Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Has Died
If President Trump succeeds in naming her replacement, it will change the court for a generation.
Just days before her death, as her strength waned, Ginsburg dictated this statement to her granddaughter Clara Spera:
"My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died, the Supreme Court announced Friday night. Ginsburg’s passing gives President Donald Trump the opportunity to radically remake the Supreme Court for a generation by replacing the liberal feminist icon with a staunch conservative.
If Trump succeeds in filling Ginsburg’s seat with a justice in the mold of his two other appointees to the court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, it will be the court’s most extreme ideological shift since President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to replace legendary civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall in 1991.
Adam Feldman, who runs the Empirical SCOTUS blog, wrote recently that Ginsburg’s departure could be the left’s “biggest loss yet.” He pointed to some of the recent liberal victories on the court that would presumably have gone the other way if Ginsburg had been replaced with a conservative. Those cases include the affirmative action decision in Fisher v. University of Texas; Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage; National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, which upheld most of Obamacare; and Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt, which struck down restrictive abortion laws in Texas.
For this reason, the confirmation fight over Ginsburg’s replacement promises to be every bit as brutal as that of Kavanaugh, whose nomination was marred by allegations that he had sexually assaulted a woman in high school. The fact that it will take place during a pandemic in the middle of a presidential election promises to make the fight an ugly one, especially given that Senate Republicans prevented President Barack Obama from confirming a nominee to the court to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. CONTINUE READING: Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Has Died – Mother Jones
