Both Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, abjured reliance on foreign precedent at their confirmation hearings. Justice Ginsburg has given us reason to be glad they are there.

Ed Whelan at Bench Memos links to a recent speech given by Justice Ginsburg in South Africa. I link to the speech above. Justice Ginsburg, Clinton appointee and former ACLU counsel would use her position, granted by Americans, to draw from foreign law and foreign courts to interpret the American Constitution's provisions and indeed traduce those provisions.

While she is quick to state foreign precedent would not be binding, it is hard discern how it would not be binding if the Supreme Court decided to follow it. Worse, right now those Justices who say it won't be binding are testing the waters. Once they cross this Rubicon there is no principle to hold them back. The speech itself draws on sources that clearly delineate the horrible consequences of this approach to Constitutional interpretation. She cites Vicki Jackson, a smart and rigorous lawyer, who is a Professor at Georgetown. The same Georgetown whose smart and rigorous faculty backed the FAIR v. Rumsfeld arguments on our First Amendment and spending clause, that did not attract a single vote on the Court. She clerked for Thurgood Marshall, no friend to what the Constitution actually says. (Full disclosure, Prof. Jackson taught me very well long ago and I am indebted to her as an attorney). Justice Ginsburg's husband is a professor at Georgetown Law School as well.

Justice Ginsburg also cites favorably the Israeli Supreme Court and the South African Supreme Court. Both Courts are relentlessly Left Wing. The Israeli Supreme Court has degraded that nation's security decisions even under terrorist attack. Judge Bork in his book "Coercing Virtue" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0844741620/103-2660806-5521413?v=glance&n=283155 lists many of the problems with this Court and notes that the push to follow international law is simply a cover for the "New Class" to inflict its benighted views of self-government on unsuspecting polities. Justice Ginsburg gives the game away by noting that the cases where the Court used foreign law were to overturn Texas' view of homosexual activity and to outlaw the death penalty for certain classes of defendants. Outlawing the death penalty and Constitutionalizing homosexual activity by force of law have been on the Left's agenda for some time but are not found in the Constitution.

One of the worst things about Justice Ginsburg's speech is that on foreign soil, in the former land of Apartheid, she intimated that opposing the infliction of foreign court's on the American Constitution is motivated by racism. At a time when America needs ambassadors abroad, Justice Ginsburg cited Justice Taney of Dred Scott fame,against the use of foreign precedent and also noted that the apartheid court did not use foreign precedent. We can take heart the modern aphorism that if a liberal accuses someone of racism its because they are losing an argument. She could think of no other reason not to inflict the law of foreign nations on Americans (many who fled those foreign nations to escape those laws) other than racism.

Justice Ginsburg added to this intimated slander by criticizing precedent, going back over 100 years, that allows America to try villains caught abroad but brought here without following extradition procedures. She cites foreign precedent that would not allow such an action. Justice Ginsburg would side with a foreign despots' decision to harbor an enemy of the Republic over an American Executive's decision to track him down and bring him in. Under this theory if Osama Bin Laden is caught in a country with which we have an extradition treaty but they will not hand him over because we have a death penalty, she will not allow him to be tried if we send special forces to pull him out of his refuge.

The fact is that the Texas Rangers and bounty hunters often brought and bring back criminals from South and North of our borders to be tried. The idea that we can only try people for breaching our law if some foreign government has handed them over is madness. It is especially madness given that the Supreme Court has explicitly upheld such trials after these criminals were nabbed abroad for over a hundred years, and we are in the midst of a war where we may very well have to forcibly capture criminals from countries harboring them. Where are the liberals crying out against this attack on stare decisis?

Justice Ginsburg has, while slandering her countrymen, laid out the Constitutional agenda of the Left. The laws chosen to govern family life, reduce criminality and apprehend criminals found abroad, are to abrogated using the law of foreign lands where the intellectually corrupt elite Justice Ginsburg represents are more insulated from the decision of the polity than are even America's imperious judges.

Every Democratic Senator and Presidential nominee ought to be confronted with Justice Ginsburg's slobbering devotion to alien Courts and ask if they agree. The American people will then know who respects their decisions and Constitutions, and those who pine with eager hearts for someone else's' mandate.