Planned Parenthood sounded the alarm Friday night after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, noting that abortion rights could be decided on the high court based on her replacement.
Reproductive rights, voting rights, protections from discrimination, the future of criminal justice, the power of the presidency, the rights of immigrants, tax rules and laws, and healthcare for millions of vulnerable Americans, to name a few issues.
Every big issue in American life is on the line.
“Tonight we honor that legacy, but tomorrow, we’re going to need to get to work to preserve the ideals she spent her life’s work defending. Because this is not an understatement: The fate of our rights, our freedoms, our health care, our bodies, our lives, and our country depend on what happens over the coming months,” Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson said in a statement.
McGill said the Senate should not consider a replacement for Ginsburg in an election year, indicating that a potential pick from President Trump would likely be opposed to the same abortion rights that Ginsburg championed on the high court.
“To be very clear, it would be an absolute slap in the face to the millions of Americans who honor and cherish Justice Ginsburg’s legacy if President Trump and Mitch McConnell were to replace her with someone who would undo her life’s work and take away the rights and freedoms for which she fought so hard,” she said.
“On behalf of Planned Parenthood’s 16 million supporters and people across the country whose lives and rights would be in jeopardy if President Trump was able to confirm another nominee to the highest court in the land, we vow to honor the legacy of Justice Ginsburg and approach the coming months like the future of our country depends on it — because it absolutely does.”
Ginsburg died Friday due to complications of metastatic pancreas cancer at the age of 87.
Just the second woman to be nominated to the high court, she served on the Supreme Court for more than 27 years.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Friday the Senate will consider a potential nominee from Trump, with Democrats crying foul after the GOP blocked President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, from receiving a confirmation hearing after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in 2016.
During her time in the Supreme Court, Ginsburg was a fierce advocate for gender equality and a staunch supporter for abortion access.
Replacing Ginsburg with a young conservative justice would fundamentally shift the ideological balance of the court, creating a seemingly bulletproof conservative majority of five justices (excluding chief justice John Roberts, who would make six conservatives but who is seen by the far right as less reliable).
This new majority could usher in a new legal landscape that could last at least 30 years.
An ideological tilt of this kind on the supreme court has not happened for 50 years.
Since 1969, Republican presidents have appointed 14 out of 18 justices elevated to the court – but certain Republican appointments, such as Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter turned out to occupy moderate ground or even drift liberal on some issues.
In the recent hyper-partisan age, that middle ground on the court has mostly disappeared.
Trump has released a list of potential picks, among them Amy Coney Barrett, 48, whom Trump appointed to the US court of appeals for the seventh circuit in 2017.
Barrett worries progressives as a committed Roman Catholic with conservative views on social issues, including a strong anti-abortion stance.
At Barrett’s circuit court confirmation hearings, the Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein expressed concern that the judge would be guided by church law instead of the constitution.
“The dogma lives loudly within you and that’s a concern,” Feinstein said, “when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for for years in this country.”
Astonishingly, earlier this month the Trump augmented the list with the names of three sitting Republican senators among 20 additional names, including Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, who then tweeted “It’s time for Roe v Wade to go”, referring to the landmark 1973 court ruling that led to the legalization of abortion in the US.
Trump sees appointing conservative judges as a political winner with his base, and a third supreme court justice in his first term could help him win re-election.
But the hypocrisy in a move by McConnell to confirm a Trump pick with so little time before the election – after McConnell blocked the Barack Obama nominee Merrick Garland in March 2016 on the grounds that “only” eight months remained before that year’s election – could be politically costly.
Because McConnell might be more worried about helping Republican senators win in close races, allowing McConnell to keep his leadership post, than helping Trump win a long-shot race, the political will to push a Trump nominee through might falter.
The resistance to the confirmation would be extreme and the political fight would be all-consuming.
Just hours before Ginsburg died, moderate Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska had remarked hypothetically, it was reported on Friday evening, that she would not confirm a new justice until after the presidential inauguration in January, 2021.