18 September 2020 — 2312 mdt
A torch not passed becomes a torch dropped
A great jurist loses a great gamble —
those she cared about will pay the price
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in poor health for two decades, survived many cancers, falls, and surgeries. Today, at 87, she died of pancreatic cancer.
A champion of civil liberties and rights, of women and minorities, of the people owed equal rights but accorded unequal treatment before the bar of justice, she was adored, sometimes to the point of de facto deification, by those for whom she she cared, and by the advocates who plead their cases before Ginsburg and her colleagues.
Now her death during Trump’s presidency jeopardizes all she lived to protect, for her passing provides theocratic Republicans with one last opportunity to nominate, and get confirmed, a justice who will overturn Roe. v. Wade; a justice who will champion special justice for the one percent at the top instead of equal justice for all.
Ginsburg suffered a common flaw of gerontocrats: she believed she would live forever. She refused to pass the torch to a stronger, younger, runner, apparently waiting for President Hillary Clinton to appoint her successor.
When should she have retired? As I wrote in early 2017, at the beginning of Obama’s second term. Below, that post in its entirety.
1 February 2017
Democrats lost the Gorsuch confirmation
vote on 8 November 2016
Unless Neil Gorsuch gets caught doing something unthinkably degenerate and evil — buggering pigs on the White House’s front law at high noon while spying for Iran might qualify — he’ll be confirmed as the next justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Whether there will be sufficient votes to confirm him was decided on 8 November 2016.
Given how and why former President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court was torpedoed by Mitch McConnell’s Republicans, no Democrat should vote to confirm Gorsuch, but there’s no point filibustering the nomination. Trump is President. He has the votes. He will prevail.
Will Democratic senators in red states who are up for re-election in 2018 vote for Gorsuch to pander to Republican voters? It’s a good bet that some will, thereby allowing Trump to claim that Gorsuch was confirmed with bipartisan support.
And it’s likely Trump will have at least one more opportunity to appoint a justice to the Supreme Court. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a frail but determined cancer survivor, celebrates her 84th birthday in March. She should have retired in 2013, when Obama had the votes to confirm a replacement, but she was too selfish and stubborn to subordinate her ambition and pride to the needs of the nation. She was holding out for President Hillary Clinton. Now she must survive another four years, hoping that Trump is a one-term President.
Will she last that long? Possibly. Will a Democrat replace Trump in 2021? Possibly. But those happy outcomes are not good bets.
Even if Ginsburg outlasts Trump, either Stephen Breyer, 79 in August, or Anthony Kennedy, 81 in July, or both, might not. By the end of Trump’s first term, there could be only two liberal justices, Sotomayer and Kagan, on the court. Unless Democrats win back the Senate in 2018, possible but unlikely, there’s nothing they can do to prevent this other than urging Ginsberg, Breyer, and Kennedy, to eat their vegetables, get their flu shots, and not step into empty elevator shafts.
Thank you, Hillary Clinton.
Ginsburg’s death will remind the religious right of the importance of the Supreme Court to their issues, motivating them to vote for Republicans. It will remind voters that old people die, and that Joe Biden is three years older than Donald Trump. It may replace Trump’s mishandling of the SARS-cov-2 virus as the fundamental issue of 2020 with deep seated values issues of the genre that Trump exploited so adroitly four years ago while Democrats thought Heaven had ordained Hillary’s victory.
I mourn Ginsburg’s passing. I lament her selfish decision to stay on the court long after she should have stepped down and aside to salute the next generation of jurists. She was proud, too proud. And in the end, her hubris ended as hubris always ends, in tragedy.
Now Trump gets to replace her successor. God help us — because the
Devil (spelled M i t c h) won’t.