Everyone was agog last week when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg let the public in on a poorly-kept secret: She doesn’t like Donald Trump. Now, say what you will about her comments, this was not exactly a mind-blowing position for Ginsburg to take. Did anyone seriously think she was a closet Trumpster? Ginsburg is an avowed liberal, and she’s never bothered to keep that fact under wraps.
But we like to pretend that the Supreme Court is above the petty politics that the rest of us indulge in. Ginsburg’s crime wasn’t to be a liberal, it was to embrace it so shamelessly. That messes with the narrative.
How that narrative could exist in the first place, though, is quite baffling. Forget about Ginsburg’s remarks on Trump; take a look at some of the Supreme Court’s most recent decisions. If this is a court ruled by the Constitution, these justices must have access to a different copy than the rest of us.
In that version of the Constitution, abortion is a right that cannot be hindered by anyone, for any reason. In that version, religious freedom is nowhere to be found.
That’s the only explanation for the court’s ruling in a Washington state case, where they decided that state officials were constitutionally allowed to force Christian pharmacists to dispense abortifacient drugs. If the Democrats in charge of any particular state want to implement this rule, they are more than welcome to do so. Religiously-inclined pharmacists can either get with the program or get out.
That’s in line with the First Amendment, right?
Then there’s the court’s ruling on Texas abortion laws. These regulations on abortion clinics were mild, reasonable, and comparable to healthcare regulations governing clinics all around the country. But because these regulations – even as basic and sensible as they were – caused many of the state’s abortion clinics to close, the court ruled against them. Abortion clinics are not to be held to any legal standard, apparently, because a woman’s right to an abortion comes before any other consideration.
We might not care to hear what Ruth Bader Ginsburg has to say about Donald Trump, but her loose lips are the least of our problems with the Supreme Court. In fact, if the court is going to be this ideologically-inclined, we should encourage the justices to weigh in on politics more often. At least then, we’ll know what we’re dealing with. And maybe we can begin erasing the myth that these robed lawyers are the impartial bastions of justice that they pretend to be.
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