Oh my. This is really quite extraordinary: a sitting Supreme Court justice (or any justice, really) weighing in on a presidential election.
The always stellar Mark Joseph Stern has some great analysis of the decision here:
Makes for an interesting theoretical: what if we have a repeat of 2000 and RBG had to recuse, and we still had only 8 on the court?
Make no mistake, this is an incredibly unethical (and wonderful and inspiring) stand for RBG to make, and there is no way she didn’t know what she was doing.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” - Edmund Burke
“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. " – Elie Wiesel
As someone whose limbic brain occasionally reprioritizes logic and reasoning when its had enough of someone’s crap, I empathize completely with RBG.
And should Hilary Clinton win the general election, everyone will adopt their consequentialist thinking caps and commend Ginsburg for standing up for what was right.
I just wonder what those same people will be thinking should another outcome prove not so kind to her decision.
See, I believe she did it on purpose not because she was irrational. I believe she felt in order to defend her values (and American value) she made the choice to be moral over being ethical.
Also, women have been called ‘irrational’ and ‘illogical’ as a replacement for ‘shrewd’ or ‘strategic’ or ‘principled’ for far too long. I say we all give the sister the benefit of the doubt after 84 years and a career and intellect that puts her among the greats. Just sayin…
On the other hand, I’m not sure what kind of difference her comment will make. It seems unlikely to convince anyone to change their vote, or to come out and vote if they otherwise would not have. And the potential downsides worry me a lot. The prospect of her having to recuse herself in a case involving Trump is genuinely worrisome. Also, the court sort of / kind of tries to keep itself somewhat removed from standard partisan politics, and that’s really been falling apart, and this won’t help
Yeah - master plan to suss out response or just RBG bein’ RBG? I guess the latter, but it’s such a watershed moment (IMHO) I can’t help but wonder at the thought process behind it.
This editorial has a nice roundup of Scalia, Alito, and others going political:
Scalia in 2012 wandering into an irrelevant tangent in a decision to bash Obama shortly before the election:
Scalia didn’t recuse himself from relevant cases after his repeated catty snipings at Obama. While I agree with her remarks, given her office there are problems with her (or Scalia, or Alito, or others) going political, but given the number of times justices haven’t recused themselves in cases where there was far more cause, I don’t think that were Trump to win RBG would be forced to. While it sets a bad precedent if Trump does win for him to wage a war against the SCOTUS, though if he wins he won’t need a justification. He’d be doing that anyway.
if Alito were to publicly criticize Hilary, there would be a firestorm from the center-left and the associated BB thread would’ve reached 250 comments within 36 hours.
I’ll rescind my previous comment that her decision was necessarily the result of a limbic override, but I won’t rule it out. She may have had a perfectly logical line of reasoning for making these remarks but her premise in this case was fatally flawed.
No doubt. It was a bad precedent. I like to imagine that the left is supposed to hold itself to higher standards. I’m not sure that happens as much as I’d like, but it is the way things should be. I just don’t think the problem is that if Trump wins it’ll gives him an edge (he won’t need a valid excuse to do whatever he wants, he’ll invent an excuse regardless), so much as that it’s inappropriate.
Yeah, I’ve been surprised that not much has been made about Scalia and Thomas’ (via his wife) political policy commections. Talk about conflict of interests. Some of SCOTUS have been outright hostile to Obama during his State of the Nation addresses.
and thanks for the link. (Had to give it this way, because…
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