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What does Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death mean for the supreme court?
Obituary: ‘Formidably clever with a superhuman capacity for work’
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Obituary: Ruth Bader Ginsburg More
“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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The US president reacted with visible surprise when reporters informed him the 87-year-old supreme court justice had died. ‘She led an amazing life,’ Trump said after a rally in Minnesota. ‘What else can you say? She was an amazing woman who led an amazing life. I’m actually saddened to hear that.’
Supreme court justice dies aged 87
Obama calls on Republicans to delay filling vacancy – as it happened
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Joe Biden says there is no doubt the next US supreme court justice should be chosen by the winner of the country’s presidential election, following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday.
‘She was fierce and unflinching in her pursuit of the civil legal rights of everyone,’ Biden said of Ginsburg, who had sat on the supreme court since 1993. ‘Her opinions and her dissent are going to continue to shape the basis for law for a generation.’
Biden said her replacement should be selected by the winner of the election in November, citing precedent established by Senate Republicans in 2016, when they blocked Barack Obama’s attempt to replace justice Antonin Scalia in an election year
McConnell vows to push on with Trump’s pick to replace Ginsburg
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, supreme court justice, dies aged 87
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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
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
US supreme court justice and champion of women’s rights
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her own words – video obituary
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has died aged 87, was the second woman to sit on the supreme court of the United States. Nominated to the court by Bill Clinton in 1993, she had already established a reputation as a champion of gender equality and women’s rights as advocate, academic and appeals court judge. Throughout her long career, she was firm in her twin convictions: there is discrimination against women in the US (and elsewhere), and that discrimination violates the American constitution.
In her 27 years on the supreme court bench, she was a consistent moderate liberal. Her role as the senior liberal justice, after 2010, became increasingly important as the balance of opinion shifted in the court, and her scathing dissents on conservative majority decisions, particularly on women’s rights, made her a celebrated figure on the left.
In recent years Ginsburg was treated, as one New Yorker writer said, as “a pop culture feminist icon, a comic book superhero”. She was formidably clever, and had in her youth almost superhuman capacity for work. But what made her historically so important was her clear conviction of the injustice of unequal treatment of women, and her absolute certainty that it could be cleansed by applying the constitution.
Her emphasis changed over her long career. Early on, as a law professor at Rutgers, New Jersey and then Columbia, New York, and especially in her advocacy work for the American Civil Liberties Union in the 1970s, she seemed a committed feminist. As director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, she argued six gender discrimination cases before the supreme court, winning five, persuading the bench that gender discrimination was a violation of the constitution’s equal protection clause. She sometimes argued – as she did in Weinberger v Wiesenfeld (1975), representing a widower denied benefits after his wife died in childbirth – that women, as well as men, could be the unfair winners of an unjust system. More
