USA TODAY International Edition
Ginsburg’s ‘ Own Words’: Supreme cool
In My Own Words, a collection of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s writings and speeches dating back to the eighth grade, the woman now known as “Notorious R. B. G.” comes across not as the rock- star liberal jurist her adoring fans celebrate, but a cool cucumber in the white- hot world of Washington, a voice of reason speaking up for civility.
There is Ginsburg the friend and mentor, recalling her relationships with Republican nominees Sandra Day O’Connor and Antonin Scalia. From O’Connor, she learned to “waste no time on anger, regret or resentment, just get the job done”; from Scalia, to attack ideas, not people, because “some very good people have some very bad ideas.”
There’s Ginsburg the appellate lawyer, winning a series of precedent- setting cases in the 1970s on gender equality. Tipped off by her tax attorney husband, Martin, to a Colorado man’s obscure challenge involving the otherwise mundane Internal Revenue Code, she broke out into a broad smile and said, “Let’s take it!”
There’s Ginsburg the night- owl workaholic, taking President Clinton’s 1993 phone call offering the Supreme Court nomination shortly before midnight, after the president had watched an NBA basketball game that went into triple overtime. “As high as I was with this great news, I had to settle down and write some remarks that I could deliver the next day,” she recalled.
But the main focus of this collection — which precedes the long- anticipated Ginsburg biography by Georgetown University Law Center’s Mary Hartnett and Wendy Williams — is Ginsburg the women’s rights crusader.
What emerges is not a portrait of a take- no- prisoners advocate but a strategic legal plotter who understands how to bring her audience around to her point of view.
She recounts her effort to keep alive a female captain’s lawsuit in 1972 after the Air Force withdrew its demand that she have an abortion or resign. The only other complaint the woman had was that she couldn’t become a pilot. “We laughed, agreeing it was hopeless to attack that occupational exclusion then,” Ginsburg, now 83, recalled in 2008. “Today, it would be hopeless, I believe, to endeavor to reserve flight training exclusively for men.”
That patience is what led Ginsburg to ruminate in 1993, before her Supreme Court nomination, that the Supreme Court’s 1973
Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion might better have struck down Texas’ harsh law without fashioning “a regime blanketing the subject, a set of rules that displaced virtually every state law then in force.”
The same patience was on display when she told the Senate Judiciary Committee considering her nomination that “in my lifetime, I expect to see three, four, perhaps even more women on the high court bench.” Seated behind the panel’s chairman, Joe Biden, was a 33- year- old staffer named Elena Kagan, whose appointment 17 years later gave the court three female justices.