>>4721224
I think people are getting wrapped up around the wrong things in regard to Ginsberg.
>>And so when Clinton, eager to please, entertained names proposed by women’s groups, he learned that some of them refused to support Ginsburg, because they were worried that she might be willing to overturn Roe (which is not what she had written, but one gathers that the Madison Lecture was more often invoked than read).
>> But the Air Force changed its policy and, in 1972, at the urging of then Solicitor General Erwin Griswold, the case was dismissed, a decision that had profound consequences: the following year, the Court ruled on Roe v. Wade instead, and struck down anti-abortion legislation not on the ground of equal protection but on the ground of a much weaker constitutional doctrine, the right to privacy.
>>If Struck was Ginsburg’s next, carefully placed stepping stone across a wide river, Roe was a rickety wooden plank thrown down across the water and—Ginsburg thought—likely to rot. In a lecture she delivered in 1984, she noted the political significance of the fact that the Court had treated sex discrimination as a matter of equal protection but reproductive autonomy as a matter of privacy. When the Court overturned laws on the basis of sex discrimination, no great controversy ensued, she observed, but Roe v. Wade remained “a storm center.” She went on, “Roe v. Wade sparked public opposition and academic criticism, in part, I believe, because the Court ventured too far in the change it ordered and presented an incomplete justification for its action.”
>>In 1971, Chief Justice Warren Burger, on hearing that Richard Nixon was considering nominating a woman to the Court, drafted a letter of resignation. “Feminist Picked for U.S. Court of Appeals Here,” the Washington Post announced in December of 1979, even before Carter had officially named Ginsburg to the D.C. Circuit.
>>De Hart describes Ginsburg’s thirteen years on the circuit court as something like a decontamination chamber, in which Ginsburg was rinsed and scrubbed of the hazard of her thirteen years as an advocate for women’s rights. By 1993, she had been sufficiently depolarized to be appointed to the Supreme Court.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/08/ruth-bader-ginsburgs-unlikely-path-to-the-supreme-court
This is why Ginsberg was selected - or a candidate for the reasons, she was very much a proponent of abortion and other issues, and cleverly arguing for them. She's a rabid feminist beneath the whitewashing. I'm copying too much pasta, here - but it's worth a read on her history and the snap decision by Clinton to appoint her to SCOTUS.