Ginsburg Faults GOP Critics, Cites a Threat From 'Fringe'

Recently, Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave a speech, overseas nonetheless, (it's quite amazing that it has become commonplace for the left to speak out harshly against their critics and/or country whenever their feet leave the soil of America) in which she said that Republicans who criticize the Supreme Court are inciting the nut-jobs on the fringe, who then threaten the lives of the justices.

Now I am not in favor of threats, even idle ones, or ones done in so-called "good old fashioned fun". There is nothing humorous about talk of strangling someone, or "poisoning" someone as Anne Coulter did. That being said, does "Ginsey" not understand that this happens all the time by the wackos on the right and the left. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and "Condi" have all been victims of this morose humor and far more frequent then what she has had to endure.

Furthermore, does her objection to criticism not imply that Justices are to be above criticism? What other recourse do the citizens of this country, or our elected officials for that matter, have when we have become exasperated with these unelected, robed arbiters when they decide they are the ones who will set policy, legislate, and determine social mores.

And isn't it amazing that one of her objections is that some Republican legislators had been criticizing her for the use of foreign laws in court rulings. My, how inconsiderate and unappreciative can these legislators be? How un-American can you be to dislike the idea of justices selectively choosing foreign laws as support for their reasoning?

Naturally, the justices don't always cite foreign laws, only those they agree with that advances their own prejudices. Case in point is the abortion issue. The United States has a much more liberal position on abortion than most countries, but we don't defer to them on abortion laws as Justice Scalia has pointed out. Try as they might, we cannot have justices that just select the parts of the Constitution that support their personal views, but then dismiss the other inconvenient parts.

As Betsy Newmark points out,

The beauty of our system is that there is a set Constitution and body of laws that serve as the basis for our jurisprudence. But, if the universe of possible precedents is now expanded to include whatever random foreign law that appeals to a justice, we will have given up something really fundamental about our judicial system. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg wishes that people would please stop criticizing her for doing just that. Sorry, Justice Ginsburg, you're no more immune from criticism than Chief Justice Taney was when Abraham Lincoln was assailing the Dred Scott decision in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. In this country, we can criticize anyone in the three branches of government. If you don't like it, there is always retirement.