Breaking with the tradition that Supreme Court Justices do not address political issues directly, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who says she would consider moving to New Zealand in the event of a Trump win, shows that she has more in common with Trump than she might imagine, according to Commentary's Jonathan Tobin:
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg doesn’t like Donald Trump. That one of the most liberal members of the U.S. Supreme Court feels this way isn’t a surprise to anyone. But what is surprising is the fact that she thinks herself entitled to tell the country that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is so bad that it would make her think of moving to New Zealand. Yet as much as Ginsburg and Trump represent the opposite ends of the political spectrum, that line—which was just the most outrageous quote from a remarkably candid interview conducted by the justice with the New York Times published on their front page today—shows the two have more in common than we thought.
Ginsburg has evolved over the last 20 years from being just another lockstep liberal vote on the high court to something of a celebrity icon for left-wing women. The book and meme “Notorious RBG” illustrates how a staid octogenarian judge can be transformed into a pop culture star with a nickname that is a takeoff on the handle of slain rap singer. That Ginsburg was delighted with the adulation that has produced bobble head dolls and t-shirts is no secret, but it never occurred to me that it had gone to her head in quite this fashion until now.
. . .
Ginsburg’s fan base among the readership of the Times will cheer every word she utters. But they should realize that her desire to appeal to the mob in this manner is merely another manifestation of how the cultural norms they claim to uphold against Trump’s “barbarians” have already been demolished by their own side’s judicial star.
By speaking out on Trump and the GOP-controlled Senate's refusal to confirm a fifth liberal justice, Tobin observes, she has put herself in the position of having to recuse herself in the admittedly unlikely event of a Bush v. Gore situation.
In the New York Times article, Justice Ginsburg, 83, was somewhat less than tactful in discussing the effect of the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, who was famously a friend:
A second deadlock, in United States v. Texas, left in place a nationwide injunction blocking Mr. Obama’s plan to spare more than four million unauthorized immigrants from deportation and allow them to work. That was unfortunate, Justice Ginsburg said, but it could have been worse.
“Think what would have happened had Justice Scalia remained with us,” she said. Instead of a single sentence announcing the tie, she suggested, a five-justice majority would have issued a precedent-setting decision dealing a lasting setback to Mr. Obama and the immigrants he had tried to protect.
Unseemly all around.