The Snoozer Awakens--and Fabricates History

Ruth Ginsburg, awakened from her slumber, goes to South Africa (!!!) to reveal that she can lie about precedent as well as anyone... but is caught by Mark Levin of NRO.

Ginsburg’s history lesson on Dred Scott is fiction. Chief Justice Roger Taney, who she tries to paint as an originalist, was actually an activist. She ignored Justice Curtis’s dissent because it would have disproved her argument in support of using foreign law to interpret the Constitution.

Curtis wrote, in part:

When a strict interpretation of the Constitution, according to fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws, is abandoned, and the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we have no longer a Constitution; we are under the government of individual men, who for the time being have power to declare what the Constitution is according to their own views of what it ought to mean.

Tom Jefferson had his suspicions about the BlackRobes, as well:

To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privileged of their corps … and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whether hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.

Levin closes:

The Court’s repeated interposition into political and policy areas invites the kind of scrutiny and criticism received by politicians and policymakers. And the public is growing increasingly resentful of justices and judges who use their office to impose their personal preferences on society.

Does Massachusetts ring a bell?