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NEED-A-VETTE 09-18-2020 6:53pm

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dead at 87
 
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/18/polit...ead/index.html

Quote:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dead at 87

(CNN) — Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday, the court announced. She was 87.

Ginsburg was appointed in 1993 by President Bill Clinton and in recent years served as the most senior member of the court's liberal wing consistently delivering progressive votes on the most divisive social issues of the day, including abortion rights, same-sex marriage, voting rights, immigration, health care and affirmative action.

Along the way, she developed a rock star type status and was dubbed the "Notorious R.B.G." In speaking events across the country before liberal audiences, she was greeted with standing ovations as she spoke about her view of the law, her famed exercise routine and her often fiery dissents.

She had suffered from five bouts of cancer, most recently a recurrence in early 2020 when a biopsy revealed lesions on her liver. In a statement she said that chemotherapy was yielding "positive results" and that she was able to maintain an active daily routine.

"I have often said I would remain a member of the Court as long as I can do the job full steam," she said in a statement in July 2020. " I remain fully able to do that."

She told an audience in 2019 that she liked to keep busy even when she was fighting cancer. "I found each time that when I'm active, I'm much better than if I'm just lying about and feeling sorry for myself," she said in New York at the Yale Club at an event hosted by Moment Magazine. Ginsburg told another audience that she thought she would serve until she was 90 years old.

Tiny in stature, she could write opinions that roared disapproval when she thought the majority had gone astray.

Before the election of President Donald Trump, Ginsburg told CNN that he "is a faker" and noted that he had "gotten away with not turning over his tax returns." She later said she regretted making the comments and Trump suggested she should recuse herself in cases concerning him. She never did.

In 2011, by contrast, President Barack Obama singled out Ginsburg at a White House ceremony. "She's one of my favorites," he said, "I've got a soft spot for Justice Ginsburg."

The vacancy gives Trump the opportunity to further solidify the conservative majority on the court and fill the seat of a woman who broke through the glass ceiling at a time when few women attended law school with a different justice who could steer the court to the right on social issues.

Ginsburg was well-known for the work she did before taking the bench, when she served as an advocate for the American Civil Liberties Union and became the architect of a legal strategy to bring cases to the courts that would ensure that the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection applied to gender.

"I had the good fortune to be alive and a lawyer in the late 1960s when, for the first time in the history of the United States, it became possible to urge before courts, successfully, that society would benefit enormously if women were regarded as persons equal in stature to men,'" she said in a commencement speech in 2002.

Once she took the bench, Ginsburg had the reputation of a "judge's judge" for the clarity of her opinions that gave straight forward guidance to the lower courts.

At the Supreme Court, she was perhaps best known for the opinion she wrote in United States v. Virginia, a decision that held that the all-male admissions policy at the state funded Virginia Military Institute was unconstitutional for its ban on women applicants.

"The constitutional violation in this case is the categorical exclusion of women from an extraordinary educational opportunity afforded men," she wrote in 1996.

Ginsburg faced discrimination herself when she graduated from law school in 1959 and could not find a clerkship.

No one was more surprised than Ginsburg of the rock star status she gained with young women in her late 70s and early 80s. She was amused by the swag that appeared praising her work, including a "You Can't have the Truth, Without Ruth" T-shirt as well as coffee mugs and bobbleheads. Some young women went as far as getting tattoos bearing her likeness. A Tumblr dubbed her the "Notorious R.B.G." in reference to a rap star known as "Notorious B.I.G." The name stuck. One artist set Ginsburg's dissent in a religious liberty case to music.

"It makes absolute sense that Justice Ginsburg has become an idol for younger generations," Justice Elena Kagan said at an event at the New York Bar Association in 2014. "Her impact on America and American law has been extraordinary."

"As a litigator and then as a judge, she changed the face of American anti-discrimination law," Kagan said. "She can take credit for making the law of this country work for women and in doing so she made possible my own career."

Dissents and strategy


Part of Ginsburg's renown came from her fierce dissents in key cases, often involving civil rights or equal protection.

In 2007, the court heard a case concerning Lilly Ledbetter, who had worked as a supervisor at a Goodyear tire plant in Alabama. Near the end of her career, Ledbetter discovered a pay disparity between her salary and the salaries of male co-workers. She filed a claim arguing she had received discriminatorily low salary because of her sex in violation of federal law. A majority of the court found against Ledbetter, ruling she had filed her complaints too late. Ginsburg wasn't impressed with that reasoning.

"The court's insistence on immediate contest overlooks common characteristics of pay discrimination," Ginsburg wrote, urging Congress to take up the issue, which it did in 2009.

In 2015, it was Ginsburg who led the liberal block of the court as it voted in favor of same-sex marriage with the critical fifth vote of Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy wrote the opinion and it was joined by the liberals who chose not to write separately. Ginsburg was likely behind that strategy and she said later that had she written the majority she might have put more emphasis on equal protection.

After the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens, Ginsburg was the most senior of her liberal colleagues and she had the power to assign opinions when the chief justice was on the other side.

She assigned herself an angry dissent when the court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

"The sad irony of today's decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proven effective," she wrote. She compared racial discrimination to a "vile infection" and said early attempts to protect against it were like "battling the Hydra."

She also penned a partial dissent in 2012 a case concerning Obama's health care law disagreeing with the conservative justices that the individual mandate was not a valid exercise of Congress' power under the Commerce Clause. She called the reasoning "crabbed" but was satisfied that Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the fifth vote to uphold the law under the taxing power.

Ginsburg puzzled some liberals with her criticisms of the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion -- a case that was decided well before she took the bench. Although she said she felt like the result was right, she thought the Supreme Court should have limited itself to the Texas statute at hand instead of issuing a sweeping decision that created a target for opponents to abortion rights.

She was in dissent in 2007 when the majority upheld a federal ban on a procedure called "partial birth abortion." She called the decision "alarming" and said that it "tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists."

She voted with the majority, however, in 2016 when the court struck down a Texas abortion law that critics called one of the strictest nationwide.

In July (2020), Ginsburg filed another fierce dissent when the conservative majority allowed the Trump administration to expand exemptions for employers who have religious or moral objections to complying with the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive mandate.

"Today, for the first time, the Court casts totally aside countervailing rights and interests in its zeal to secure religious rights to the nth degree," Ginsburg wrote, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She observed that the administration had said the new rules would cause thousands of women -- "between 70,500 and 126,400 women of childbearing age," she wrote -- to lose coverage.

Friendship with Scalia


Despite their ideological differences, her best friend on the bench was the late Justice Antonin Scalia. After the conservative's sudden death in February 2016, she said he left her a "treasure trove" of memories.

She was a life-long opera fan who appeared onstage in 2016 at the Kennedy Center for a non-speaking role in the Washington National Opera's "The Daughter of the Regiment."

At speaking events she often lamented the fact that while she dreamed of being a great opera diva, she had been born with the limited range of a sparrow.

Her relationship with Scalia inspired Derrick Wang to compose a comic opera he titled Scalia/Ginsburg that was based on opinions penned by the two justices.

The actress Kate McKinnon also portrayed Ginsburg -- wearing black robes and a trademark jabot -- in a recurring "Saturday Night Live" skit responding to the news of the day.

Ginsburg suffered two bouts of cancer in 1999 and 2009, and received a stent implant in her heart but never missed a day of oral arguments. She was married to Martin Ginsburg, a noted tax attorney for more than 50 years until his death in 2010 and they had two children.

"I would just like people to think of me as a judge who did the best she could with whatever limited talent I had," Ginsburg said at an event at the University of California Hastings College of Law in 2011, "to keep our country true to what makes it a great nation and to make things a little better than they might have been if I hadn't been there."

This is a breaking story and will be updated.

JRD77VET 09-18-2020 6:54pm

https://www.foxnews.com/us/ruth-bade...urg-dies-at-87
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies at 87

Ginsburg was appointed in 1993.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the enigmatic, longtime Supreme Court justice who attained near cult-like status among progressive circles, died Friday at the age of 87 from complications surrounding metastatic pancreas cancer.


The late Supreme Court Justice, who spent more than two decades on the bench in the highest court of the land, is survived by her two children, Jane Carol and James Steven Ginsburg.

Ginsburg, who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Bill Clinton, was known for her soft-spoken demeanor that masked an analytical mind, a deep concern for the rights of every American and a commitment to upholding the Constitution.

"She changed the way the Supreme Court views the issue, and she changed millions of people's lives in the process," said David Schizer, who served as a law clerk during Ginsburg's first year on the high court bench in 1993. "She did it with her soft-spoken, quiet manner. She understood if you're trying to do something momentous, you should present it as quite ordinary."

She had battled back from two forms of cancer in the past but her health began to take a downturn in December 2018 when she underwent a pulmonary lobectomy after two malignant nodules were discovered in the lower lobe of her left lung.

On Jan. 7, 2019, the Court announced she would miss oral arguments that day for the first time since she joined as she continued to recuperate from that surgery.

From Brooklyn to the bench
Born in 1933 in Brooklyn, young Ruth's early influence was her mother, Celia, who instilled in her daughter the value of education and dignity. "She taught me," Ginsburg said, "be someone who holds fast to her convictions and her self-respect, someone who is a good teacher, but doesn't snap back in anger. Recriminations do no good."

To her lifelong sadness, Ruth Bader's mother died of cancer the day before her high school graduation in 1948.


"I had the good fortune to be a Jew born in the U.S.A. My father left Odessa bound for the New World in 1909, at age 13," Ginsburg reminisced in 2004 at a Holocaust remembrance ceremony. "My mother was first in her large family to be born here, in 1903... What is the difference between a bookkeeper in New York's Garment District and a Supreme Court justice? Just one generation, my mother's life and mine bear witness."

As a child, Ginsburg wanted to be an opera star, but soon found her brain would carry her farther than her voice, which remained tinged with a thick New York accent.

She finished first in her class as a Cornell undergrad. Later at Harvard and Columbia Law Schools, she juggled raising a daughter, helping her husband Martin recover from cancer, and finishing her own studies. As one of nine women at Harvard Law, her initial reception was chilly, with one professor telling her and the eight other women of the Class of 1959 how it felt to take the spots that should have gone to more "qualified" men.

She made the law review, and finished as the top student at Columbia, where she had transferred in her third year. Those impeccable academic credentials evidently were not good enough for Ginsburg to get a job in a New York law firm or a top judicial clerkship. So she went into teaching, and found a new calling.

"Those experiences along with others really galvanized her interest in women's rights litigation," said Margo Schlanger, a Washington University law professor and former Ginsburg law clerk.

Her personal experiences collided with monumental social changes in the 1960s. While teaching at Rutgers, Ginsburg feared losing her non-tenured position when she became pregnant, so she wore large clothing to hide it. One of the first cases she helped litigate involved teachers forced to give up their jobs when they became pregnant.

“I had the great fortune to be alive and a lawyer in the late 1960s," said Ginsburg, "when for the very first time in the history of this country it became possible to urge before courts successfully that society would benefit enormously if women were regarded as people equal in stature to men."

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With the help of her students, Ginsburg argued six cases before the Supreme Court in the 1970s, winning five of them before an all-male group that included her future benchmates William Rehnquist, Harry Blackmun, and John Paul Stevens.

Her strategy was to take a measured approach, carefully choosing cases that would promote equality but not appear radical to often skeptical federal courts.

"It was very much with the model of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, led by Thurgood Marshall," Schlanger said. "She had this idea that you have to build precedence step-by-step."

Ginsburg also tried to expand the 14th Amendment's traditional ban on racial discrimination to gender, and to show the effect stereotyping had on limiting opportunities for women.

“Race discrimination was immediately perceived as evil, odious, and intolerable," Ginsburg said during her 1993 confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. "But the response I got when I talked about sex discrimination was, 'What are you talking about? Women are treated ever so much better than men.' I was talking to an audience that thought... I was somehow critical about the way they treated their wives and their daughters."

Among the cases she argued: Weinberger v. Wisenfeld (1975), in which a father wanted to stay home and take care of his young son after his wife had died suddenly in childbirth. Social Security would not pay benefits for the man, even though had the situation been reversed, the woman would receive money, based on the man' salary. The thinking was: husbands earned the money, the wife took care of the house and family. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously for the father.

But that careful approach and her belief that "courts needed to be educated" had its critics. Some feminists believed differences in the sexes, in many cases, should allow for preferred treatment for women, instead of a pure gender-neutral lens.

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“I know there are people who think those cases didn't go far enough," said Schlanger, "and the theories of equality that say men and women should be treated basically without much distinction by the law is not everyone's favorite approach to equality. But that's not a view [held by more radical gender activists] that was very likely to succeed, and her approach did succeed."

That success brought Ginsburg a national reputation and in 1980 President Jimmy Carter nominated her to the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Thirteen years later, President Clinton chose her to fill the Supreme Court seat of retiring Justice Byron White, citing not only her experience but her "big heart."

Ironically some of the opposition to her nomination came from feminists, who did not like her criticism over the legal reasoning of Roe v. Wade, which permitted abortion. That ruling grounded first trimester abortions in the right to privacy, thereby overturning state laws that varied widely on access to the procedure. Ginsburg believed a more gradual liberalization to abortion would have kept the issue back in the states, avoiding the social and political upheaval that has been part of Roe's legacy. The law on abortion was evolving at the time of Roe, Ginsburg recalled in 2005. "The Supreme Court stopped all that by deeming every law-- even the most liberal-- as unconstitutional. That seemed to me not the way courts generally work."

But Ginsburg, in her rulings, upheld reproductive choice. "When government controls that decision for her, she's being treated as less than a full adult human being responsible for her own choices," she said during her confirmation.

Notorious RBG
One of Ginsburg's first clerks on the high court was David Schizer, later dean at Columbia Law School, Ginsburg's alma mater. Despite being the first justice named by a Democratic president in 26 years, and her generally left-leaning views, Schizer recalls how quickly she fit in with the legal and social culture of this exclusive "club."

"People who don't agree with her policy instincts still think the world of her as a judge. Justice Scalia [the late conservative] once said if he were ever stranded on a desert island with a liberal, he'd want it to be Ruth Ginsburg."

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Clerks and staff described her as a mother figure of sorts, keeping track of birthdays, anniversaries, even dentist appointments. Despite deep affection and a nurturing personality, she was also a stern taskmaster, pushing hard for excellence in the often tedious, detailed-oriented work of the Court: preparing arguments, writing opinions. Ginsburg, friends said, was even harder on herself, often working all night. She has been known to take a flashlight to a movie theater, catching up on her caseload, while still following the plot.

In 1999, came a near tragedy. Diagnosed with colon cancer, she underwent emergency surgery, yet two weeks later, she was back on the bench. While keeping up her workload, she had chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Her only public words at the time: "I am still mending but have progressed steadily."

"Some of us were angry with her, but we were wrong," Schizer said. "We kept telling her to slow down, we kept telling her to take it easy, I sent her a couple of fiction books to read, and she wouldn't have any of it. She just bore down, went through the [cancer] treatment, treated it as part of her work. It was a lesson to me in how to deal with adversity, and she dealt with it with grace. And she basically refused to let anyone help her, because the way she could help herself was by doing things herself."

A 2009 diagnosis for pancreatic cancer led to fears she would retire then, but again, Ginsburg was back on the job within days, even working on her caseload from the hospital bed after initial surgery to remove the tumor. A year later, she was on the bench the day after her husband Martin died from cancer, telling friends privately he would have wanted it that way.

Later in her career, she developed an Internet cult following as the "Notorious RBG," for her blistering dissents on divisive issues, and for her octogenarian workout routines inside the court's gym. But controversy followed her, too, for her pointed 2016 criticism of then-candidate Donald Trump, calling him, among other things a "faker."

Dreams Come True
The power of a justice comes from the strength of the opinions she writes, whether it breaks new constitutional ground, or affirms existing precedent. Bridging consensus helps build allies to one's views on often hot-button issues. Ginsburg, say legal scholars, tended to rule on procedure, rather than establishing broad principles of social reform. That strategy not to overreach won her admiration from her more conservative colleagues, but her generally liberal record remained intact.

Yet she never backed down from her often tough-sounding rhetoric. On the death penalty, she wrote a 2004 majority opinion slamming Texas prosecutors for their behavior in a capital trial, which the Court found was riddled with errors, and worse. "When police or prosecutors conceal significant exculpatory or impeaching material, we hold it is ordinarily incumbent on the state to set the record straight," she wrote. "A rule declaring 'prosecutor may hide, defendant must seek,' is not tenable in a system constitutionally bound to accord defendants due process."


Dissenting in 2003's high-profile case throwing out Michigan's controversial affirmative action program for undergraduate students, Ginsburg declared, "The stain of generations of racial oppression is still visible in our society, and the determination to hasten its removal remains vital."

Perhaps Ginsburg's most important ruling in her early years on the bench was on a subject she knew well. In 1996's U.S. v. Virginia, the Court ordered state officials to admit women to formerly all-male Virginia Military Institute.

In her landmark opinion, she concluded the "skeptical scrutiny of official action denying rights or opportunities based on sex responds to volumes of history." She noted efforts to create an elite military corps "is great enough to accommodate women, who today count as citizens in our American democracy equal in stature to men. Just as surely, the State's great goal is not substantially advanced by women's categorical exclusion, in total disregard of their individual merit."

In law and life, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a role model to the many people she encountered over the years. Her message of success and tolerance go hand in hand, as she explained in 1999, just a month after undergoing cancer surgery: "The challenge is to make and keep our communities places where we can understand, accommodate and celebrate our differences while pulling together for the common good."

Ginsberg added: "No door should be closed to people willing to spend the hours of effort needed to make dreams come true."

Fox News’ Andrew O’Reilly contributed to this report.

Little Red L98. 09-18-2020 7:02pm

Like her or not, there’s no denying she had moxie.

RIP RBG. :angel:

99 pewtercoupe 09-18-2020 7:02pm

Can Trump get one more in before January? :dance:
I think he could nominate Jesus Christ and the Dems would be in lockstep opposition

The_Dude 09-18-2020 7:12pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by 99 pewtercoupe (Post 1807127)
Can Trump get one more in before January? :dance:
I think he could nominate Jesus Christ and the Dems would be in lockstep opposition

It would be hypocrisy for McConnell to consider anyone before January, but then he is a politician.

dvarapala 09-18-2020 7:15pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by 99 pewtercoupe (Post 1807127)
Can Trump get one more in before January? :dance:

We'll see a new Justice before we see a new vaccine. :D

Dan Dlabay 09-18-2020 7:17pm

May she rest in peace and be blessed by God:sadangel:

bill_daniels 09-18-2020 7:21pm

Trump should make a nomination right now, before the body is cold, and get started on the confirmation first thing Monday. All the Democrats can do is try and run the clock out, but Trump has until January 20, 2025.

Rodnok1 09-18-2020 7:30pm

They were discussing his next pick couple days ago the news said...

Sorry she died and cancer not a good way to go..

This lifetime term bullshit has got to be done away with.

Aerovette 09-18-2020 7:34pm

Trump should suggest a liberal and after the election, switch.

kvozel 09-18-2020 7:47pm

Let the war begin.

Cybercowboy 09-18-2020 7:55pm

This is the craziest year ever but RGB dying? Least crazy thing.

Thunder22 09-18-2020 8:02pm

If the Dems controlled the Senate, and had a Dem President, they wouldn't hesitate for millisecond to get a liberal judge on the SC.

Not. A. Millisecond.

Cybercowboy 09-18-2020 8:05pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by Thunder22 (Post 1807146)
If the Dems controlled the Senate, and had a Dem President, they wouldn't hesitate for millisecond to get a liberal judge on the SC.

Not. A. Millisecond.

Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi would gracefully wait until the election, while flocks of pigs flew by hordes of dogs and cats sleeping together.

bill_daniels 09-18-2020 8:40pm

Quote:

A few days before her death, she dictated a statement to her granddaughter Clara Spera, "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

LOL! Fervent wish in one hand, shit in the other....see which fills up first.

VITE1 09-18-2020 8:56pm

:sadangel:

Aerovette 09-18-2020 9:13pm

Quote:

A few days before her death, she dictated a statement to her granddaughter Clara Spera, "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."
Too fkn bad. If she was so concerned about her replacement, she should have bailed when the Kenyan was in office.

Anyone know if Cuomo had her in a senior living center?

BOTY 09-18-2020 9:28pm

:sadangel: but not a fan.

snide 09-18-2020 9:43pm

That's a shame. :sadangel:

Rikki Z-06 09-18-2020 9:50pm

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Attachment 47454


And , **** off. :kimblair:


:yesnod:


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