The election is going to be more brutal than ever now. ABC News just announced President Trump will nominate a replacement for Ginsburg in the coming days.
“Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the enigmatic, longtime Supreme Court justice who attained near cult-like status among progressive circles, died Friday at the age of 87 from complications surrounding metastatic pancreas cancer.
The late Supreme Court justice, who spent more than two decades on the bench in the highest court of the land, is survived by her two children, Jane Carol and James Steven Ginsburg.
Ginsburg, who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Bill Clinton, was known for her soft-spoken demeanor that masked an analytical mind, a deep concern for the rights of every American and a commitment to upholding the Constitution.
Should the Senate confirm a new Supreme Court Justice if President Trump nominates one now that Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died?
— Jeff Rainforth (@Bring_Back_Phil) September 19, 2020
“She changed the way the Supreme Court views the issue, and she changed millions of people’s lives in the process,” said David Schizer, who served as a law clerk during Ginsburg’s first year on the high court bench in 1993. “She did it with her soft-spoken, quiet manner. She understood if you’re trying to do something momentous, you should present it as quite ordinary.”
Everyone knows the Democrats would confirm a Supreme Court nominee if the parties were reversed here
— Jack Posobiec ?? (@JackPosobiec) September 19, 2020
She had battled back from two forms of cancer in the past but her health began to take a downturn in December 2018 when she underwent a pulmonary lobectomy after two malignant nodules were discovered in the lower lobe of her left lung.
On Jan. 7, 2019, the Court announced she would miss oral arguments that day for the first time since she joined as she continued to recuperate from that surgery.
From Brooklyn to the bench
Born in 1933 in Brooklyn, young Ruth’s early influence was her mother, Celia, who instilled in her daughter the value of education and dignity. “She taught me,” Ginsburg said, “be someone who holds fast to her convictions and her self-respect, someone who is a good teacher, but doesn’t snap back in anger. Recriminations do no good.”
To her lifelong sadness, Ruth Bader’s mother died of cancer the day before her high school graduation in 1948.
“I had the good fortune to be a Jew born in the U.S.A. My father left Odessa bound for the New World in 1909, at age 13,” Ginsburg reminisced in 2004 at a Holocaust remembrance ceremony. “My mother was first in her large family to be born here, in 1903… What is the difference between a bookkeeper in New York’s Garment District and a Supreme Court justice? Just one generation, my mother’s life and mine bear witness.”
As a child, Ginsburg wanted to be an opera star, but soon found her brain would carry her farther than her voice, which remained tinged with a thick New York accent.
She finished first in her class as a Cornell undergrad. Later at Harvard and Columbia Law Schools, she juggled raising a daughter, helping her husband Martin recover from cancer, and finishing her own studies. As one of nine women at Harvard Law, her initial reception was chilly, with one professor telling her and the eight other women of the Class of 1959 how it felt to take the spots that should have gone to more “qualified” men.
Ruth Badger Ginsburg has passed away.
Pray for the Ginsburg family, but also pray for America.
If you thought you saw the face of true evil with the Democrats’ treatment of Brett Kavanaugh— you ain’t see nothing yet.— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) September 18, 2020
She made the law review, and finished as the top student at Columbia, where she had transferred in her third year. Those impeccable academic credentials evidently were not good enough for Ginsburg to get a job in a New York law firm or a top judicial clerkship. So she went into teaching, and found a new calling.
“Those experiences along with others really galvanized her interest in women’s rights litigation,” said Margo Schlanger, a Washington University law professor and former Ginsburg law clerk.
Her personal experiences collided with monumental social changes in the 1960s. While teaching at Rutgers, Ginsburg feared losing her non-tenured position when she became pregnant, so she wore large clothing to hide it. One of the first cases she helped litigate involved teachers forced to give up their jobs when they became pregnant.
NEW: Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) announces she will NOT vote to replace RBG on SCOTUS until after Election Day. "Fair is fair," she says.
— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) September 18, 2020
“I had the great fortune to be alive and a lawyer in the late 1960s,” said Ginsburg, “when for the very first time in the history of this country it became possible to urge before courts successfully that society would benefit enormously if women were regarded as people equal in stature to men.”
With the help of her students, Ginsburg argued six cases before the Supreme Court in the 1970s, winning five of them before an all-male group that included her future benchmates William Rehnquist, Harry Blackmun, and John Paul Stevens.
Her strategy was to take a measured approach, carefully choosing cases that would promote equality but not appear radical to often skeptical federal courts.
“It was very much with the model of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, led by Thurgood Marshall,” Schlanger said. “She had this idea that you have to build precedence step-by-step.”
Ginsburg also tried to expand the 14th Amendment’s traditional ban on racial discrimination to gender, and to show the effect stereotyping had on limiting opportunities for women.
“Race discrimination was immediately perceived as evil, odious, and intolerable,” Ginsburg said during her 1993 confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. “But the response I got when I talked about sex discrimination was, ‘What are you talking about? Women are treated ever so much better than men.’ I was talking to an audience that thought… I was somehow critical about the way they treated their wives and their daughters.”
Among the cases she argued: Weinberger v. Wisenfeld (1975), in which a father wanted to stay home and take care of his young son after his wife had died suddenly in childbirth. Social Security would not pay benefits for the man, even though had the situation been reversed, the woman would receive money, based on the man’ salary. The thinking was: husbands earned the money, the wife took care of the house and family. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously for the father.
But that careful approach and her belief that “courts needed to be educated” had its critics. Some feminists believed differences in the sexes, in many cases, should allow for preferred treatment for women, instead of a pure gender-neutral lens.
“I know there are people who think those cases didn’t go far enough,” said Schlanger, “and the theories of equality that say men and women should be treated basically without much distinction by the law is not everyone’s favorite approach to equality. But that’s not a view [held by more radical gender activists] that was very likely to succeed, and her approach did succeed.”
That success brought Ginsburg a national reputation and in 1980 President Jimmy Carter nominated her to the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Thirteen years later, President Clinton chose her to fill the Supreme Court seat of retiring Justice Byron White, citing not only her experience but her “big heart.”
Ironically some of the opposition to her nomination came from feminists, who did not like her criticism over the legal reasoning of Roe v. Wade, which permitted abortion. That ruling grounded first trimester abortions in the right to privacy, thereby overturning state laws that varied widely on access to the procedure. Ginsburg believed a more gradual liberalization to abortion would have kept the issue back in the states, avoiding the social and political upheaval that has been part of Roe’s legacy. The law on abortion was evolving at the time of Roe, Ginsburg recalled in 2005. “The Supreme Court stopped all that by deeming every law– even the most liberal– as unconstitutional. That seemed to me not the way courts generally work.”
But Ginsburg, in her rulings, upheld reproductive choice. “When government controls that decision for her, she’s being treated as less than a full adult human being responsible for her own choices,” she said during her confirmation.”
Jeff Rainforth is a freelance photographer & news editor covering events on the US/Mexico border, and riots & unrest in Democrat-run cities.
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