The Ginsburg Fallacy

In the Wash Post, Ruth Marcus has a piece about what she calls the "Ginsburg Fallacy," the notion that Ruth Bader-Ginsburg was a total lefty on the bench and that GOP senators only accepted her on the Supreme Court out of deference to the president (this argument is made now by Republicans pushing for easy confirmation of Alito).

In fact, then-Judge Ginsburg was a consensus choice, pushed by Republicans and accepted by the president in large part because he didn't want to take on a big fight. Far from being a crazed radical, Ginsburg had staked out a centrist role on a closely divided appeals court. Don't take it from me—take it from Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). In his autobiography, the Utah Republican describes how he suggested Ginsburg—along with Clinton's second pick, Stephen G. Breyer—to the president. "From my perspective, they were far better than the other likely candidates from a liberal Democratic administration," Hatch writes….

According to a Legal Times study of voting patterns on the appeals court in 1987, for instance, Ginsburg sided more often with Republican-appointed judges than with those chosen by Democrats. In cases that divided the court, she joined most often with then-Judge Kenneth W. Starr and Reagan appointee Laurence H. Silberman; in split cases, she agreed 85 percent of the time with then-Judge Robert H. Bork—compared with just 38 percent of the time with her fellow Carter appointee, Patricia M. Wald.

More here.