Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the demure firebrand who in her 80s became a legal, cultural and feminist icon, died today.
The Supreme Court announced her death, saying the cause was complications from metastatic cancer of the pancreas.
The court, in a statement, said Ginsburg died at her home in Washington surrounded by family.
“Our nation has lost a justice of historic stature,” Chief Justice John Roberts said. “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 tired and resolute champion of justice.”
Architect of the legal fight for women’s rights in the 1970s, Ginsburg subsequently served 27 years on the nation’s highest court, becoming its most prominent member.
Her death will inevitably set in motion what promises to be a nasty and tumultuous political battle over who will succeed her, and it thrusts the Supreme Court vacancy into the spotlight of the presidential campaign.
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 I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”
She knew what was to come. Ginsburg’s death will have profound consequences for the court and the country.
Inside the court, not only is the leader of the liberal wing gone, but with the Court about to open a new term, Chief Justice John Roberts no longer holds the controlling vote in closely contested cases.
Though he has a consistently conservative record in most cases, he has split from fellow conservatives in a few important ones, this year casting his vote with liberals, for instance, to at least temporarily protect the so-called Dreamers from deportation by the Trump administration, to uphold a major abortion precedent, and to uphold bans on large church gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic.
But with Ginsburg gone, there is no clear court majority for those outcomes.
Indeed, a week after the upcoming presidential election, the court is for the third time scheduled to hear a challenge brought by Republicans to the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare.
In 2012 the high court upheld the law by a 5-to-4 vote, with Chief Justice Roberts casting the deciding vote and writing the opinion for the majority.
But this time the outcome may well be different.
That’s because Ginsburg’s death gives Republicans the chance to tighten their grip on the court with another Trump appointment that would give conservatives a 6-to-3 majority.
And that would mean that even a defection on the right would leave conservatives with enough votes to prevail in the Obamacare case and many others.
At the center of the battle to achieve that will be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
In 2016 he took a step unprecedented in modern times: He refused for nearly a year to allow any consideration of President Obama’s supreme court nominee.
Back then, McConnell’s justification was the upcoming presidential election, which he said would allow voters a chance to weigh in on what kind of justice they wanted.
But now, with the tables turned, McConnell has made clear he will not follow the same course.
Instead he will try immediately push through a Trump nominee so as to ensure a conservative justice to fill Ginsburg’s liberal shoes, even if President Trump were to lose his re-election bid.
Asked what he would do in circumstances like these, McConnell said: “Oh, we’d fill it.”
So what happens in the coming weeks will be bare-knuckle politics, writ large, on the stage of a presidential election.
It will be a fight Ginsburg had hoped to avoid, telling Justice Stevens shortly before his death that she hoped to serve as long as he did–until age 90.
“My dream is that I will stay on the court as long as he did,” she said in an interview in 2019.
She didn’t quite make it.
But Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nonetheless an historic figure.
She changed the way the world is for American women.
For more than a decade, until her first judicial appointment in 1980, she led the fight in the courts for gender equality.
When she began her legal crusade, women were treated, by law, differently from men.
Hundreds of state and federal laws restricted what women could do, barring them from jobs, rights and even from jury service.
By the time she donned judicial robes, however, Ginsburg had worked a revolution.
That was never more evident than in 1996 when, as a relatively new Supreme Court justice, Ginsburg wrote the court’s 7-to-1 opinion declaring that the Virginia Military Institute could no longer remain an all-male institution.
True, said Ginsburg, most women — indeed most men — would not want to meet the rigorous demands of VMI. But the state, she said, could not exclude women who could meet those demands.
“Reliance on overbroad generalizations … estimates about the way most men or most women are, will not suffice to deny opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description,” Ginsburg wrote.
She was an unlikely pioneer, a diminutive and shy woman, whose soft voice and large glasses hid an intellect and attitude that, as one colleague put it, was “tough as nails.”
By the time she was in her 80s, she had become something of a rock star to women of all ages.
She was the subject of a hit documentary, a biopic, an operetta, merchandise galore featuring her “Notorious RBG” moniker, a Time magazine cover, and regular Saturday Night Live sketches.
On one occasion in 2016, Ginsburg got herself into trouble and later publicly apologized for disparaging remarks she made about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.
But for the most part Ginsburg enjoyed her fame and maintained a sense of humor about herself.
Asked about the fact that she had apparently fallen asleep during the 2015 State of the Union address, Ginsburg did not take the Fifth, admitting that although she had vowed not to drink at dinner with the other justices before the speech, the wine had just been too good to resist.
The result, she said, was that she was perhaps not an entirely “sober judge” and kept nodding off.
In 1980 then-President Jimmy Carter named Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Over the next 13 years, she would amass a record as something of a centrist liberal, and in 1993 then-President Bill Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court, the second woman appointed to the position.
She was not first on his list.
For months Clinton flirted with other potential nominees, and some women’s rights activists withheld their active support because they were worried about Ginsburg’s views on abortion.
She had been publicly critical of the legal reasoning in Roe v. Wade.
But in the background, Marty Ginsburg was lobbying hard for his wife.
And finally Ruth Ginsburg was invited for a meeting with the president.
As one White House official put it afterward, Clinton “fell for her–hook, line and sinker.”
So did the Senate. She was confirmed by a vote of 96 to 3.
Once on the court, Ginsburg was an example of a woman who defied stereotypes.
Though she looked tiny and frail, she rode horses well into her 70s and even went parasailing.
At home, it was her husband who was the chef, indeed a master chef, while the justice cheerfully acknowledged that she was an awful cook.
Though a liberal, she and the court’s conservative icon, Antonin Scalia, now deceased, were the closest of friends.
Indeed, an opera called Scalia/Ginsburg is based on their legal disagreements, and their affection for each other.
Over the years, as Ginsburg’s place on the court grew in seniority, so did her role.
In 2006, as the court veered right after the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Ginsburg dissented more often and more assertively, her most passionate dissents coming in women’s rights cases.
Dissenting in Ledbetter v. Goodyear in 2007, she called on Congress to pass legislation that would override a court decision that drastically limited back-pay available for victims of employment discrimination.
The resulting legislation was the first bill passed in 2009 after President Barack Obama took office.
In 2014, she dissented fiercely from the court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, a decision that allowed some for-profit companies to refuse, on religious grounds, to comply with a federal mandate to cover birth control in health care plans.
Such an exemption, she said, would “deny legions of women who do not hold their employers’ beliefs, access to contraceptive coverage.”
Where, she asked, “is the stopping point?” Suppose it offends an employer’s religious belief “to pay the minimum wage” or “to accord women equal pay?”
And in 2013, when the court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, contending that times had changed and the law was no longer needed, Ginsburg dissented.
She said that throwing out the provision “when it has worked and is continuing to work … is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
She viewed her dissents as a chance to persuade a future court.
“Some of my favorite opinions are dissenting opinions,” Ginsburg told NPR. “I will not live to see what becomes of them, but I remain hopeful.”
And yet, Ginsburg still managed some unexpected victories by winning over one or two of the conservative justices in important cases.
In 2015, for example, she authored the court’s decision upholding independent redistricting commissions established by voter referenda as a way of removing some of the partisanship in drawing legislative district lines.
Ginsburg always kept a backbreaking schedule of public appearances both at home and abroad, even after five bouts with cancer: colon cancer in 1999, pancreatic cancer 10 years later, lung cancer in 2018, and then pancreatic cancer again in 2019 and liver lesions in 2020.
During that time, she endured chemotherapy, radiation, and in the last years of her life, terrible pain from shingles that never went away completely.
All who knew her admired her grit.
In 2009, three weeks after major cancer surgery, she surprised everyone when she showed up for the State of the Union address.
Shortly after that, she was back on the bench; it was her husband Marty who told her she could do it, even when she thought she could not, she told NPR.
A year later her psychological toughness was on full display when her beloved husband of 56 years was mortally ill.
As she packed up his things at the hospital before taking him home to die, she found a note he had written to her.
“My Dearest Ruth,” it began, “You are the only person I have ever loved,” setting aside children and family. “I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell….The time has come for me to … take leave of life because the loss of quality simply overwhelms. I hope you will support where I come out, but I understand you may not. I will not love you a jot less.”
Shortly after that, Marty Ginsburg died at home. The next day, his wife, the justice, was on the bench, reading an important opinion she had authored for the court.
She was there, she said, because “Marty would have wanted it.”
Years later, she would read the letter aloud in an NPR interview, and at the end, choke down the tears.
In the years after Marty’s death, she would persevere without him, maintaining a jam-packed schedule when she was not on the bench or working on opinions.
Some liberals criticicized her for not retiring while Obama was president, but she was at the top of her game, enjoyed her work enormously, and feared that Republicans might not confirm a successor.
She was an avid consumer of opera, literature, and modern art. But in the end, it was her work, she said, that sustained her.
“I do think that I was born under a very bright star,” she said in an interview. “Because if you think about my life, I get out of law school. I have top grades. No law firm in the city of New York will hire me. I end up teaching; it gave me time to devote to the movement for evening out the rights of women and men. ”
And it was that legal crusade for women’s rights that ultimately led to her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.
To the end of her tenure, she remained a special kind of feminist, both decorous and dogged.