Justice Ginsberg: please resign before the 2014 elections

(PLEASE NOTE: Ginsberg is my favorite Justice – she’s smart and savvy and full of mischief.)

It’s futile to pretend any more that the Supreme Court is non-partisan. Justices are people (the human, not the corporate kind – at least not yet) and don’t have identical values or beliefs. Their perspectives – on law, history, social justice, the U.S. Constitution – are informed by cultural identity, ethnicity, education, religion and probably gender. This has always been true.

Of course a Court is, ideally, charged with rising above the personal and interpreting the law. But we don’t get ideal; we get nine mere mortals who must somehow work it all out and render ‘judgement’ on a legal appeal.  (Note to Scalia: judgement involves judging. All things are not self-evident.)

Today’s Court isn’t doing too well with that ‘rising above’ thing. A lot of decisions are nakedly political and too much of the time we have 5 to 4 votes favoring the Right. Also:

• The 2014 elections could very well change the majority in the Senate.
• Justice Ginsberg is the oldest person on the bench and will be 81 in 2014.
• Justice Ginsberg, while mentally acute (unlike Scalia, the next oldest), is physically unwell and has had cancer more than once. Her health could decline further.
• A Republican Senate can deny Obama a majority on any Supreme Court  nominee. (UPDATE: James reminds me in comments that confirming a Supreme still requires the ‘super majority’ of 60 votes, but still . . . )
• If Republicans take the White House and hold the Senate in 2016, that doesn’t bear thinking about.

She and Scalia have for decades enjoyed a close friendship, so perhaps they could make the leap together – before 2014. Solidarity and all. (A bit of trivia – after Reagan nominated Scalia in 1986, he was confirmed by a Senate vote of 98-2.)

Say no more

Scalia on DOMA (passed by Congress almost 20 years ago ago by a vote of 85-14 in the Senate and 342-67 in the House):

We have no power to decide this case,” Scalia wrote. “And even if we did, we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation.

Scalia on Affirmative Action (law was extended by Congress in 2006 for 25 more years by a vote of  98-0 in the Senate and 390-33 in the House):

Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes… It’s a concern that this is not the kind of a question you can leave to Congress…

And jkust for the heck of it, here’s somerthig else he wrote:

DOMA is motivated by ‘bare … desire to harm’ couples in same-sex marriages

Some Constitutional rigor there, eh?

Da blog haz a hunger. I feedz it!

Over at Notes from Rumbly Cottage, the Answer Lady has thoughtfully provided a photo of a brick wall – for those who found themselves at her site in their search for such an image.  This oddity sent me to my own site stats to see what might cause Google and Bing to direct people here.

Turns out it’s Scalia. Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS for those of us ‘in the know’). Those search engines scoop me right up with the other droppings, even though I’ve no memory of using a Scalia picture, but Google knows what Google knows, so we may assume that in fact I did. We may also assume that I had a darn good reason!

That long-forgotten posting may even have featured the photo above. I just found it via Google – at yet another blog – which may have actually gotten it here – via a Google search – and maybe I posted it the first time after finding it on another blog via Google . . . I think we need a word for this disturbing and all too common process.

So allow me to take the self-serving lesson and throw some feed to my site stats.  If one Justice is good, nine are better.