Not surprisingly, Ginsburg’s comments raised hackles on the right. “Is it too much for a United States Supreme Court justice to have a little reverence for the Constitution of the United States?’’ Glenn Beck demanded on his radio show. In the conservative newspaper Human Events, John Hayward lamented that instead of “a robust endorsement of American ideals from someone who actually loves and understands this country,’’ what Egypt’s TV audience heard was “a mealy mouthed half-hearted squeak from someone who . . . admires the rest of the world for being so much more enlightened than we are.’’ Liberty Counsel announced in a press release: “Ginsburg insulted the US Constitution.’’
Yet if Ginsburg drew fire for telling Egyptians they were more likely to find inspiration in South Africa’s “great’’ constitution than in the one she took an oath to defend, shouldn’t there have been an even greater backlash when another Supreme Court justice sang the praises of the Soviet constitution?
“The bill of rights of the former ‘evil empire,’ the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours,’’ Antonin Scalia told a congressional panel last October. “I mean it literally: It was much better. We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press. Big deal. They guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests, and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa, that is wonderful stuff!’’
Why no outrage? Because Scalia went on to make the point that the Soviet constitution was nothing but “words on paper,’’ a fig leaf for tyranny. By contrast, America’s constitutional system — with its careful separation of powers and government institutions checking and balancing each other — has proved a bulwark against tyranny. Only someone brazenly yanking Scalia’s words out of context could have accused him of revering the Kremlin’s Potemkin constitution more than the one drafted in Philadelphia in 1787.
