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      Rushing to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, McConnell shows power trumps principle | Robert Reich

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      People in public life tend to fall into one of two broad categories – those motivated by principle, and those motivated by power.Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Friday night at the age of 87, exemplified the first.When he nominated her in 1993, Bill Clinton called her “the Thurgood Marshall of gender-equality law”, comparing her advocacy and lower-court rulings in pursuit of equal rights for women to the work of the great jurist who advanced the cause of equal rights for Black people. Ginsburg persuaded the supreme court that the 14th amendment’s guarantee of equal protection applied not only to racial discrimination but to sex discrimination as well.For Ginsburg, principle was everything – not only equal rights, but also the integrity of democracy. Always concerned about the consequences of her actions for the system as a whole, she advised young people “to fight for the things you care about but do it in a way that will lead others to join you”.My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installedRuth Bader GinsburgMitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, exemplifies the second category. He couldn’t care less about principle. He is motivated entirely by the pursuit of power.McConnell refused to allow the Senate to vote on Barack Obama’s nominee to the supreme court, Merrick Garland, in February 2016 – almost a year before the end of Obama’s second term – on the dubious grounds that the “vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president”.McConnell’s move was a pure power grab. No Senate leader had ever before asserted the right to block a vote on a president’s nominee to the supreme court.McConnell’s “principle” of waiting for a new president disappeared on Friday evening, after Ginsburg’s death was announced.Just weeks before one of the most consequential presidential elections in American history, when absentee voting has already begun in many states (and will start in McConnell’s own state of Kentucky in 25 days), McConnell announced: “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.”This is, after all, the same Mitch McConnell who, soon after Trump was elected, ended the age-old requirement that supreme court nominees receive 60 votes to end debate and allow for a confirmation vote, and then, days later, pushed through Trump’s first nominee, Neil Gorsuch.Ginsburg and McConnell represent the opposite poles of public service today. The distinction doesn’t depend on whether someone is a jurist or legislator – I’ve known many lawmakers who cared more about principle than power, such as the late congressman John Lewis. It depends on values.Ginsburg refused to play power politics. As she passed her 80th birthday, near the start of Obama’s second term, she dismissed calls for her to retire in order to give Obama plenty of time to name her replacement, saying she planned to stay “as long as I can do the job full steam”, adding: “There will be a president after this one, and I’m hopeful that that president will be a fine president.”She hoped others would also live by principle, including McConnell and Trump. Just days before her death she said: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”Her wish will not be honored.McConnell’s ‘principle’ of waiting for a new president disappeared on Friday eveningIf McConnell cannot muster the Senate votes needed to confirm Trump’s nominee before the election, he’ll probably try to fill the vacancy in the lame-duck session after the election. He’s that shameless.Not even with Joe Biden president and control over both the House and Senate can Democrats do anything about this – except, perhaps, by playing power politics themselves: expanding the size of the court or restructuring it so justices on any given case are drawn from a pool of appellate judges.The deeper question is which will prevail in public life: McConnell’s power politics or Ginsburg’s dedication to principle?The problem for America, as for many other democracies at this point in history, is this is not an even match. Those who fight for power will bend or break rules to give themselves every advantage. Those who fight for principle are at an inherent disadvantage because bending or breaking rules undermines the very ideals they seek to uphold.Over time, the unbridled pursuit of power wears down democratic institutions, erodes public trust and breeds the sort of cynicism that invites despotism.The only bulwark is a public that holds power accountable – demanding stronger guardrails against its abuses, and voting power-mongers out of office.Ruth Bader Ginsburg often referred to Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous quote, that “the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people”. Indeed. More

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      Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Trump given chance to replace liberal lion with young conservative

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      “My most fervent wish,” Ruth Bader Ginsburg said days before her death on Friday, “is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”Ginsburg’s wish could be fulfilled, if the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, falls short in his 11th-hour push to rally Republicans to replace her. But even before Ginsburg’s death, McConnell, Donald Trump, conservative legal activists and evangelical groups were mobilizing for an all-hands campaign to fulfill their dream of a conservative super-majority on the supreme court that could endure for generations.That dream sees Roe v Wade, the landmark abortion rights decision, overturned; healthcare laws and environmental regulations tossed out; voting rights rolled back; anti-discrimination protections stripped; protections for immigrants vacated; and crucial bonds restraining the power of the presidency loosed.A national anti-abortion group, Susan B Anthony List, hailed a historic crossroads in the battle to make abortion illegal.“This is a turning point for the nation in the fight to protect its most vulnerable, the unborn,” the group’s president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, said. “The pro-life grassroots have full confidence that President Trump, leader McConnell, [judiciary committee] chairman [Lindsey] Graham, and every pro-life senator will move swiftly to fill this vacancy.”Ginsburg’s death has opened the way for Trump to make a third appointment to the court in just four years. But this one would be special. With his first two picks, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, Trump filled slots that had been occupied by conservatives.By replacing Ginsburg, Trump will have the opportunity – and he has left no doubt that he sees it as such – to swap out a liberal lion with a young conservative, building up the current four-vote bedrock conservative minority into an impregnable five-vote majority. The nine-seat court decides cases with strict majority votes.If Trump can replace Ginsburg, conservatives would not even need the vote of the chief justice. A George W Bush appointee, John Roberts’ rulings with the liberal bloc on healthcare and LGBTQ+ and immigration rights have led activists on the right to view him as unreliable.Such a fundamental ideological tilt has not happened in 50 years. Progressive groups have raised an alarm about a generational threat to basic rights and protections.“It would be an insult to [Ginsburg’s] legacy for this president to select a justice he promises will assail our rights and undermine, upend and unravel our democratic norms for generations,” said Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “Our fundamental rights are at risk.”Trump has released lists of potential nominees, in an effort to shore up support among evangelicals and so-called “values voters”.The lists include eight circuit court judges, three senators and two former solicitors general. But court watchers see three names as most likely to get the call: Amy Coney Barrett, 48, a federal appeals court judge in Chicago; Thomas M Hardiman, 55, an appeals court judge in Philadelphia; and William Pryor, 58, an appeals court judge in Atlanta.With only 45 days left until an election which could usher Trump out of the White House and change the balance of power on Capitol Hill, Trump was expected to name a selection almost immediately. The confirmation process would be extraordinarily short.Any Trump nominee would have to appear before Graham’s judiciary committee, which would then vote the nomination onto the Senate floor, where a majority would be required to install the judge on the court.Outraged that McConnell planned hearings so close to the election, in what critics see as a cravenly hypocritical reversal of his refusal in 2016 to consider a Barack Obama nominee advanced in March of an election year, Democrats and activists vowed to stop any rushed confirmation.With the next presidential election quickly closing in, now is not the time to ram through a supreme court justiceNan Aron“With the next presidential election quickly closing in, now is not the time to ram through a supreme court justice,” said Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice.The perceived frontrunners in Trump’s selection process have drawn sharp warnings from progressives about ties and statements on abortion, criminal justice and other topics.Barrett, a former law professor at the University of Notre Dame, is an outspoken Roman Catholic and a mother of seven.“The dogma lives loudly within you and that’s a concern, when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for for years in this country,” the Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein told Barrett at confirmation hearings for her appeals court post.Barrett replied: “If you’re asking whether I take my faith seriously, and I’m a faithful Catholic, I am, although I would stress that my personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear on the discharge of my duties as a judge.”Pryor, 54, of Alabama, once described Roe v Wade, the 1973 decision making abortion legal, as the “worst abomination in the history of constitutional law” and wrote that it had “led to the slaughter of millions of innocent unborn children”.Appointed to the circuit court by Bush in 2004, Pryor was previously Alabama attorney general, replacing future Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions.Hardiman, 51, of Pennsylvania, has advanced conservative rulings in “law and order” cases on issues such as sentencing guidelines, the death penalty and gun rights issues. In one case, he questioned if the first amendment protected people who videotaped police during a traffic stop.For any nominee to advance, Graham, in a tough re-election fight in South Carolina, must agree to schedule a last-minute hearing. After Obama nominated Merrick Garland in 2016 to fill a seat vacated after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, Graham said he was against such an election year move on principle.“I want you to use my words against me,” Graham said in televised remarks. “If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said, ‘Let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.’” More

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      Ruth Bader Ginsburg, supreme court justice, dies aged 87

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      Ruth Bader Ginsburg

      Stalwart of court’s liberal bloc had survived four cancer treatments
      Death of justice gives Trump chance of third appointment

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      Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her own words – video obituary

      The supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died of pancreatic cancer, the court said Friday. She was 87.
      Ginsburg was the second woman appointed to the court in history and became a liberal icon for her sharp questioning of witnesses and intellectually rigorous defenses of civil liberties, reproductive rights, first amendment rights and equal protections under the law.
      In a statement, the court said Ginsburg, who served more than 27 years on the bench, “died this evening surrounded by her family at her home in Washington DC, due to complications of metastatic pancreas cancer”.
      The chief justice, John Roberts, said that the nation “has lost a jurist of historic stature. We at the supreme court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her – a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”
      Her death thrust an immediate spotlight on who might fill the vacancy on the court, with just over six weeks before the election. The news was received with alarm by liberals and moderates who feared that Republicans would exploit the narrow window to install a third Donald Trump appointee on the supreme court.
      The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, pledged to get Trump a swift vote his supreme court pick. “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate,” McConnell said. More