Ruth Bader Ginsburg Yearns for Less-Partisan Political Climate
‘My hope is in my lifetime we will get back to the way it was,’ justice tells audience at play about Antonin Scalia
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Claude Solnik
Long Island Business News
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Home > LI Confidential > Stop scratching on holidays
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last month PHOTO: J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON—A reflective Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg offered something of a lament Saturday night for the polarized state of national politics, speaking to a theater audience following a play about her late friend and ideological sparring partner, Justice Antonin Scalia.
The court’s senior liberal justice was on hand at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., for a new run of The Originalist, named after Justice Scalia’s method for interpreting the Constitution according to its perceived original meaning. The play centers on a fictional relationship between the conservative lion and a self-described “flaming liberal” law clerk, whom Justice Scalia hires to keep his debating skills sharp.
The law clerk comes to grow fond of Justice Scalia even as she dislikes many of his views. The clerk also comes to detest rigid liberal and conservative fault lines that can dominate debate in the U.S.
“I love this play and the idea behind it that people with very different views on important things can genuinely like each other,” Justice Ginsburg said during a question-and-answer session after the show.
The 84-year-old Justice Ginsburg said she and Justice Scalia, who died last year, found common ground more often than most people realize, even as they jousted fiercely on hot-button constitutional cases.
The justice also spoke longingly of the days when nominations to the Supreme Court didn’t spark the all-out partisan combat that defines the process now, noting her own 96-3 Senate confirmation vote in 1993 and Justice Scalia’s 98-0 vote in 1986.
Justice Ginsburg fondly singled out Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, saying he was her biggest supporter in the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time of her nomination. The senator, she said, still invites her to speak to Utah audiences, which she will do later this month.
“My hope is in my lifetime we will get back to the way it was,” Justice Ginsburg said.
Any such shift would be a challenge in the current political environment. Many Democrats voiced deep objections to President Donald Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to succeed Justice Scalia, which came after President Barack Obama’s nominee for the vacancy, Judge Merrick Garland, was blocked from the court after the Senate Republicans declined to consider the nomination.
Justice Ginsburg thrust herself directly into the heated political debate last summer when she publicly criticized Mr. Trump during the presidential campaign and suggested he would be bad for the Supreme Court and the nation, remarks she later said she regretted.
MORE
- Justice Ginsburg’s Spin on a Supreme Opera, ‘Scalia/Ginsburg’ (July 13, 2015)
- How Do You Solve a Problem Like Scalia? Set His Dissents to Music (Dec. 2, 2014)
The justice made no mention of the president Saturday night, though current events clearly hung over the discussion. Justice Ginsburg said she was optimistic about the nation “over the long haul” and she cited the pendulum swing of U.S. politics, which she said was as much a symbol of America as the bald eagle.
When the pendulum swings too far in one direction, “you can look forward to it moving back,” she said.
Write to Brent Kendall at brent.kendall@wsj.com
