Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
taffet@dallasvoice.com

According to Jewish tradition, a person who dies on Rosh Hashanah is a “tzedek,” a person of great righteousness. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who will be remembered as one of the most beloved Supreme Court justices in U.S. history, died just as the holiday was beginning.

Her death prompted an outpouring of grief from those who loved, admired and respected her, but it also prompted a wave of fear from progressive advocates who worry that Trump will nominate and the for-now Republican-controlled Senate will confirm a right-wing jurist to the court that could lead to the unraveling on years of progress toward equality.

President Trump said he was sad to learn of her death and called her “an amazing woman who led an amazing life” — appropriate words and rare coming from someone who rarely compliments those who oppose him in any way. In one of the last court decisions of her career, Ginsburg sided with the majority in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, a case that resulted in sexual orientation and gender identity being included in the sexual discrimination coverage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Trump’s justice department had filed a brief opposing nondiscrimination.

Ginsburg had a lifelong history as an advocate for equality, making her mark either as an attorney, a judge or just an individual activist on issues ranging from women’s rights to LGBTQ equality and more. She was co-founder of the Women’s Rights Project of the ACLU, saying, “Women’s rights are an essential part of the overall human rights agenda, trained on the equal dignity and ability to live in freedom all people should enjoy.”

People gathered at the Supreme Court Friday, Sept. 18, in Washington after the Court announced that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died of metastatic pancreatic cancer at age 87. (Alex Brandon/Associated Press)

Although she graduated first in her class in 1959 at Columbia Law School, when she was recommended for a clerkship with Justice Felix Frankfurter, he said he wasn’t ready to hire a woman. After working in a law firm during the summer of her second year in law school, she expected a job offer from that firm after graduation. Despite her stellar performance, the firm didn’t offer her anything. Neither did 12 other law firms where she interviewed.

Ginsburg clerked for a U.S. district judge in New York, then went to work at Columbia Law School’s International Procedure Project where she co-authored a book on Sweden’s legal system and translated Sweden’s judicial code into English.

In 1963, Ginsburg joined the Rutgers Law School faculty where she soon learned she was being paid less than the men. She won one of her first fights for equal gender rights when she and other women on the faculty pressed for and won equal pay.

As a result of that success, she began to handle sex discrimination complaints referred to her by the ACLU. Sometimes she took cases of discrimination against men, because she saw that kind of discrimination as harmful to everyone. In an early case, a husband was denied spousal benefits from the military because he couldn’t prove economic dependence on his wife, while wives of military men were automatically given those benefits.

In another case, Ginsburg argued that a widowed father should receive social security benefits from his deceased wife who had worked. Before this case, only widowed mothers received those benefits.

When she lost in court, as she did in a case on discrimination against pregnant women, Ginsburg lobbied Congress to act. Her work resulted in an amendment to Title VII called the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978.

Her career as a judge began in 1980 when President Jimmy Carter appointed Ginsburg to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed her to the U.S. Supreme Court.

As a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, Ginsburg was always on the side of nondiscrimination for the LGBTQ community. She was in the majority on Romer v. Evans in 1996, Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 (which overturned the Texas sodomy law), Windsor v. U.S. in 2013 (which overturned part of the federal Defense of Marriage act), Obergefell v. Hodges (which made marriage equality legal nationwide) in 2015 and Bostock v. Clayton County this year (which declared that Civil Rights Act protections against employment discrimination included LGBTQ people).

While she was a champion of abortion rights, Ginsburg was not a fan of Roe v. Wade. She felt it was too broad. She also didn’t like that it was based on privacy rights rather than gender equality. Deciding the case under the Equal Protection Clause would have left it less open to later attack, Ginsburg believed, according to the author of an upcoming biography, Mary Hartnett, in an article in the New York Times.

While she was passionate about women’s and LGBTQ right, Ginsburg was very strategic. She would have preferred rulings that legalized abortion incrementally, the way several earlier rulings led to marriage equality.

Ginsburg wrote a number of important decisions and dissents during her 27 years on the court. She wrote the dissent to Bush v. Gore, declaring “The conclusion that a constitutionally adequate recount is impractical is a prophecy the court’s own judgment will not allow to be tested,” ending with, “I dissent,” rather than the traditional “I respectfully dissent.”

Equality on the line
With the loss of Ginsburg, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, abortion rights, civil rights, disability rights and more are on the line.
Amanda Williams, executive director of the Lilith Fund, wrote, “The vacancy on the Supreme Court creates bleak uncertainty for the future of abortion access in the U.S. There is a very real possibility that Roe v. Wade could be severely chipped away or completely overturned.”

Texas state Rep. Celia Israel said, “As a young lesbian, society told me that I should stay silent about who I was. Because of Justice Ginsburg, the next generation will never have to feel that way.

“When she voted to validate my family, and all LGBTQ Americans, she changed our country forever. I’ll always be grateful,” Israel said.

Human Rights Campaign CEO Alphonso David noted that Ginsburg’s “decades of work helped create many of the foundational arguments for gender equality in the United States, and her decisions from the bench demonstrated her commitment to full LGBTQ equality.”

Republicans are determined to replace Ginsburg within the next six weeks, before the election. Since 1975, the average time it takes from day of nomination to confirmation is more than two months. The quickest confirmation was for John Paul Stevens in 1975, which took just 19 days.

Unless four members of the Senate block consideration of the nomination, there’s little Senate Democrats can do to postpone consideration of a nominee until after the election or after the inauguration of a new president should Trump lose in November.

And that prospect is daunting for progressive advocates.

We’re all lamenting Ginsburg’s loss, noted Kierra Johnson, deputy executive director of the LGBTQ Task Force who, the Task Force announced this week, will become executive director of the agency next year when Rea Carey steps down.
“She was so significant in multiple ways,” Johnson said. “She literally inspired and yielded an entire generation of women in law.”

Among the LGBTQ community, Ginsburg’s passing ignited an anxiety, Johnson said, because she fought so tirelessly and vehemently for our community. And on the rush to replace Ginsburg and name a successor before the pioneering jurist’s funeral had even been held, Johnson added, “We’re not operating as business as usual.”

Johnson said she’s been in contact with many other progressive organizations to discuss strategy but there was little they could suggest to stop the confirmation of the nominee without four Republican votes to delay. So Johnson and the Task Force are continuing their efforts to get out the vote for the November election encouraging people to vote to for candidates that support LGBTQ and women’s issues up and down the ballot and reminding them that who’s in office does matter.

At the funeral service held inside the Supreme Court building on Wednesday, Sept. 23, Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt said, “This was Justice Ginsburg’s life’s work, to insist that the Constitution deliver on its promise that ‘we the people’ would include all the people. She carried out that work in every chapter of her life.”

Before her burial in Arlington Cemetery this weekend, Ginsburg scored two more firsts, becoming the first woman and the first Jewish person to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol.