Team Jesus, please pray for Justice Ruth Brader Ginsburg’s family and friends during this time. I also pray that America will put aside ugly politics at this time. Ruth Bader Ginsberg Dies
The following is a statement from Republican Party of New Mexico Chairman Steve Pearce on the passing of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg:
“Justice Ginsburg was a pioneer and a true trailblazer on the Supreme Court. Our nation has lost a jurist of great stature who helped shape our nation on many difficult issues and on many social fronts. While she may not have held conservative positions on the High Court, she is a testament to what’s good on the bench—she had courage, a will to do what she felt was right and a desire to move our nation forward. She will be missed as a tremendous force on the Court and in our nation. She was an honest champion of justice.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberal leader of the Supreme Court, died Friday at the age of 87, less than two months before an election that is likely to decide the future of the Supreme Court for at least a generation.
The high court said in a statement that Ginsburg died “surrounded by her family at her home in Washington, D.C., due to complications of metastatic pancreas cancer.”
Even as the country absorbed the news of Ginsburg’s passing, the political implications of her death raised the prospect that President Trump could move to nominate a new justice while Republicans hold a narrow majority in the Senate ahead of an election that could see Democrats retake control of the upper chamber.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the soft-spoken firebrand who in her 80s became a legal, cultural and feminist icon, died at her home in Washington, D.C. on Friday. The Supreme Court announced her death, saying the cause was complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer. She was 87.As an 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.
Born in 1933 in Brooklyn, N.Y., Ruth Bader went to public schools, where she excelled as a student. At age 17, she went to Cornell University on a full scholarship, where she met Martin (aka “Marty”) Ginsburg. The couple married, started a family and both went on to attend Harvard Law School, where she was one of only nine women in a class of more than 500. Despite graduating at the top of her law school class, the doors to law firms were closed to women, and though recommended for a Supreme Court clerkship, Bader wasn’t even interviewed. In 1963, Ginsburg finally landed a teaching job at Rutgers Law School, where she began her work fighting gender discrimination.
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Becoming A Beloved Women’s Rights Icon
Bettmann/Corbis
Ginsburg 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.” Ginsburg founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union and would go on to become the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School. As the chief architect of the battle for women’s legal rights, she devised a strategy that was characteristically cautious, precise and single-mindedly aimed at one goal: winning. By the time she donned judicial robes, however, Ginsburg had worked a revolution.In the last few years, Ginsburg’s initials became a so-old-school-it’s-cool shorthand that took on a life of its own. By the time she was in her 80s, she had become something of a rock star. 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.
The Upcoming Political Battle
Rebecca Gibian/AP
Ginsburg’s death will have profound consequences for the court and the country. In a statement dictated to her granddaughter Clara Spera days before her death, Ginsburg said, “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new President is installed.” Her death gives Republicans the chance to tighten their grip on the Supreme Court with another Trump appointment so conservatives would have 6-to-3 majority.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 Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee.
But now, with the tables turned, McConnell has made clear he will not follow the same course. Instead he will try immediately to push through a Trump nominee so as to ensure a conservative justice to fill Ginsburg’s liberal shoes. So what happens in the coming weeks will be bare-knuckle politics, writ large, on the stage of a presidential election.
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