Sisters in Law by Linda Hirshman

Author:Linda Hirshman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

WINDING UP TO THE PITCH

For someone about to nominate a brilliant, beautifully educated, experienced, and symbolic candidate, Clinton spent a long time considering. Partly this was not his fault. His first choice was the charming and charismatic Mario Cuomo, governor of New York. Likening Cuomo to another former governor turned justice, Earl Warren, Clinton thought Cuomo might persuade some members of the Republican-dominated bench into decisions more to his liking, rather than just being another liberal vote. The legendarily indecisive Cuomo kept the president dangling for months. At the White House, everyone seemed to have a different dream. Some dreamed of towering constitutional law scholars such as Harvard’s Larry Tribe. Others thought it would be brilliant to appoint someone without a law degree (which is allowed, but unprecedented). Clinton was very enamored of his interior secretary, the smart and articulate Bruce Babbitt. The key Republican Senate Judiciary Committee member Orrin Hatch wanted his pal Ted Kennedy’s former chief of staff, Stephen Breyer, then a judge on the First Circuit.

As Clinton dithered, Judge Ginsburg’s posse was hard at work. Even her long-deceased mother, Celia Amster Bader, played a role. Bader’s niece Cousin Beth, née Amster, was married to a good friend of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, one Stephen Hess. He and Moynihan had served together in the Nixon White House and Hess was then at a powerful centrist think tank in D.C., the Brookings Institution. Beth’s husband sprang into action, reaching out to Senator Moynihan, who turned into Ruth’s best advocate. Although they had never met, Moynihan, the brainy ex-Harvard professor, knew Ginsburg, the brainy ex-Columbia professor, from her writings and her advocacy. In some precincts, that’s as good as long acquaintance, and so it was with Moynihan. It was her views on judicial respect for the legislature, he said in an interview, that attracted him to her. Of course, it didn’t hurt that she was born in Brooklyn.

As the spring wore on, White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, who was a lead player in picking a nominee, received an unexpected phone call from one of his pals at NYU Law School. Would Nussbaum and his wife like to join him at a dinner for six at the posh Inn at Little Washington in the nearby Virginia countryside? The other couple would be . . . the caller’s friends, Marty and Ruth Ginsburg. “Of course I knew exactly what people were doing,” Nussbaum says. But the evening was delightful. “I really saw her close up. All these things have an impact. I was impressed on a personal basis.”

Moynihan flew from Washington to New York City with the president on Air Force One, and he used the opportunity to lobby for his candidate. But Ginsburg was a bookish appeals court judge, just the kind of appointment Clinton said he did not want, a “footnote” type rather than a political type, who could sway the other justices his way. She was also sixty, and the White House staff was hoping for someone younger, who would outlast the youthful Clarence Thomas.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.