution. In this year's shocking decisions, the Court abandoned all pretense of basing rulings on what the U.S. Constitution allows or forbids.
Some liberals openly preach the "evolution" of the Constitution, or assert that judges are merely translating obsolete language into a "living" Constitution. Liberal Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe is more blunt: he calls it the "free-form method."
This spring, the Supreme Court dealt devastating blows to longstanding American laws and beliefs about morals and about a just society, and did this without advancing any argument that reasonably relates to the U.S. Constitution. The Court struck down our right to legislate against immoral actions (Lawrence v. Texas), and the Court exalted "diversity" as a new rule that trumps nondiscrimination on account of race (Grutter v. Bollinger).
No constitutional argument justifies those two decisions that create new rights of sodomy and reverse racial discrimination. They evolved out of the social preferences of the shifting majorities of justices and their pandering to the liberal elites.
Ginsburg's tour de force to aid the feminists' campaign against everything masculine was her sudden discovery in 1996 of a new right for women to enroll in Virginia Military Institute. Nobody else had detected that right in the Constitution for 157 years.
Ginsburg has long been on record as wanting cases to be decided on her version of what she calls "the equality principle" (rather than on the Constitution). Her "equality" notions include the right to abortion at taxpayers' expense (which the Supreme Court rejected in 1980), and a mindless gender neutrality that would include eliminating the concept of "breadwinning husband" and "dependent, homemaking wife."
The influence of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is clearly seen in another 2003 decision that shocked observers, Nevada Dept. of Human Resources v. Hibbs. The court's tirade against "stereotypes" (a word used 19 times) which supposedly "forced women to continue to assume the role of primary family caregiver" was based on feminist fantasies about a gender-neutral society, not on the U.S. Constitution.
When will the American people call a halt to the tyranny of the Imperial Judiciary and restore "all legislative powers" to the legislatures? Will that happen if some court presumes to invent a new right of same-sex marriage?
