THE DISCONNECT BETWEN THE LEGAL PROFESSION, THE MEDIA AND THE AMERICAN MAINSTREAM: ANDREW McCARTHY
NRO — The Corner
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
More on the LATimes Hit Piece on Ginni Thomas [Andy McCarthy]
On Sunday, I wrote about this hatchet job by the Los Angeles Times against Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. Mrs. Thomas is a conservative activist who has established a lobbying group called “Liberty Central Inc.” to promote freedom and core conservative values. The LATimes argued that this created a threat to the impartiality of the Supreme Court.
The claim was not just that, if Liberty Central happened to find itself in litigation before the high court, Justice Thomas would be duty-bound to recuse himself (a proposition with which, I’m quite confident, Justice Thomas would be the first to agree). The gist of the Times story is that Ginni’s activism is a thoroughgoing problem not just for her husband but for the Court as an institution — that her work taints his participation in all cases in which conservative principles might somehow factor, and thereby taints the Supreme Court vaunted reputation as an impartial, apolitical arbiter. (I know, I know.)
If you want to know everything you need to know about the lefty legacy media, compare the Times’ treatment of Mrs. Thomas to the hagiography the newspaper published just a few weeks ago on the occasion of Ramona Ripston’s announcement that she would soon retire from her position as executive director of the ACLU of Southern California.
An “indefatigable liberal icon,” gushed the tribute, Ms. Ripston spent 38 years “battl[ing] police over the treatment of prisoners and the homeless. She’s marched against segregation and sued for better inner-city schools. She’s taken authorities to court for withholding public housing and medical care from those she believes need them most.” If it’s not clear enough where she’s coming from, we further learn she has become disheartened in recent times because she thinks President Obama “could have pushed harder on his health plan.” (How? Maybe another 50 speeches? Is there some other part of the Constitution he neglected to mangle? A judgeship he forgot to trade for a yea vote?)
When finally we reach the end of the puff piece, readers are informed that Ms. Ripston has for the last 20 years been married to Judge Stephen Reinhardt, perhaps the most leftist jurist on the nation’s most leftist federal court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Do we get any LATimes handwringing about whether Ms. Ripston’s crusades for “social justice” undermine Judge Reinhardt’s adjudicating and thus taint the Ninth Circuit generally? Surely you gest. We learn it’s no big deal: He just recuses himself whenever the ACLU is involved in a case. In fact, far from grave concern, the newspaper sees the conflict as occasion for a good laugh: “They always ask me,” Reinhardt jokes, “why couldn’t I have married one of those conservatives and taken that vote away.” (Emphasis in original.) What a riot!
There’s a reason this newspaper, like so many other, has driven itself into bankruptcy. If we really need unabashed bias leavened by the occasional one-liner from an institution putting on the airs of impartiality, there is always the Ninth Circuit website. Who needs the LATimes?
NRO — The Corner
Sunday, March 14, 2010
The Legacy Media’s War on Conservatives [Andy McCarthy]
So let me make sure I have this straight. If you’re a “progressive” lawyer who volunteers to represent America’s enemies for free in offensive lawsuits brought against the American people during wartime, and then you are placed in a policy-making position in the Justice Department, we’re not allowed even to suggest that you be identified, much less to infer that the sympathies that impelled you to donate your talents to al Qaeda might affect your decision-making at DOJ.
If you’re a hard-Left ideologue and pro-abortion zealot like Dawn Johnsen, who has analogized unwanted pregnancy to slavery, we’re supposed to avert our eyes from your record and put you in charge of DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, an influential government position that calls more than any other for even-handed, non-partisan, non-ideological scholarship.
But if you are the wife of a Supreme Court justice — not the Supreme Court justice himself, mind you, but the justice’s wife — and you dare to have your own career and further dare to be a public conservative who defends core American principles of individual liberty against the Leftist onslaught, we are supposed to assume that the impartiality of the Supreme Court (on which the wife of the justice does not sit) has been compromised.
That’s the upshot of the Los Angeles Times hit job this morning by Kathleen Hennessey on Ginni Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. It’s an unmitigated disgrace.
I’ve looked through other articles by Ms. Hennessey, searching for one about whether she thought the high court would be compromised by the appointment of Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Prior to her appointment, Justice Sotomayor herself — not her spouse, herself — was a Leftist activist (board member and top policy maker at the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education fund) who infamously opined that a “wise Latina” is more apt to make good decisions that a mere “white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Doesn’t seem to have troubled Ms. Hennessey, though.
Nor did the journalist fret about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Ginsburg also had an extensive pre-Supreme Court career in Leftist causes (e.g., co-director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project in the 1970s) — and on while on the Court she has been a reliable Leftist vote who, for example, champions resort to international law to interpret the U.S. Constitution and, in a bizarre extrajudicial comment, favolrably linked abortion with eugenics (“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion” (emphasis added)).
No, none of that bothers the media. The Court’s ballyhooed “impartiality” is only threatened because a conservative male justice is married to a conservative woman who has a life and career of her own, which was once thought to be the feminist ideal.
I’ve been writing a lot lately about the disconnect between the American legal profession and the American mainstream. The legacy media is no different from the bar on this score. Because of that, it is shriveling into extinction. It can’t survive on a competitive playing field by enraging its consumer base — the only potential savior on the horizon is the possibility of a bail-out by our current Leftist government (i.e., Democrats forcing the public to underwrite what the public doesn’t want to buy). Today is just the latest example of why it is heading downn the tubes. That’s one part of the silver lining. The other is that the hit piece is likely to have the opposite effect from what the Times intended.
Comments are closed.
