What Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Death Means for America
The Supreme Court vacancy will surely inflame an already-angry nation.
Russell Berman September 18, 2020
A furious battle over a Supreme Court vacancy is arguably the last thing the United States needs right now.
The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg today represents a devastating loss for feminists who held up the 87-year-old as an icon of women’s rights, and as a bulwark protecting abortion rights and a wide range of other progressive ideals on a conservative Supreme Court. The Brooklyn-born jurist became one of the nation’s foremost advocates against gender discrimination as a lawyer for the ACLU, decades before President Bill Clinton appointed her to be the second woman to sit on the high court.
But her passing less than two months before the presidential election also tosses one more lit match into the tinderbox of national politics in 2020: It will surely inflame a deeply polarized country already riven by a deadly pandemic, a steep economic downturn, and civil unrest in its major cities.
In Washington, the vacancy fight could ratchet up tensions to a level unseen even in the tumultuous Trump era. President Donald Trump will be eager to fill Ginsburg’s seat immediately, seizing an opportunity to rally his base before the election and to cement his legacy in the event that he is defeated in November. He could also become the first president since Richard Nixon to install three justices on the high court in a single four-year term. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already indicated that he’s ready for another confirmation battle, either before or immediately after the election. Republicans might be hard-pressed to consider and approve a Trump nominee in the eight weeks before November, but even a victory by Vice President Joe Biden and a Democratic takeover of the Senate might not prevent Trump from successfully appointing another justice. Republicans would still control both the White House and the Senate until a new Congress takes office in early January.
Ginsburg made her own desire clear in the days before her death, NPR’s Nina Totenberg
reported today. She dictated a statement to her granddaughter that read: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”
Whether that final wish will be granted is unclear. McConnell
has insisted that the precedent he created in denying former President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland in the final year of Obama’s term—to fill a vacancy that occurred nearly nine months before the 2016 election—no longer applies, because the same party controls both the White House and the Senate majority. “Oh, we’d fill it,” the Kentucky Republican promised in May 2019, more than a year before Ginsburg announced the cancer recurrence that would take her life. He reiterated that position in the hours after Ginsburg’s death was announced, saying American voters had given Republicans a mandate to fill judicial vacancies by expanding the party’s Senate majority in 2018. “We will keep our promise,” McConnell said in a statement. “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.” Never mind that the rationale McConnell gave in 2016—that voters should have the chance to weigh in on their next Supreme Court justice—would seem to apply even more strongly during an election in which the
first ballots have already been cast.
The Supreme Court vacancy will surely inflame an already-angry nation.
www.theatlantic.com