Here’s a report of a remarkable comment from Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg:
People seeking clues about how soon the Supreme Court might weigh in on states’ gay marriage bans should pay close attention to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told a Minnesota audience Tuesday.
Ginsburg said cases pending before the circuit covering Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee would probably play a role in the high court’s timing. She said “there will be some urgency’ if that appeals court allows same-sex marriage bans to stand. Such a decision would run contrary to a legal trend favoring gay marriage and force the Supreme Court to step in sooner, she predicted.
She said if the appeals panel falls in line with other rulings there is “no need for us to rush.’
In other words, as long as activist courts continue overruling the will of the people in a way that Ms. Ginsburg finds politically congenial, then it’s best if her Court drags its feet as long as possible. Otherwise, she’s got work to do! and no time to waste.
So much for impartial justice, and for the consent of the governed. I’m not surprised to hear that Justice Ginsburg feels this way — we already know how this woman feels about the United States Constitution — but it harrows me that she can be so blasé about fessing up in public. Obviously she knows that she wields great power, and is accountable to absolutely no one.
Pity the laboring American citizen. His vote means almost nothing. He is subject to the tyrannous caprices of a flamboyantly autonomous Executive; to the occult machinations of a vast administrative bureaucracy, sometimes called the ‘Fourth Branch’, for which there is no accountability at all, and upon which he can exert no check whatsoever; and to the ideological whims of a plenipotent judiciary that routinely annuls what little victories of self-determination he occasionally manages to achieve through his state legislatures. Shackled to his oar, he toils and groans to pull the ship forward nevertheless, though the combined tonnage of freight, idle passengers, and stowaways recently brought aboard have sunk it so low in the water that its gunwales are already awash. Should he grumble, or cry out in his exhaustion, he swiftly feels the lash.
Ahead, dark clouds gather.
11 Comments
She’s still alive?
You have a remarkable gift with words when you are impassioned.
Thanx, Bill.
:)
Oh, so it’s “the will of the people” which should guide Supreme Court decisions, as its decisions should be based on “the consent of the governed.” The Court should never have banned segregation in the Brown case, as most people opposed forced integration. They should never have given the 2000 election to Bush, as a half million more people voted for Gore. And when most Washington residents wanted to ban handguns from their city, the Court was very wrong in its Heller decision. Or maybe the will of the people doesn’t extend to, you know, those people.
Who needs stare decisis – or a Constitution, for that matter – when you can have nine pollsters in robes?
But wait! 55% of Americans support legal gay marriage. It seems like the estimable Justice Ginsburg is just doing her bit to codify the popular will into settled law.
This is so confusing! I guess that if you’re in favor of the way the decision went, everything is hunky dory, but if you don’t, it’s those damned “activist judges” again.
Seriously?
The “will of the people”, when it comes to state laws, is reflected in the laws passed by their own state legislatures, and by local referenda, in the states they live in. The result of some nationwide public-opinion poll is completely irrelevant. If the residents of Vermont want to let people marry goats in threes, while people in Utah would rather that marriage be only between one man and one woman, then I see no reason why Utah and Vermont shouldn’t be able to arrange things the way they like, as long as it doesn’t violate the Constitution — and as far as I know there’s nothing in the Constitution about the definition of marriage.
Likewise, the nationwide popular vote is not the criterion by which we elect Presidents, but rather the will of the States as expressed through the Electoral College.
I suppose I shouldn’t find your comment all that surprising, though — because the centralization of power under the the Federal sovereign, and the corresponding diminution of the sovereignty of the States, is an idÁ©e fixe among ‘progressives’, and an ideal that they pursue with relentless aggression. (They’ve done a very good job of it, too.)
As for the Heller and Brown decisions: if a law violates the Constitution, then of course the Supreme Court is right to annul it. But you have managed, in your zeal, completely to miss the point of this post — which offered no opinion whatsoever about how the Supreme Court should rule on this case, but rather commented on the blatant ideological partisanship of Justice Ginsburg regarding whether the Court should even take up the case in a timely fashion.
If “the appeals panel falls in line with other rulings,” then there are no cases for the Court to consider. If there is a disagreement among the appellate courts, then the Supreme Court would step in settle the dispute. If all the appellate courts rule the same way, then the Court would only adjudicate if the losing party appeals and the Court decides to take the case (which is usually declines to do).
Ginsburg’s comment has nothing to do with “blatant ideological partisanship,” and simply reflects the way the Court operates.
The “centralization of power under the Federal sovereign” is not “an idee fixe among progressives,” unless you are referring to the progressives who ditched the Articles of Confederation in favor of a Constitution with strong and robust powers given to the Federal sovereign.
While there is nothing in the Constitution about the definition of marriage, there is that pesky Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment.
If that technical point was what Justice Ginsburg was trying to explain, she could easily have done so. Not only that, but there are many of these cases still pending, and there will without question be appeals if bans are overturned. When the will of the people is being routinely overturned by circuit courts in multiple states, on such a hugely divisive issue as gay marriage, obviously it is an important enough matter for SCOTUS to take the case — as I am sure it will. For you to pretend that a woman with Justice Ginsburg’s sentiments is merely making a wholly impartial comment based on nothing but technical grounds, or that she wouldn’t have responded differently if the decisions were going the other way, is disingenuous, and you know it.
I assume you are referring to the Equal Protection Clause. This is not a persuasive argument, as I am sure we will see when SCOTUS reviews these decisions.
Gay people are not denied the right to marry, any more than I am. They are welcome, as are all citizens, to marry members of the opposite sex. That’s what “marriage” is, as defined by state laws.
The right they seek, then, is not the right to marry, but the right to redefine the very nature of marriage itself. And that right exists nowhere in the Constitution.
Yeah, whatever. And the check’s in the mail, and Islam is a religion of peace.
You may have noticed that the Supreme Court announced their fall docket yesterday, which did not include any gay marriage cases. If advocates for marriage equality continue to run the tables, I doubt they will. Why should they?
Your assertion that “the will of the people is regularly overturned” is also incorrect. The majority of Americans favor legal gay marriage.
You may not find the equal protection clause to be a compelling argument, but appellate court after appellate court sees it the other way.
If a gay couple – let’s call them William Fitzpatrick and Patrick Fitzwilliam – want to commit themselves to holy matrimony, court after court has decided that there is no rational reason to deny them the same rights as Ward and June Cleaver. Discrimination absent a rational cause is invidious discrimination, which is a Fourteenth Amendment no-no.
As for the Founders abandoning the state-centric Articles of Confederation in favor of the federal-centric Constitution: another inconvenient fact ignored by the right wing, which pretends to have the Constitution they want to have, instead of the one they actually have.
A federal court in Louisiana just upheld a gay-marriage ban last month.
According to the latest Pew poll, this is false.
But even if it were true, it’s completely irrelevant, because we are talking about State laws here. If the majority of people in, say, Louisiana, want to define marriage as between a man and a woman, national-opinion polls have nothing to do with the matter. I realize that this is painful for you, because, as I said above, “the centralization of power under the the Federal sovereign, and the corresponding diminution of the sovereignty of the States, is an idÁ©e fixe among ‘progressives’, and an ideal that they pursue with relentless aggression.” But whether lefties like yourself like it or not, we are still a republic of federated States, and not a raw democracy governed exclusively by an undifferentiated mass of 318,000,000 people. You seldom keep this in mind, it seems, but as noted above, that’s to be expected. This centralizing pressure never lets up.
There is a very simple reason, with a universal and ancient pedigree, and never questioned until these crepuscular days of our civilization, why William and Patrick do not have an automatic ‘right’ to marry: it is because William and Patrick are both male, and marriage has, always and everywhere, been defined as a union of complementary sexes. Marriage is arguably the most ancient and centrally important of all human rituals and conventions. It is the anchor and foundation of all societies and of the civilizations they create.
If the people of Louisiana wish to retain the traditional, universal, commonsense, purposeful definition of marriage that has prevailed everywhere on Earth throughout all time, while the people of Massachusetts wish to revise it, then, as free citizens of their several States, they should both be able to do so. That is completely in accordance, despite the incoherent spluttering in your last paragraph above, with the Constitutional architecture of the United States as a federal republic. Given the reasonable arguments on both sides of this issue (again, the issue here is not who has the right to marry, but who has the authority to define what marriage is), and the lack of any explicit comment on it by the Constitution, this should quite obviously be a matter for the people of the various States to decide. But given that this has been brought to the lower courts, with inevitable appeals — and given also that there is disunity of opinion in the lower courts, which you yourself argued would press the matter — SCOTUS will, no doubt, have to deliver an opinion.
It is wholly unsurprising, however, that as a loyal soldier of the Left, you eagerly wish both to annul the traditional definition of marriage, and, moreover, to ram your opinion of what it ought to be down the throats of every State in the Union — not by persuasion, as would befit a mature society of free people, but by the power of the Courts. As I wrote a while back: