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Supreme
Court
Justice
Ruth
Bader
Ginsburg
dies at
87
By
MARK
SHERMAN
apnews.com
WASHINGTON
-
Supreme
Court
Justice
Ruth
Bader
Ginsburg,
a
towering
women’s
rights
champion
who
became
the
court’s
second
female
justice,
died
Friday
at her
home in
Washington.
She was
87.
Ginsburg
died of
complications
from
metastatic
pancreatic
cancer,
the
court
said.
Her
death
just
over six
weeks
before
Election
Day is
likely
to set
off a
heated
battle
over
whether
President
Donald
Trump
should
nominate,
and the
Republican-led
Senate
should
confirm,
her
replacement,
or if
the seat
should
remain
vacant
until
the
outcome
of his
race
against
Democrat
Joe
Biden is
known.
Majority
Leader
Mitch
McConnell
said
late
Friday
that the
Senate
will
vote on
Trump’s
pick to
replace
Ginsburg,
even
though
it’s an
election
year.
Trump
called
Ginsburg
an
“amazing
woman”
and did
not
mention
filling
her
vacant
Supreme
Court
seat
when he
spoke to
reporters
following
a rally
in
Bemidji,
Minnesota.
Biden
said the
winner
of the
November
election
should
choose
Ginsburg’s
replacement.
“There
is no
doubt —
let me
be clear
— that
the
voters
should
pick the
president
and the
president
should
pick the
justice
for the
Senate
to
consider,”
Biden
told
reporters
after
returning
to his
hometown
of
Wilmington,
Delaware,
from
campaign
stops in
Minnesota.
Chief
Justice
John
Roberts
mourned
Ginsburg’s
passing.
“Our
Nation
has lost
a jurist
of
historic
stature.
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
tireless
and
resolute
champion
of
justice,”
Roberts
said in
a
statement.
Ginsburg
announced
in July
that she
was
undergoing
chemotherapy
treatment
for
lesions
on her
liver,
the
latest
of her
several
battles
with
cancer.
Ginsburg
spent
her
final
years on
the
bench as
the
unquestioned
leader
of the
court’s
liberal
wing and
became
something
of a
rock
star to
her
admirer
s. Young
women
especially
seemed
to
embrace
the
court’s
Jewish
grandmother,
affectionately
calling
her the
Notorious
RBG, for
her
defense
of the
rights
of women
and
minorities,
and the
strength
and
resilience
she
displayed
in the
face of
personal
loss and
health
crises.
Those
health
issues
included
five
bouts
with
cancer
beginning
in 1999,
falls
that
resulted
in
broken
ribs,
insertion
of a
stent to
clear a
blocked
artery
and
assorted
other
hospitalizations
after
she
turned
75.
She
resisted
calls by
liberals
to
retire
during
Barack
Obama’s
presidency
at a
time
when
Democrats
held the
Senate
and a
replacement
with
similar
views
could
have
been
confirmed.
Instead,
Trump
will
almost
certainly
try to
push
Ginsburg’s
successor
through
the
Republican-controlled
Senate —
and move
the
conservative
court
even
more to
the
right.
Ginsburg
antagonized
Trump
during
the 2016
presidential
campaign
in a
series
of media
interviews,
including
calling
him a
faker.
She soon
apologized.
Her
appointment
by
President
Bill
Clinton
in 1993
was the
first by
a
Democrat
in 26
years.
She
initially
found a
comfortable
ideological
home
somewhere
left of
center
on a
conservative
court
dominated
by
Republican
appointees.
Her
liberal
voice
grew
stronger
the
longer
she
served.
Ginsburg
was a
mother
of two,
an opera
lover
and an
intellectual
who
watched
arguments
behind
oversized
glasses
for many
years,
though
she
ditched
them for
more
fashionable
frames
in her
later
years.
At
argument
sessions
in the
ornate
courtroom,
she was
known
for
digging
deep
into
case
records
and for
being a
stickler
for
following
the
rules.
She
argued
six key
cases
before
the
court in
the
1970s
when she
was an
architect
of the
women’s
rights
movement.
She won
five.
“Ruth
Bader
Ginsburg
does not
need a
seat on
the
Supreme
Court to
earn her
place in
the
American
history
books,”
Clinton
said at
the time
of her
appointment.
“She has
already
done
that.”
Following
her
death,
Clinton
said,
“Her 27
years on
the
Court
exceeded
even my
highest
expectations
when I
appointed
her.”
On
the
court,
where
she was
known as
a facile
writer,
her most
significant
majority
opinions
were the
1996
ruling
that
ordered
the
Virginia
Military
Institute
to
accept
women or
give up
its
state
funding,
and the
2015
decision
that
upheld
independent
commissions
some
states
use to
draw
congressional
districts.
Besides
civil
rights,
Ginsburg
took an
interest
in
capital
punishment,
voting
repeatedly
to limit
its use.
During
her
tenure,
the
court
declared
it
unconstitutional
for
states
to
execute
the
intellectually
disabled
and
killers
younger
than 18.
In
addition,
she
questioned
the
quality
of
lawyers
for poor
accused
murderers.
In the
most
divisive
of
cases,
including
the Bush
v. Gore
decision
in 2000,
she was
often at
odds
with the
court’s
more
conservative
members
—
initially
Chief
Justice
William
H.
Rehnquist
and
Justices
Sandra
Day
O’Connor,
Antonin
Scalia,
Anthony
M.
Kennedy
and
Clarence
Thomas.
The
division
remained
the same
after
John
Roberts
replaced
Rehnquist
as chief
justice,
Samuel
Alito
took
O’Connor’s
seat,
and,
under
Trump,
Neil
Gorsuch
and
Brett
Kavanaugh
joined
the
court,
in seats
that had
been
held by
Scalia
and
Kennedy,
respectively.
Ginsburg
would
say
later
that the
5-4
decision
that
settled
the 2000
presidential
election
for
Republican
George
W. Bush
was a
“breathtaking
episode”
at the
court.
She
was
perhaps
personally
closest
on the
court to
Scalia,
her
ideological
opposite.
Ginsburg
once
explained
that she
took
Scalia’s
sometimes
biting
dissents
as a
challenge
to be
met.
“How am
I going
to
answer
this in
a way
that’s a
real
putdown?”
she
said.
When
Scalia
died in
2016,
also an
election
year,
Senate
Majority
Leader
Mitch
McConnell
refused
to act
on
Obama’s
nomination
of Judge
Merrick
Garland
to fill
the
opening.
The seat
remained
vacant
until
after
Trump’s
surprising
presidential
victory.
McConnell
has said
he would
move to
confirm
a Trump
nominee
if there
were a
vacancy
this
year.
Reached
by phone
late
Friday,
Sen.
Lindsey
Graham,
R-S.C.,
the
chairman
of the
Judiciary
Committee,
declined
to
disclose
any
plans.
He
called
Ginsburg
a
“trailblazer”
and
said,
“While I
had many
differences
with her
on legal
philosophy,
I
appreciate
her
service
to our
nation.”
Top
Senate
Democrat
Chuck
Schumer
tweeted:
“The
American
people
should
have a
voice in
the
selection
of their
next
Supreme
Court
Justice.
Therefore,
this
vacancy
should
not be
filled
until we
have a
new
president.”
Ginsburg
authored
powerful
dissents
of her
own in
cases
involving
abortion,
voting
rights
and pay
discrimination
against
women.
She said
some
were
aimed at
swaying
the
opinions
of her
fellow
judges
while
others
were “an
appeal
to the
intelligence
of
another
day” in
the
hopes
that
they
would
provide
guidance
to
future
courts.
“Hope
springs
eternal,”
she said
in 2007,
“and
when I
am
writing
a
dissent,
I’m
always
hoping
for that
fifth or
sixth
vote —
even
though
I’m
disappointed
more
often
than
not.”
She
wrote
memorably
in 2013
that the
court’s
decision
to cut
out a
key part
of the
federal
law that
had
ensured
the
voting
rights
of Black
people,
Hispanics
and
other
minorities
was
“like
throwing
away
your
umbrella
in a
rainstorm
because
you are
not
getting
wet.”
Change
on the
court
hit
Ginsburg
especially
hard.
She
dissented
forcefully
from the
court’s
decision
in 2007
to
uphold a
nationwide
ban on
an
abortion
procedure
that
opponents
call
partial-birth
abortion.
The
court,
with
O’Connor
still on
it, had
struck
down a
similar
state
ban
seven
years
earlier.
The
“alarming”
ruling,
Ginsburg
said,
“cannot
be
understood
as
anything
other
than an
effort
to chip
away at
a right
declared
again
and
again by
this
court —
and with
increasing
comprehension
of its
centrality
to
women’s
lives.”
In
1999,
Ginsburg
had
surgery
for
colon
cancer
and
received
radiation
and
chemotherapy.
She had
surgery
again in
2009
after
being
diagnosed
with
pancreatic
cancer
and in
December
2018 for
cancerous
growths
on her
left
lung.
Following
the last
surgery,
she
missed
court
sessions
for the
first
time in
more
than 25
years on
the
bench.
Ginsburg
also was
treated
with
radiation
for a
tumor on
her
pancreas
in
August
2019.
She
maintained
an
active
schedule
even
during
the
three
weeks of
radiation.
When she
revealed
a
recurrence
of her
cancer
in July
2020,
Ginsburg
said she
remained
“fully
able” to
continue
as a
justice.
Joan
Ruth
Bader
was born
in
Brooklyn,
New
York, in
1933,
the
second
daughter
in a
middle-class
family.
Her
older
sister,
who gave
her the
lifelong
nickname
“Kiki,”
died at
age 6,
so
Ginsburg
grew up
in
Brooklyn’s
Flatbush
section
as an
only
child.
Her
dream,
she has
said,
was to
be an
opera
singer.
Ginsburg
graduated
at the
top of
her
Columbia
University
law
school
class in
1959 but
could
not find
a law
firm
willing
to hire
her. She
had
“three
strikes
against
her” —
for
being
Jewish,
female
and a
mother,
as she
put it
in 2007.
She
had
married
her
husband,
Martin,
in 1954,
the year
she
graduated
from
Cornell
University.
She
attended
Harvard
University’s
law
school
but
transferred
to
Columbia
when her
husband
took a
law job
there.
Martin
Ginsburg
went on
to
become a
prominent
tax
attorney
and law
professor.
Martin
Ginsburg
died in
2010.
She is
survived
by two
children,
Jane and
James,
and
several
grandchildren.
Ginsburg
once
said
that she
had not
entered
the law
as an
equal-rights
champion.
“I
thought
I could
do a
lawyer’s
job
better
than any
other,”
she
wrote.
“I have
no
talent
in the
arts,
but I do
write
fairly
well and
analyze
problems
clearly.”
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