Word: ginsburg
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...Carlucci case, the problem is not so critical because McEnroesque tantrums on the tennis courts don't bring out the armchair moralizers like Judge Ginsburg's pot smoking, Sen. Biden's plagiarizing, or Gary Hart's womanizing. For those men, revelations about their private lives had much graver consequences. Ginsburg's Supreme Court nomination fell through and Biden and Hart had to withdraw from the presidential campaign...
...occurred -- as a scandale du jour. The tendency to press excess was visible in a little-noted but unforgettable moment on Nov. 7, as all six candidates gathered in Des Moines for the Iowa Democrats' Jefferson- Jackson Day dinner, ready to discuss the issues. That same day Douglas Ginsburg's nomination to the Supreme Court went up in marijuana smoke, and the politicians were forced to hack through thickets of have-you-ever interrogation. Two (Al Gore and Bruce Babbitt) volunteered that they had. When it was Richard Gephardt's turn at the pressroom ritual, he restated his lifelong purity...
...Ginsburg's marijuana use was greeted with revulsion not because of its illegality, but because of its perceived intrinsic moral taint. Even without law, it is something that demands contrition. Why? Because, to summarize much that has been said on the subject, it is a decadent, nihilistic, frivolous giving over of one's consciousness and self-control to the pleasures of a waking stupor. Fine. But any moral reasoning that leads you to call immoral that kind of self-surrender must lead you to conclude the same about drinking, which can get you to a stretch of Lethe-land right...
...Which makes the Ginsburg test so hard to justify. Did a few encounters with marijuana really make him morally unfit for the Supreme Court? Six out of ten Americans born in the '50s and '60s tried pot by age 25. A test that has the potential for disqualifying almost two-thirds of the population from high public service needs a compelling logic. The Ginsburg test doesn't have one. That won't save poor Ginsburg. But it might save a few others down the road...
...encounters with marijuana really make Douglas Ginsburg unfit for the Supreme Court? We need better tests than that...