Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an exemplary beacon of justice.
Adam Smith
U.S. Representative, 9th District, WA-D
Press Release September 18, 2020
[This tells you everything you need to know about this public servant.
He is incredibly ignorant and/or evil.
Why? Contrast Smith’s words to these:
In a constitutional democracy the moral content of law must be given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the morality of the judge.
Robert Bork
Speech
American Enterprise Institute, 1984
At the SCOTUS level a judge’s job is not to deliver “justice”. It is to interpret and apply the law. If the judge is ruling in terms of what is “just” then they are little more than another legislative branch elected, for life, by the President and the Senate.
Leftists see SCOTUS as needing to be politically “balanced”. At least as long as they can’t have the court entirely filled with those who administer “justice” from the left. This is wrong.
There is no “balance” when reading the law of the legislative and the founders. There are only various degrees, including zero, of error in interpreting and applying it to the case under consideration.
Smith has demonstrated his ignorance and/or distain for our form of government. He needs to be replaced with someone who passed their government class in high school and will honor their oath of office.—Joe]
Once the case is appealed, the question is no longer justice for one of the parties, but whether the trial court judge misinterpreted a statement of the law. Bork would doubless agree with Scalia’s statement that “If you, as a judge, are happy with every case you ever decided, you are a poor judge. Based on this quotation, the grossly misnamed Adam Smith would doubtless agree with California Chief Justice Rose Bird, who went directly from being a trial lawyer to being the chief Justice of the California Supreme Court. It was said that she never failed to find reversible error in a capital punishment case (68:0), and that having never served as a trial judge, lacked the judicial temperament and applied her liberal (Leftist, really) views to the cases instead of the law.
Not a fan of Bork. Pretty profound misstatement here.
The Second Amendment was designed to allow states to defend themselves against a possible tyrannical national government.
Now that the federal government has stealth bombers and nuclear weapons, it is hard to imagine what people would need to keep in the garage to serve that purpose.
-Judge Bork-
That reads like a typical Republican statement. Everything is framed so as to indicate that he really wants to be on the side of liberty, but logic and reason simply won’t allow it! In this case, “I mean, get real; for the second amendment to be valid we’d all need stealth bombers and nuclear missiles in our garages.”
In other words; you’re an idiot, a walking, breathing joke, if you cling to your guns and Bible, and to your out-dated, utterly ridiculous notions of liberty!
Of course what they’re advocating is old-fashioned tyranny, which never seems to be out-dated or deserving of ridicule! And that’s the conservative Republicans’ thinking! John McCain related the same sentiment when he called us “Hobbits” (derisively, and of course, ignorantly).
So you can have Republicans, who stoop so low, in their minds, as to pander to us just enough to get our votes, and hate that they have to stoop so low (it makes them feel icky), or you can have the Democrats’ version of things. You’ll forgive me if I’m not terribly interested in that choice.
Remember the old movies of Communist China? You always see people out sweeping.
Maybe they were on to something. I mean, certain people just can’t be trusted doing anything else.
Government seems to be a magnet for that type. Imagine the clean society we could have by now!
Bork could have been war crime criminal and stomper of kittens and still said something profoundly true in a succinct manner.
I’ve never understood by why people seem to believe that because someone was wrong on one topic that it casts a cloud over other things they say. If they were a liar, okay, check out their claims, but if the statement is correct and the wording clever and enlightening then why not give them credit and adopt their words?
Yeah, she was a beacon. A lighthouse warning anyone with eyes, “justice dies on the shoals of this place.”
When you have nothing precise to say, or, let’s face it; when you wish to avoid precision for fear of revealing too much about your morals and goals, you can always fall back on “an exemplary beacon of justice”. Best shut up right there though because you’ve probably said too much already. The next things out of your mouth are likely to be advocacy of “social justice”, “economic justice” and even “environmental justice”, i.e. tyranny. Next you’re likely to prattle on about “the common good” and then you’re already quoting both Karl Marx and the pope.
Speaking of the moral makeup and goals of the Supreme Court; I bet you all didn’t know half of what’s in this video. All referenced directly from the various sources. If you can get past the very short prayer at the beginning I think you’ll be glad you toughed it out for that 30 seconds;
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9HvyxqaXSV4
The job of a judge….specifically a Supreme Court justice is NOT to “interpret” jack shiite. Their job is to look at laws passed by legislatures, compare those laws to the Constitution AND the intent of the people who wrote the Constitution via the massive amount of writings those founders left for us and determine if said laws
either violate or do not violate the Constitution. THAT is the primary purpose of a “Supreme Court”.
That is a critical but very small part of their job. Review some of the cases before them here. It involves things such as deciding between conflicting law and does the use of 11,000 lines of software code constitute “fair use” under copyright law?
That is interpretation.
And even if they are deciding a case as you describe that would be “interpretation” of what the constitution was meant to have said.
“Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should therefore be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense; and their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure” — Thomas Jefferson
One big problem with what judges do is that, like priests, they constantly look for angels dancing on pinheads. If they did what Jefferson calls for in this quote and read the laws as plain English documents, stating plain English meanings, there would be far fewer problems. The only additional rule needed is that anything which doesn’t have a plain English meaning does not exist.
Come to think of it, that last principle was mentioned by Robert Heinlein in one of his short stories (one which starts with the sudden death of the President, leaving the VP to step in. And the VP is a black woman…). He called it the “Plain English Amendment”.
Pretty much what I’ve been thinking for a while.
Leftists want a Left/Right “balance” on the court, which is exactly what we as a nation DON’T need.
What we need is an originalist majority, if not unanimity.
The job of SCOTUS isn’t to decide policy or morality. It’s to decide if a statute or action complies with the written text and intent of the U.S. Constitution and its several Amendments.
Period. Full stop.
Whether a law or policy “should” be in place is the job of the legislature and executive to decide. The judiciary’s job – its ONLY job – is to decide if the law or policy, as written and implemented, complies with the Constitution.
Anything else, and you’re just deciding if you prefer the jackboot on your face be worn by the left or right foot.
Archer, no, leftists don’t want a balance. They want the left to rule the courts. The “balance” notion is just a red herring designed to mislead us. And the reason they want this is that leftist judges are activist judges, unlike conservative judges.
Correct. The “Left/Right balance” is a red herring, a pseudonym for empaneling just enough conservative judges to appease the GOP, but leaving a majority of Leftist activist judges that will uphold Leftist causes.
Democrats almost universally appoint Leftist activists. Originalists are only appointed by Republicans, who — in a misguided effort to be liked by both sides, or because they buy into the “balance” red herring — also appoint moderates, who in turn tend to slide steadily left through their careers (maybe they also believe the red herring?). Thus, originalists in the judiciary are few and far between.
Constitutional originalism shouldn’t be a Left/Right issue. But it is, because the Left seeks to empanel a judiciary that through its written opinions will “interpret” the Constitution into irrelevance.