Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once again praised fellow Justice Brett Kavanaugh during a question-and-answer session Wednesday.
After Duke Law professor Neil Siegel said Supreme Court nominees are no longer picked for their legal ability or decency, Ginsburg leapt to the defense of Kavanaugh and Justice Neil Gorsuch, in comments first reported by National Review.
"My two newest colleagues are very decent, very smart individuals," she said.
Ginsburg has previously praised Kavanaugh for having an all-female staff.
"It's thanks to our new justice, Justice Kavanaugh, whose entire staff are all women, all of his law clerks are women," Ginsburg told a panel at Georgetown earlier this month, "And with his four women as law clerks, it's the first time in the history of the United States that there have been more women clerking at the court than men."
Ginsburg had similarly praised Kavanaugh in June to a conference of judges in New York City. She lamented in 2018, however, that Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing was a partisan show.
"The way it was was right. The way it is is wrong. The atmosphere in ’93 was truly bipartisan," Ginsburg said.
She went on to say that her own confirmation showed that it was a different time in Washington, since her experience in liberal groups did not stop her from being confirmed on a bipartisan basis.
"The vote on my confirmation was 96 to three, even though I had spent about ten years of my life litigating cases under the auspices of the ACLU and I was on the ACLU board," she said. "That’s the way it should be, instead of what it’s become, which is a highly partisan show. The Republicans move in lock step, so do the Democrats. I wish I could wave a magic wand and have it go back to the way it was."