Just Say Goodbye

DOUGLAS GINSBURG President Reagan said upon announcing his intention to nominate the former Law School professor to the Supreme Court, is a jurist who remembers "not just the rights of criminals but, equally important, the rights of the victims of crime and the rights of society." It seemed odd when Reagan chose to so identify his second choice to replace Justice Lewis Powell. After all, Ginsburg's academic specialty is anti-trust law and he never has written on constitutional law, let alone criminal procedure. Had the president spoken with his nominee and discerned his views on Miranda rights and the exclusionary rule?

Nope. It turns out Reagan had yet to meet the man annointed to carry the mantle of the Reagan Revolution into the 21st Century. In fact, he was reading from a text prepared days before the Administration knew who the new nominee would be. A blank spot had been left for the name of the eventual nominee, and White House officials filled it in moments after Reagan decided on Ginsburg the morning of October 29.

The speech Reagan read was not an introduction of Doug Ginsburg to the nation, but the opening salvo in a highly partisan and combative plan authored by extremists in the Administration. Their goal was to ram down the throats of the Senate and the nation an unkown and unproven judge whose constitutional views would be hard to rebut because they would be hard to find and who, at age 41, could sit on the Court for decades. To make matters worse, officials did not deny that it was hoped the selection of the Jewish Ginsburg would pre-empt the opposition of Jewish liberals to the nomination of a judicial conservative.

But the victory cigars of Meese, Helms and Company have exploded in their faces. In their haste to nominate Ginsburg and their rush to get him on the Court--Senate hearing should begin without delay, the president said, criminals are being set free--Administration extremists didn't take the time to see how well they knew the unkown quantity they were trying to foist upon Court and country. There were hints that Ginsburg, a student of the University of Chicago's Richard Posner, was more inclined to law-and-economics than to law-and-order. Former colleagues on the Law School faculty suggested we might be surprised by his liberal views on social issues. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

It wasn't so much that he smoked marijuana that ended Ginsburg's high court hopes. He has nothing to be ashamed about on that count. But he was the darling of an Administration that has waged, rhetorically, at least, an hysterical war against drugs. And he was touted by arch conservatives as the savior in the war against law-breaking--and marijuana, you'll remember, still is an illegal substance. Those conservatives were the very ones who ultimately did in Ginsburg's nomination.

The sight of President Reagan defending Ginsburg's previous indulgences as making him something less than "an addict" and no less qualified to sit on the Supreme Court is no small cause for glee among those long ago deadened to the hypocrisy of the Reagan Administration and its leader. This is an Administration whose Justice Department has had a long-standing policy against hiring in any law-enforcement capacity anyone who admits on their job application to ever having tried pot. Which perhaps explains why when the ambitious Ginsburg was asked the $64,000 question when filling out application forms for earlier Justice Department posts, he just said no.