ANALYSIS: TRUE. Ruth Bader Ginsburg Didn’t Understand Her Job:

Justice Ginsburg’s using her position to try to impose a feminist vision on federal policy ought to be recognized for what it was: an abuse of power. If you want to rewrite the law along feminist lines, that’s a perfectly honorable project — run for Congress.

The real fissure running through the Supreme Court is not between so-called liberals and notional conservatives, but between those who believe that judges are superlegislators empowered to impose their own vision on society and those who believe that judges are constrained by what the law actually says. The latter is the position of the Federalist Society and many lawyers associated with it, and that this position — that the law says what it says, not what people with power wish for it to say — should be controversial is an excellent indicator of why faith in our institutions has eroded so deeply. “If Republicans give Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat to some Federalist Society fanatic, Democrats should pack the court,” reads the line over Michelle Goldberg’s New York Times column. Read that and ask yourself who the fanatic really is.

(And: Whose seat?)

To be fair, some of her most diehard groupies didn’t understand their jobs, either: “Paul Farhi, a media critic for the Washington Post, says that Justice Ginsburg’s close friendship with NPR’s long time Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg raises questions of journalism ethics. Farhi notes that Ginsburg and Totenberg became friends in the 1970s. They shared dinners and celebrations, and Ginsburg presided over Totenberg’s wedding to her second husband. The question is whether Totenberg therefore was in a position fairly to cover Ginsburg’s work on the Supreme Court. Another question is whether, at a minimum, Totenberg should have disclosed the relationship to her audience.”