Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dead at 87
When Richard Nixon was sworn in as the 37th President of the United States on the 20th of January, 1969, I was in my 1st year of law school at the Howard University School of Law.
More than any other single event, his ‘law and order’, ‘silent majority’ presidency impacted the trajectory of my career and my life in ways that took me a lifetime to unravel and comprehend…
The passing of Justice Ginsburg, the last remaining progressive/liberal giant on the Court, has the potential of altering more than individual lives and careers.
Should Senator McConnell rush to fill this vacancy, which he has announced he would do as I write this post, it will alter the course of American jurisprudence for decades to come….
The last “fervent wish” of Justice Ginsburg is in the form of her request that she not be replaced until after the election and a new President is installed…
McConnel stole an Obama opportunity to fill a vacancy on the high Court by announcing that he would “let the voters decide” 9 months prior to the election in 2016.
McConnell will undoubtedly become the face and poster boy for political hypocrisy and double standard when he initiates the process to replace Justice Ginsburg with less than two months to go before the 2020 election…
Should the Trump-McConnell-Barr cabal succeed in getting a Ginsburg replacement installed before January of 2021, the proverbial rock shall fall through the bottom of the legal, political, and social fabric of this country toward a depth of hell that even Dante would have been hard put describe…
Koshersalaami
09/18/2020 @ 9:14 pm
The result is actually quite simple.
If McConnell ignores his own precedent, which he probably will, and the Democrats win both houses and the White House in November, the Democrats will pack the court. There will be more than nine justices. The Democrats would not have dreamed of doing that if McConnell hadn’t refused to vet Obama’s Supreme Court nominee.
Ron Powell
09/18/2020 @ 9:27 pm
McConnell has already announced that the Trump nominee will receive a confirmation vote on the floor of Senate…
Bitey
09/18/2020 @ 10:17 pm
Ginsburg’s career has been a testament to the wisdom of incrementalism. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/07/21/ginsburg-stresses-value-of-incremental-change/d0cc5315-3521-4cc6-89ce-2fca7dd06a91/
Ron Powell
09/19/2020 @ 4:50 am
@Bitey;
Something you might not know:
“Ginsburg……has hired only one African American law clerk in her 25 years on the Supreme Court. This is an improvement from her 13-year tenure on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, when Ginsburg never had any black clerks. When this issue was raised during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1993, Ginsburg said: “If you confirm me for this job, my attractiveness to black candidates is going to improve.” This remains a promise unfulfilled. . . .”
38 years and only one black clerk.
Now THAT is a testament to incrementalism…
For young aspiring black lawyers, the road to opportunity and success in the legal profession clearly did not go through any office held by Justice Ginsburg…
Ron Powell
09/19/2020 @ 4:24 am
“Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954),[1] was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Court’s unanimous (9–0) decision stated that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” and therefore violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education#:~:text=Brown%20v.%20Board%20of%20Education%20of%20Topeka%2C%20347%20U.S.%20483,are%20otherwise%20equal%20in%20quality.
Good thing the Brown decision was unanimous. If Ginsberg was on the Warren Court her’s would have been the lone dissent couched in the language of, “too much, too soon”, incrementalism….
Bitey
09/19/2020 @ 6:52 am
That is 100% cynicism, and 0% analysis. An incrementalism doesn’t threaten a unanimous decision. It can either pass 8 to 1, or what’s more likely, an incrementalist would go along with what the court intended. You are inventing a world that does not exist to go along with a sour view.
You once asked a question, “what is a moderate?” With Ginsburg’s career, you have an answer in the context of being a jurist, and can acquire an understanding of what compromise can accomplish. You can learn something here. You’re choosing not to.
“Something you may not know”…that’s funny. You go on to spell her name two different ways. You listed her twice as “Ginsberg”, and twice as “Ginsburg”. And you have the temerity…
Her name is Ginsburg, Ron. That’s something you may not know.
Ron Powell
09/19/2020 @ 8:42 am
@Bitey;
Re Brown v Board with Ginsburg dissenting: I was being sarcastic….
It’s a kind of Law school humor like inventing law firm names such as Dewey, Cheatham, & Howe…
Re spelling, my apologies for not checking my phone’s haptic edit of the spelling of Ginsburg….
It’s correct in the title…
And I’ll correct the errors.. Thanks for the heads up…
As for; “Something you may not know”…that’s funny.”
What’s funny is your refusal to acknowledge that you didn’t know about her ‘problem’ with selecting black applicants for clerkships…
My misspelling of her name doesn’t alter the fact and the fact that you didn’t know it…
It was a problem she herself acknowledged but never corrected…
38 years and only one black clerk.
Even conservative justices had better track records than she re diversity in selection of Law clerks….
Not likely to get a mention from the media…
She was a moderate who was perceived as a liberal or progressive primarily because of her stand on (white?) women’s equality via a vis the 14th Amendment equal protection clause.
Bitey
09/19/2020 @ 11:03 am
Wrong, Ron. You’re assuming I didn’t know. In fact, I did. I would let you know if I did not know about that. I tend to let your silly assumptions pass so that I can focus on what I am addressing you about. You make bad assumptions all the time. I don’t jump at your childish distractions.
Ginsburg selecting Black clerks would be good with regarding social justice, but it isn’t everything. Social justice is not entirely about Black people, Ron. Far be it for me to take something away from her accomplishments with regard to social justice.
I’ll grant you that it is difficult to compare the effects of systemic oppression in America on different classes, but Black men got the right to vote long before White women did. Different issues tie in to the patriarchy in different ways. It is not all taken down with a single strategy concerning Black people.
It’s interesting how you seek to compare her to the USSC in 1954. You really should compare her to yourself. Her work has advanced justice. Show me where yours has. How do you have the position to say that her moderate approach is less than yours when her accomplishments are greater? Where is the evidence of your extremism approach? Evidence of her approach is written into law.
Ron Powell
09/19/2020 @ 2:11 pm
This is what I said: “Something you might not know:”
I assumed nothing.
I wrote that here because it isn’t common knowledge that in 38 years on the bench she had but on black clerk…
I also said that there would be little or no mention of it in the media.
Given her posture, it’s an oddity or peculiarity that sticks out like a sore thumb…
I acknowledged her as the last remaining liberal/progressive on the Court…
And so she was…
But she had a bit of a blind spot…
The 1954 Brown case was a bit of a radical departure from legal precedent and societal norms…
As I said while in law school, some of us came up with humorous absurdities as exercises in playing devil’s advocate or reversal of roles…
A Ginsburg dissent to Brown would have been such an exercise…
Koshersalaami
09/19/2020 @ 10:56 am
I’m curious. Do we have statistics on Justices hiring female law clerks?
Bitey
09/19/2020 @ 6:18 pm
Perhaps you forgot this part, Ron.
“What’s funny is your refusal to acknowledge that you didn’t know about her ‘problem’ with selecting black applicants for clerkships…”
You state this as a matter of fact. In fact, you are wrong, AND, it is an assumption. Furthermore, Ron, what I know or knew about the woman is entirely irrelevant. I said, her career success is a testament to incrementalism. Your comment about what you think I know is not only a reach for ad hominem, but it is also beside the point.
Ron Powell
09/19/2020 @ 9:07 pm
You’re right it’s beside YOUR point which is ancillary to the notion that Ginsburg will go down in the history of American jurisprudence as a liberal/progressive advocate of 14th Amendment equality and equal rights, particularly for women….
Incrementalism may have been an element of her methodology but the outcomes she brought about were momentous, monumental, and sweeping…
Thus the oddity and conundrum re her track record with black law clerks…
It does seem strange and possibly even noteworthy….
koshersalaami
09/20/2020 @ 11:36 am
Perhaps you should go into detail about Justice Ginsburg’s (z”l) incrementalism in areas other than law clerks.
z’’l stands for zichronah livracha, which is Hebrew for Of Blessed Memory.