Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies at 87!!! And This Week in the 2020 Race.

 

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies at 87!!!

© Provided by Associated Press FILE - In this July 31, 2014, file photo, Associate Justice Ruth 

Bader Ginsburg is seen in her chambers in at the Supreme Court in Washington. The Supreme Court says Ginsburg has died of metastatic pancreatic cancer at age 87. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — 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.

© Provided by Associated Press FILE - In this April 6, 2018, file photo, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg applauds after a performance in her honor after she spoke about her life and work during a discussion at Georgetown Law School in Washington. The Supreme Court says Ginsburg has died of metastatic pancreatic cancer at age 87. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

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.

© Provided by Associated Press People gather at the Supreme Court Friday, Sept. 18, 2020, in Washington, after the Supreme Court announced that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died of metastatic pancreatic cancer at age 87. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

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.

© Provided by Associated Press FILE - In this Feb. 6, 2017 file photo, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speaks at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif. The Supreme Court says Ginsburg has died of metastatic pancreatic cancer at age 87. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)

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.

© Provided by Associated Press FILE - In this June 15, 1993, file photo, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg poses with Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., left, and Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington. The Supreme Court says Ginsburg has died of metastatic pancreatic cancer at age 87. (AP Photo/Marcy Nighswander, File)

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.

© Provided by Associated Press The American flag blows in the wind after it was lowered to half-staff Friday, Sept. 18, 2020, in Washington, after the Supreme Court announced that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died of metastatic pancreatic cancer at age 87. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

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.

© Provided by Associated Press A couple pauses outside the Supreme Court Friday, Sept. 18, 2020, in Washington, after the Supreme Court announced that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died of metastatic pancreatic cancer at age 87. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

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."

© Provided by Associated Press FILE - In this Aug. 10, 1993, file photo, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg takes the court oath from Chief Justice William Rehnquist, right, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington. Ginsburg's husband Martin holds the Bible and President Bill Clinton watches at left. The Supreme Court says Ginsburg has died of metastatic pancreatic cancer at age 87. (AP Photo/Marcy Nighswander, File)

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.

© Provided by Associated Press Ages of sitting Supreme Court justices and their years on the court.;

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.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Dies: This Week in the 2020 Race

Welcome to our weekly analysis of the state of the 2020 campaign.

The week in numbers

Joe Biden continues to dominate the paid media landscape. On broadcast television, the Biden campaign spent $36.5 million over the last week, while the Trump campaign only spent about $14.7 million, according to Advertising Analytics, an ad tracking firm. The Biden campaign has a similar advantage on Facebook, where it spent $4.2 million over the past week, while President Trump’s team spent $2.4 million.

A series of New York Times/Siena College surveys in seven battleground states generated mostly positive news for Mr. Biden, who didn’t trail in a single survey. Mr. Trump failed to reach 45 percent support in any poll. Support for Mr. Biden ranged from 45 percent to 55 percent.

With Mr. Biden pushing back on the president’s aggressive law-and-order messaging, 53 percent of likely voters in Minnesota and Wisconsin said they thought that Mr. Trump had encouraged violence in America.

In Wisconsin there was evidence of some possible receptiveness to Mr. Trump’s tough talk: It was the only state polled in which voters were just as likely to say that urban rioting was a bigger problem than racism in the criminal justice system, not the other way around.

But of those more worried about riots, nearly one in five said they planned to vote for Mr. Biden.

Catch me up

Late Friday night, the Supreme Court announced that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died from complications of metastatic pancreas cancer.

The news immediately upended the presidential race, as the death of Supreme Court Justice so synonymous with liberal values presented an opportunity for Mr. Trump and a challenge for Mr. Biden. After months of relative stability in the race, a Senate confirmation fight might aid a president searching for a political lifeline and trying to make the campaign about something other than a referendum on his handling of the pandemic.

Democrats immediately clamored for Mr. Biden to find a way to counter Republican efforts and hold Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, to the same standard he set in 2016, when he refused to fill the seat of Justice Antonin Scalia under former President Barack Obama.

The shock came in a week that otherwise seemed remarkably normal.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden each participated in town hall forums, moderated by ABC News and CNN, which included questions from voters that could not be shrugged off with claims of fake news or media bias. Both candidates also visited Minnesota on Friday, in a push from each party now that early voting has begun in several states. Mr. Trump hit Nevada and Wisconsin as well, while Senator Kamala Harris, Mr. Biden’s running mate, made stops in Philadelphia and California.

Two town halls offer window into debate

The two town halls this week also served as a preview of what the presidential candidates might look like at the general election debates.

Just like Mr. Biden’s convention speech, his CNN town hall was a reminder that the former vice president is not in a deep state of mental decline, as the Trump camp would like voters to think. At one point, he even recognized one of the voters who had been chosen to ask a question — a retired police chief from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., whom Mr. Biden remembered meeting.

Two nights earlier, Mr. Trump was unrepentant when forced to defend his administration’s handling of the coronavirus, in a setting that did not include shouted questions from reporters. At one point, he even blamed Mr. Biden for not instituting a national mask mandate, despite his holding no official position from which to do so.

Trump thinks the debates will turn things around: The president has been telling aides for months that he is counting on the debates to provide him with a boost. But Mr. Biden’s most recent big moments show someone more in command than he was in the Democratic primary debates.

Why Trump doesn’t prepare: Typically, candidates study a policy prep book that is hundreds of pages long. Trump aides have scaled that down to fewer than 30 pages, many of which simply have bullet points about issues likely to come up. So far, according to a campaign official, there are no formal debate preparation sessions set. Instead, whichever aide is traveling with the president has been peppering him with questions on the go.

Debates are still risky for Biden: Mr. Trump won’t play by the rules. And when he feels like he’s losing, he will go low. A conventional debate prep binder does little to steel a candidate against an onslaught of personal attacks, in Mr. Biden’s case most likely about his son Hunter. And while the town halls offered a preview, they were fairly tame compared to what is expected to come.

With tensions like these within the Trump administration …

This week had the president doing battle not so much with political adversaries, but with expert voices from within his own administration.

Dr. Robert S. Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Congress that a vaccine would not be widely available until the middle of 2021, contrary to the president’s promise of a big breakthrough before Election Day on Nov. 3. He also said masks were potentially more useful than a vaccine for battling the spread of the pandemic and returning to normal life.

“I think he made a mistake when he said that,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “It’s just incorrect information.”

On Thursday, a former member of the coronavirus task force, Olivia Troye, came forward to explain she had resigned because the president was only concerned with his own re-election chances and sought to downplay the threat of the virus. In response, the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, tried to discredit her by calling her a “disgruntled former detailee who typically sat in the overflow room of the task force.”

The call is coming from inside the house: From Mr. Trump’s own admissions to the journalist Bob Woodward, to current and former administration officials undermining trust in his statements about the coronavirus and the timing of a vaccine, the president is wasting precious days doing battle with himself and his own current and former officials.

It’s hard to dismiss everyone as disgruntled: Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser H.R. McMaster also spoke out this past week, saying in an interview that withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and partnering with the Taliban have made the country less safe. Another former official criticizing the president, this time on policy, threatened to undermine recent efforts to portray Mr. Trump as a peacemaker.

Trump continues to berate anyone who doesn’t fall in line: On Thursday night, he publicly rebuked the director of the F.B.I., Christopher Wray, after Mr. Wray warned of Russian interference in the election and of white supremacist violence.

Does door knocking matter? Depends whom you ask

Democrats love to fret, but after their shock in 2016, what was already a party susceptible to nervousness has hit new heights. The latest fear is not driven by money (the Biden campaign has that) or party unity (pretty safe) or advertisements (the Biden campaign is spending big), but door knocking, and whether the campaign’s reluctance to invest in a field operation during the pandemic will hurt it come November.

Our colleagues wrote recently that several county chairs and local party officials have expressed their frustration with Mr. Biden’s campaign, saying they have pleaded for more investment in organizers, volunteers and visibility merchandise, such as yard signs. It comes as Mr. Trump’s campaign has boasted about knocking on a million doors a week, with a particular focus on swing states.

Here’s the thinking of Mr. Biden’s campaign:

There are other ways to reach voters: In a digital age, campaigns have targeted ways of reaching voters that go beyond the traditional door knock. Ads that match specific demographic traits, text messages and phone banking can offer greater precision and accuracy. If the purpose of a door knock is to reach voters, some argue that the campaign can do that more efficiently without risking the health of volunteers and voters.

Joe Biden is not Bernie Sanders: Organizing has a particular resonance among members of the progressive left, who are often seeking to shift the makeup of the voting electorate and introduce candidates who have newer ideas and less name recognition to a national audience. This is distinct from the challenges Mr. Biden faces in November, because of his sky-high name recognition and brand durability among Americans. In the Democratic primary, Mr. Biden won several states on Super Tuesday despite barely having field operations there. That electorate differs from the general election makeup, but the principle holds. Mr. Biden is relying on positive earned media and ads to reach reliable and likely voters. He is not seeking to reshape the electorate’s makeup.

The fears are from the political class, not the base (with a caveat): In private, many of Mr. Biden’s political allies say the complaints of the local officials are their own projections onto the electorate. Specifically, they argue that officials are used to having field offices and yard signs as a way to cement their status as liaison between community and their campaign. However, some national Democrats think they have a point, and argue that the lack of field operations for Mr. Biden’s campaign could leave opportunities on the table to help some down-ballot candidates. It comes down to who you believe: Are the local officials correctly sensing a mood shift in their communities, or is Mr. Biden’s campaign reaching them in nontraditional ways?