Features
The Notorious RBG
by Vijaya Chandrasoma
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg passed away on Friday, September 18, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. She was 87-years old, and had served most honorably on the Supreme Court since 1993, only the second woman in history to serve on the nation’s highest court. Her life was yet another celebration of the Promise of America, a woman who overcame all odds in a male dominated world to become a legal, cultural and feminist icon.
Chief Justice Roberts said, “Our nation has lost a justice 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.”
The Notorious RBG, as she was affectionately called, was a diminutive 5 ft. 1 in. in height and under 100 lbs. in weight, but she dwarfed the obese 6 ft. 1 in., 280 lb. Despicable DJT (Donald J Trump) not just in stature, but in integrity, honor, decency and competence.
Born Ruth Bader in New York in 1933, Ginsburg grew up in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn. Her father, Nathan Bader was a Jewish immigrant from Russia and her mother was born in New York to Polish immigrants. Ginsburg suffered a series of setbacks during her childhood and teens; her older sister died when she was a baby and her mother died shortly after she graduated from high school. She graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in government, and married Martin Ginsburg shortly after graduation.
After graduation, Ginsburg found difficulty in obtaining employment because she was a woman and a mother. She entered academia in 1963, and was a professor of law at Rutgers Law School till 1972. She then co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), where she participated in hundreds of women’s rights and gender discrimination cases.
Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Clinton in 1993. She continued championing women’s rights, reproductive freedom, health care and progressive legislation until her death last Friday.
Just before her death, Ginsburg dictated this statement to her granddaughter, Clara Spera: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.” Trump is already trying to sully the name of Justice Ginsburg’s family, lying that her final wish about her replacement on the Bench had probably been dictated by Speaker Pelosi or Majority House leader, Adam Schiff.
Nothing is too low for this president, whose decisions are guided by his own abysmal standards.
Within hours of the news of her death, even before her body was cold, Trump and his Senate henchman, Moscow Mitch McConnell, sprang, vulture-like, into action. Trump announced that he would be nominating a justice to the Court later this week, and Moscow Mitch said that he would attempt to have his nominee confirmed before the presidential election on November 3. All Republican senators, currently bar one, have supported what is probably the most disgraceful, hypocritical power-grab in Supreme Court history.
It is a matter of paramount importance for Trump to have a stacked Supreme Court by election date. Current polls indicate that Vice President Biden has a comfortable lead. On Wednesday, Trump was asked at a White House press briefing whether he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power after election day if he loses. Trump said that this would depend on voter fraud because of his distrust of mail-in ballots. He is already paving the way to take a case of election fraud to the Supreme Court. A Court which, with a majority of six to three, will, in the full glory of Republican sycophancy, hold in his favor. Just like the majority Republican Court gifted George W. Bush the election in 2000.
On Justice Scalia’s death in February, 2016, President Obama nominated Justice Merrick Garland to take his place on the Court, a full nine months before the end of his presidential term. Senator McConnell refused to even hold a hearing on Garland’s nomination in the Senate, stating: “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”. Senator Lindsey Graham concurred, stating that he would oppose the confirmation of a justice to the Court during an election year.
McConnell and Graham, and the Republican Party as a whole, have predictably gone against a precedent they had set for themselves by their determination to appoint Trump’s nominee as a replacement for Justice Ginsburg on the Court, less than two months before the election.
Both Graham and McConnell have proved, once again, that their word is not worth the toilet paper they both use to clean Trump.
The principle of separation of powers is enshrined in the Constitution as a set of checks and balances, under which the executive, legislature and the judiciary are equal and separate branches of government.
In a rare rebuke of Trump’s criticism of a jurist who had ruled against his asylum policy as an “Obama judge”, Chief Justice Roberts said: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”
A commendable sentiment, which unfortunately falls far short of what prevails today. The Supreme Court is highly politicized and polarized. Trump would have appointed three justices during his first term, who will form a majority in the Court and act according to the Christian right agenda of the Republican Party and the president, with scant regard for the legal merits of the case, for generations to come.
With a Republican stacked Court, the younger generation of Americans can kiss goodbye to progressive legislation promoting universal health care, women’s equality and reproductive rights, income equality, protection of the environment and climate change, sensible gun control and a host of progressive measures enjoyed by citizens of all developed nations in the world.
More immediately, the Court, with its iron clad majority, is scheduled to make a ruling on the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), which is due to be heard on December 10, 2020. Repeal of Obamacare, without a replacement healthcare plan, will cost at least 20 million Americans their healthcare insurance, plus 100 million more will be destitute, when treatment for Covid19 will be withdrawn as a pre-existing condition. Trump has been promising a healthcare plan to replace Obamacare “in two weeks”, since his inauguration in 2017. Another blatant lie.
Democrats are not without teeth against the injustices of the composition of the Supreme Court. The Judicial Act of 1789 created the Court with six justices. Over the years, Congress has altered the number of seats in the Supreme Court, from a low number of five to a high of 10. If the Biden/Harris ticket is successful in November, and the Senate flips as seems likely, Democrats can add to the number of seats on the Bench and so mitigate the domination of a radical Republican Supreme Court.
However, if Trump wins, Americans would be faced with the establishment of the Trump dynasty, patterned on the Kim Jung-un regime of North Korea. Or the system of an autocratic kleptocracy, as practiced by his Russian mentor. We can only hope that American democracy will be resilient enough to withstand the onslaught which will certainly be engineered by Trump and Putin if he loses re-election in November.
The death of Justice Ginsburg has provided Trump with another talking point as a distraction to his colossal mismanagement of Covid19 during the last vital weeks before the election. The virus approaches seven million+ infections and 201,000+ preventable deaths, numbers far higher, per capita, than any other nation in the world. But Trump keeps lying that he has done a phenomenal job and recently awarded himself an A+++ for his management of the virus. In fact, he showed monumental contempt for the millions of families who have lost their loved ones to the virus, when he declared at a rally in Ohio on Monday, that “it (Covid19) affects virtually nobody”.
In his desperation to win re-election showing no regard for the safety of regular Americans, Trump is holding “super spreader” rallies for his supporters, with no masks or social distancing, contravening local regulations with impunity. Rallies which will only contribute to another spike in the spread of the virus. A senior member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Ms. Olivia Troye, who resigned from the Task Force last week, said that “Trump had a flat-out disregard for human life during the pandemic.”
The honored memory of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will endure long after the treasonous corruption of the past four years is a distant memory. Trump’s presidency, and the behavior of his neo-Nazi cult of enablers, will be denounced by future generations as one of the most contemptible aberrations in the nation’s history. Or as veteran journalist and author of the most recent book exposing Trump’s criminal mismanagement of the pandemic, Bob Woodward put it, “Historians writing about Donald Trump’s presidency and his handling of the Coronavirus will be asking, ‘What the F… happened to America?’”