    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
    [June 14, 1993]
    [Pages 842-844]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks Announcing the Nomination of Ruth Bader Ginsburg To Be a Supreme
    Court Associate Justice
    June 14, 1993

        The President. Please be seated. I wish you all a good afternoon,
    and I thank the Members of the Congress and other interested Americans
    who are here.
        In just a few days when the Supreme Court concludes its term,
    Justice Byron White will begin a new chapter in his long and productive
    life. He has served the Court as he has lived, with distinction,
    intelligence, and honor. And he retires from public service with the
    deep gratitude of all the American people.
        Article II, section 2 of the United States Constitution empowers the
    President to select a nominee to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court of
    the United States. This responsibility is one of the most significant
    duties assigned to the President by the Constitution. A Supreme Court
    Justice has life tenure, unlike the President, and along with his or her
    colleagues decides the most significant questions of our time and shapes
    the continuing contours of our liberty.
        I care a lot about this responsibility, not only because I am a
    lawyer but because I used to teach constitutional law and I served my
    State as attorney general. I know well how the Supreme Court affects the
    lives of all Americans personally and deeply. I know clearly that a
    Supreme Court Justice should have the heart and spirit, the talent and
    discipline, the knowledge, common sense, and wisdom to translate the
    hopes of the American people, as presented in the cases before it, into
    an enduring body of constitutional law, constitutional law that will
    preserve our most cherished values that are enshrined in that
    Constitution and, at the same time, enable the American people to move
    forward.
        That is what I promised the American people in a Justice when I ran
    for President, and I believe it is a promise that I am delivering on
    today. After careful reflection, I am proud to nominate for Associate
    Justice of the Supreme Court Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the United
    States Court of Appeals for the District of Co-

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    lumbia. I will send her name to the Senate to fill the vacancy created
    by Justice White's retirement.
        As I told Judge Ginsburg last night when I called to ask her to
    accept the nomination, I decided on her for three reasons. First, in her
    years on the bench she has genuinely distinguished herself as one of our
    Nation's best judges, progressive in outlook, wise in judgment, balanced
    and fair in her opinions. Second, over the course of a lifetime, in her
    pioneering work in behalf of the women of this country, she has compiled
    a truly historic record of achievement in the finest traditions of
    American law and citizenship. And finally, I believe that in the years
    ahead she will be able to be a force for consensus-building on the
    Supreme Court, just as she has been on the Court of Appeals, so that our
    judges can become an instrument of our common unity in the expression of
    their fidelity to the Constitution.
        Judge Ginsburg received her undergraduate degree from Cornell. She
    attended both Harvard and Columbia Law Schools and served on the law
    reviews of both institutions, the first woman to have earned this
    distinction. She was a law clerk to a Federal judge, a law professor at
    Rutgers and Columbia Law Schools. She argued six landmark cases on
    behalf of women before the United States Supreme Court and, happily, won
    five out of six. For the past 13 years she has served on the United
    States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the second highest
    court in our country, where her work has brought her national acclaim
    and on which she was able to amass a record that caused a national legal
    journal in 1991 to name her as one of the Nation's leading centrist
    judges.
        In the months and years ahead, the country will have the opportunity
    to get to know much more about Ruth Ginsburg's achievements, decency,
    humanity, and fairness. People will find, as I have, that this nominee
    is a person of immense character. Quite simply, what's in her record
    speaks volumes about what is in her heart. Throughout her life she has
    repeatedly stood for the individual, the person less well-off, the
    outsider in society, and has given those people greater hope by telling
    them that they have a place in our legal system, by giving them a sense
    that the Constitution and the laws protect all the American people, not
    simply the powerful. Judge Ginsburg has also proven herself to be a
    healer, what attorneys call a moderate. Time and again, her moral
    imagination has cooled the fires of her colleagues' discord, ensuring
    that the right of jurists to dissent ennobles the law without entangling
    the court.
        The announcement of this vacancy brought forth a unique outpouring
    of support for distinguished Americans on Judge Ginsburg's behalf. What
    caused that outpouring is the essential quality of the judge herself:
    her deep respect for others and her willingness to subvert self-interest
    to the interest of our people and their institutions.
        In one of her own writings about what it is like to be a Justice,
    Judge Ginsburg quotes Justice Louis Brandeis, who once said, ``The
    Supreme Court is not a place for solo performers.'' If this is a time
    for consensus-building on the Court, and I believe it is, Judge Ginsburg
    will be an able and effective architect of that effort.
        It is important to me that Judge Ginsburg came to her views and
    attitudes by doing, not merely by reading and studying. Despite her
    enormous ability and academic achievements, she could not get a job with
    a law firm in the early 1960's because she was a woman and the mother of
    a small child. Having experienced discrimination, she devoted the next
    20 years of her career to fighting it and making this country a better
    place for our wives, our mothers, our sisters, and our daughters. She
    herself argued and won many of the women's rights cases before the
    Supreme Court in the 1970's. Many admirers of her work say that she is
    to the women's movement what former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood
    Marshall was to the movement for the rights of African-Americans. I can
    think of no greater compliment to bestow on an American lawyer. And she
    has done all of this and a lot of other things as well by raising a
    family with her husband, Marty, whom she married 39 years ago as a very
    young woman. Together they had two children, Jane and James, and they
    now have two grandchildren. Hers is a remarkable record of distinction
    and achievement, both professional and personal.
        During the selection process, we reviewed the qualifications of more
    than 40 potential nominees. It was a long, exhaustive search. And during
    that time we identified several wonderful Americans whom I think could
    be outstanding nominees to the Supreme Court in the future. Among the
    best were the Secretary of the Inte-

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    rior, Bruce Babbitt, whose strong legal background as Arizona's attorney
    general and recent work balancing the competing interests of
    environmentalists and others in the very difficult issues affecting the
    American West made him a highly qualified candidate for the Court. And I
    had the unusual experience, something unique to me, of being flooded
    with calls all across America from Babbitt admirers who pleaded with me
    not to put him on the Court and take him away from the Interior
    Department. I also carefully considered the chief judge of the first
    circuit, Judge Stephen Breyer of Boston, a man whose character,
    confidence, and legal scholarship impressed me very greatly. I believe
    he has a very major role to play in public life. I believe he is
    superbly qualified to be on the Court. And I think either one of these
    candidates, as well as the handful of others whom I closely considered,
    may well find themselves in that position someday in the future.
        Let me say in closing that Ruth Bader Ginsburg cannot be called a
    liberal or a conservative; she has proved herself too thoughtful for
    such labels. As she herself put it in one of her articles, and I quote,
    ``The greatest figures of the American judiciary have been independent
    thinking individuals with open but not empty minds; individuals willing
    to listen and to learn. They have exhibited a readiness to reexamine
    their own premises, liberal or conservative, as thoroughly as those of
    others.'' That, I believe, describes Judge Ginsburg. And those, I too
    believe, are the qualities of a great Justice.
        If, as I believe, the measure of a person's values can best be
    measured by examining the life the person lives, then Judge Ginsburg's
    values are the very ones that represent the best in America. I am proud
    to nominate this pathbreaking attorney, advocate, and judge to be the
    107th Justice to the United States Supreme Court.

    [At this point, Judge Ginsburg expressed her appreciation to the
    President and discussed her background and her view of the position.]

        Q. The withdrawal of the Guinier nomination, sir, and your apparent
    focus on Judge Breyer and your turn, late, it seems, to Judge Ginsburg
    may have created an impression, perhaps unfair, of a certain zig-zag
    quality in the decision-making process here. I wonder, sir, if you could
    kind of walk us through it and perhaps disabuse us of any notion we
    might have along those lines. Thank you.
        The President. I have long since given up the thought that I could
    disabuse some of you of turning any substantive decision into anything
    but political process. How you could ask a question like that after the
    statement she just made is beyond me.
        Goodbye. Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:07 p.m. in the Rose Garden at the White
    House.