U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speaks on the Main Stage of the National Book Festival, August 31, 2019. Photo by Shawn Miller/Library of Congress.
In an exclusive leak from Katie Couric’s new book, the Daily Mail confirms that Couric felt she had to “protect” Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg from her thoughts on athletes kneeling for the national anthem. Presumably, Couric felt she needed to protect Ginsburg because the Justice disagreed with the liberal mainstream. Couric reports that Ginsburg thought players kneeling for the national anthem showed ‘contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life.’ That opinion was counter to the media and Democratic narrative. Allowing people to know that Ginsburg held such feelings could have led them to be angry at Ginsburg, or worse, to agree with her.
The Cult of RBG
In the last years of her life, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg became a liberal icon, with accompanying movies, books, toys, and the entire corpus of cult-like behavior surrounding her. But now we know that the “Notorious RBG,” to whom young liberals were offering their kidneys and lungs to keep alive, was just an imaginary version of the Justice, being “protected” from herself by people like Katie Couric.
Couric looked at octogenarian Ruth Bader Ginsburg and saw someone who meant well, but couldn’t keep up. But if Couric was right, and the Justice couldn’t effectively articulate her own thoughts and opinions, what does that say about her work on the Supreme Court?
After the airing of her interview with Couric in October 2016, Ginsburg went on to write 26 majority opinions before passing away in September 2020. Here’s the list of cases Ginsburg wrote the majority decision for since the Couric interview:
Source: Justia
Additionally, she wrote dozens of concurring, dissenting, and other opinions. Each of which will color to future courts’ understanding of the law.
Was Ginsburg Competent?
The question is, if Ruth Bader Ginsburg wasn’t competent enough to make up her own mind about kneeling football players, how could she have been competent enough to write decisions on cases that would affect immigration, commerce, trade, and other serious legal matters?
The answer is, that Ginsburg was plenty competent, even into her last days, but instead of allowing Ginsburg’s “deviant” thoughts on kneeling for the national anthem to be heard, Couric felt it her duty to censor them to uphold the more useful image of Ginsburg as a monolithic, Party liberal, when in fact the opposite was true. Ginsburg was, no doubt, a liberal, but as with most intelligent people, her ideas were more complex than simple sloganeering and mob thinking. If Couric was any kind of journalist, she would have allowed Ginsburg to express herself and would have allowed the audience to see a dissenting opinion.
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