(CNN)Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday, the court announced. She was 87.
Ginsburg was appointed in 1993 by President Bill Clinton and in recent years served as the most senior member of the court’s liberal wing consistently delivering progressive votes on the most divisive social issues of the day, including abortion rights, same-sex marriage, voting rights, immigration, health care and affirmative action.
Along the way, she developed a rock star type status and was dubbed the “Notorious R.B.G.” In speaking events across the country before liberal audiences, she was greeted with standing ovations as she spoke about her view of the law, her famed exercise routine and her often fiery dissents.
She had suffered from five bouts of cancer, most recently a recurrence in early 2020 when a biopsy revealed lesions on her liver. In a statement she said that chemotherapy was yielding “positive results” and that she was able to maintain an active daily routine.
“I have often said I would remain a member of the Court as long as I can do the job full steam,” she said in a statement in July 2020. ” I remain fully able to do that.”
She told an audience in 2019 that she liked to keep busy even when she was fighting cancer. “I found each time that when I’m active, I’m much better than if I’m just lying about and feeling sorry for myself,” she said in New York at the Yale Club at an event hosted by Moment Magazine. Ginsburg told another audience that she thought she would serve until she was 90 years old.
Tiny in stature, she could write opinions that roared disapproval when she thought the majority had gone astray.
Before the election of President Donald Trump, Ginsburg told CNN that he “is a faker” and noted that he had “gotten away with not turning over his tax returns.” She later said she regretted making the comments and Trump suggested she should recuse herself in cases concerning him. She never did.
In 2011, by contrast, President Barack Obama singled out Ginsburg at a White House ceremony. “She’s one of my favorites,” he said, “I’ve got a soft spot for Justice Ginsburg.”
The vacancy gives Trump the opportunity to further solidify the conservative majority on the court and fill the seat of a woman who broke through the glass ceiling at a time when few women attended law school with a different justice who could steer the court to the right on social issues.
Ginsburg was well-known for the work she did before taking the bench, when she served as an advocate for the American Civil Liberties Union and became the architect of a legal strategy to bring cases to the courts that would ensure that the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection applied to gender.
“I had the good fortune to be alive and a lawyer in the late 1960s when, for the first time in the history of the United States, it became possible to urge before courts, successfully, that society would benefit enormously if women were regarded as persons equal in stature to men,'” she said in a commencement speech in 2002.
Once she took the bench, Ginsburg had the reputation of a “judge’s judge” for the clarity of her opinions that gave straight forward guidance to the lower courts.
At the Supreme Court, she was perhaps best known for the opinion she wrote in United States v. Virginia, a decision that held that the all-male admissions policy at the state funded Virginia Military Institute was unconstitutional for its ban on women applicants.
“The constitutional violation in this case is the categorical exclusion of women from an extraordinary educational opportunity afforded men,” she wrote in 1996.
Ginsburg faced discrimination herself when she graduated from law school in 1959 and could not find a clerkship.
No one was more surprised than Ginsburg of the rock star status she gained with young women in her late 70s and early 80s. She was amused by the swag that appeared praising her work, including a “You Can’t have the Truth, Without Ruth” T-shirt as well as coffee mugs and bobbleheads. Some young women went as far as getting tattoos bearing her likeness.
A Tumblr dubbed her the “Notorious R.B.G.” in reference to a rap star known as “Notorious B.I.G.” The name stuck. One artist set Ginsburg’s dissent in a religious liberty case to music.
“It makes absolute sense that Justice Ginsburg has become an idol for younger generations,” Justice Elena Kagan said at an event at the New York Bar Association in 2014. “Her impact on America and American law has been extraordinary.”
“As a litigator and then as a judge, she changed the face of American anti-discrimination law,” Kagan said. “She can take credit for making the law of this country work for women and in doing so she made possible my own career.”
Dissents and strategy
Part of Ginsburg’s renown came from her fierce dissents in key cases, often involving civil rights or equal protection.
In 2007, the court heard a case concerning Lilly Ledbetter, who had worked as a supervisor at a Goodyear tire plant in Alabama. Near the end of her career, Ledbetter discovered a pay disparity between her salary and the salaries of male co-workers. She filed a claim arguing she had received discriminatorily low salary because of her sex in violation of federal law. A majority of the court found against Ledbetter, ruling she had filed her complaints too late. Ginsburg wasn’t impressed with that reasoning.
“The court’s insistence on immediate contest overlooks common characteristics of pay discrimination,” Ginsburg wrote, urging Congress to take up the issue, which it did in 2009.
In 2015, it was Ginsburg who led the liberal block of the court as it voted in favor of same-sex marriage with the critical fifth vote of Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy wrote the opinion and it was joined by the liberals who chose not to write separately. Ginsburg was likely behind that strategy and she said later that had she written the majority she might have put more emphasis on equal protection.
After the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens, Ginsburg was the most senior of her liberal colleagues and she had the power to assign opinions when the chief justice was on the other side.
She assigned herself an angry dissent when the court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013.
“The sad irony of today’s decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proven effective,” she wrote. She compared racial discrimination to a “vile infection” and said early attempts to protect against it were like “battling the Hydra.”
She also penned a partial dissent in 2012 a case concerning Obama’s health care law disagreeing with the conservative justices that the individual mandate was not a valid exercise of Congress’ power under the Commerce Clause. She called the reasoning “crabbed” but was satisfied that Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the fifth vote to uphold the law under the taxing power.
Ginsburg puzzled some liberals with her criticisms of the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion — a case that was decided well before she took the bench. Although she said she felt like the result was right, she thought the Supreme Court should have limited itself to the Texas statute at hand instead of issuing a sweeping decision that created a target for opponents to abortion rights.
She was in dissent in 2007 when the majority upheld a federal ban on a procedure called “partial birth abortion.” She called the decision “alarming” and said that it “tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.”
She voted with the majority, however, in 2016 when the court struck down a Texas abortion law that critics called one of the strictest nationwide.
In July (2020), Ginsburg filed another fierce dissent when the conservative majority allowed the Trump administration to expand exemptions for employers who have religious or moral objections to complying with the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate.
“Today, for the first time, the Court casts totally aside countervailing rights and interests in its zeal to secure religious rights to the nth degree,” Ginsburg wrote, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She observed that the administration had said the new rules would cause thousands of women — “between 70,500 and 126,400 women of childbearing age,” she wrote — to lose coverage.
Friendship with Scalia
Despite their ideological differences, her best friend on the bench was the late Justice Antonin Scalia. After the conservative’s sudden death in February 2016, she said he left her a “treasure trove” of memories.
She was a life-long opera fan who appeared onstage in 2016 at the Kennedy Center for a non-speaking role in the Washington National Opera’s “The Daughter of the Regiment.”
At speaking events she often lamented the fact that while she dreamed of being a great opera diva, she had been born with the limited range of a sparrow.
Her relationship with Scalia inspired Derrick Wang to compose a comic opera he titled Scalia/Ginsburg that was based on opinions penned by the two justices.
The actress Kate McKinnon also portrayed Ginsburg — wearing black robes and a trademark jabot — in a recurring “Saturday Night Live” skit responding to the news of the day.
Ginsburg suffered two bouts of cancer in 1999 and 2009, and received a stent implant in her heart but never missed a day of oral arguments. She was married to Martin Ginsburg, a noted tax attorney for more than 50 years until his death in 2010 and they had two children.
“I would just like people to think of me as a judge who did the best she could with whatever limited talent I had,” Ginsburg said at an event at the University of California Hastings College of Law in 2011, “to keep our country true to what makes it a great nation and to make things a little better than they might have been if I hadn’t been there.”
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
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Good riddance to Jewish garbage!
For 27 years Ginsburg ruled against constitutional liberty and Christian values while being a champion for homosexual movements.
Ginsburg believed that a Christian conservative wedding cake designer in Colorado should not be allowed to decline an order for a homosexual civil union.
She believed only militias should be allowed to have guns.
She believed the Boy Scouts of America should not be allowed to deny membership, including troop leader positions, to homosexual adult men.
She held that students should not be allowed to pray during school football games, and that religious schools, such as Catholic schools, must be prevented from receiving public funding.
She held that corporations and labor unions should be allowed to give unlimited political donations to candidates, but an individual’s contributions should be limited.
She believed that employees should be forced to pay union dues even if they don’t want to be members.
Her death also highlights the dismal failure of the so called “War on Cancer”. A few years ago the NY Times had an extensive article on this failure which estimated they had squandered between $100 billion and $1 trillion on the failed war on cancer but most doctors can’t even tell you what cancer is, let alone how to cure and prevent it in the human body. The reasons for this failure are many but boil down to prejudice and bigotry against the greatest biochemist of the 20th Century in Germany, Otto H. Warburg, M.D., Ph.D., 1883-1970. Here is a great reference on his life by one of his three Nobel Prize winning pupils Hans Krebs M.D.:
Krebs, Hans Adolf (1981), Otto Warburg: Cell Physiologist, Biochemist, and Eccentric, Oxford University Press
Warburg was a genius level scientist awarded the solo Nobel Prize in 1931. He was nominated in 1926 for different work but denied by Fibiger whose work was later shown to be wrong; He was nominated again a third time in 1944 for yet different work but denied by Hitler’s decree. He published over 500 scientific papers and books in his life. The late Dean Burk, Ph.D., also a genius level scientist, who earned his degree from UC Berkeley at age 23, befriended Warburg and spent much time over there and proved many of the theoretical details of Warburg’s great discoveries. He was also a foreign member of Warburg’s lab. Basically cancer is not caused by genetic mutations, as falsely claimed by the bigots in this country, but oxygen deficiency over a long period of time where the cells switch from running on oxygen to running of fermentation like the lowest forms of life before the appearance of oxygen on our planet. This is why they have so dismally failed for so long. Warburg’s Father held the Chair of Physics at Berlin. Otto H. Warburg ranks with the scientific giants like Newton and Galileo. A great book “The Hidden Story of Cancer” by Brian Peskin, E.E. was published on all this about 2010: “The Hidden Story of Cancer. I urge all interested persons to read his great book. Brian lives in Houston, TX.
Winfield J. Abbe, Ph.D., Physics
This may work in Trump’s favor…then again…as with all else these days, who knows.
(( “For Trump and his Republican allies in the Senate, the vacancy lets him change the subject away from the coronavirus pandemic that has imperiled his odds for winning a second term. Now, they can offer their base a chance to tighten the conservative majority on the high court for years to come.
Yet Biden and Democrats can seize on the moment, too, invoking Ginsburg’s legacy to spur turnout on Nov. 3 and give liberals a fresh reason to vote out Trump. Democrats had contributed more than $20 million to ActBlue in four hours after Ginsburg’s death was announced.
Jim Manley, a former top aide to ex-Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, said he hopes Democrats “wake up” to the importance of the Supreme Court.
“The reality is that Republicans have always taken judicial nominations more seriously than Democrats,” he said. “My hope is that that actually changes with this shocking news. Whether it does or not remains to be seen.”))
((Mitch McConnell didn’t waste any time Friday night. Mere hours after RBG’s death, McConnell released a statement promising a vote on the Senate floor and calling on GOP Senators to back whoever is appointed by Trump to fill the vacancy. Right now, the smart money is on 7th Circuit judge Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative Catholic and a runner-up during Trump’s last two nominations.))
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/resets-race-scotus-opening-creates-opportunity-trump-change-subject-nov-3
Too many people have lied their way to the top. Too many governments have practiced the philosophy of stealing what you can when you can. Too many people who weren’t directly hurt by the crime found it easy to look the other way after all those people were either killed or put in jail for trying to tell the truth.
This couldn’t happen to me, they think. I’ll just keep my mask on and my mouth shut.
https://johnkaminski.org/index.php/john-kaminski-american-writer-and-critic-2/279-the-awful-truth-about-humans
She has been dead for over a year. The question is why did they give up the narrative she is still alive now. Do they think they have the stolen election in the bag?
I wonder who will be signing her death certificate and forging the actual date and cause of her death.
No public sightings since 2018.
well we’re living here in Melbourne town
and they’re closing all the factories down
oh our graduations hang on the wall
but never really helped us at all
oh they never taught what was real
I mean to mock, throw a navy seal
oh our fathers faught in so many wars
Kimmel was not told they were at the doors
but the governement knew all the time
oh we never really went to the moon
and they blew up the basement of towers too soon
Donald Trump knows it was bombs
he rang up that day and said
but he never did anything to his friend Larry
and the mayor is now his lawyer
Well now can get one of his in. They have been trying to keep her alive for so long.