Friday evening brought word that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—inspirational advocate for women’s rights, second woman to ever serve on the Supreme Court, first Jewish woman on the Court, and survivor of three previous battles with cancer—had died. While the airwaves and social media were immediately filled with outpourings of grief and remembrance, Joe Biden expressed the essence of Justice Ginsburg by saying that she was “fierce and unflinching in her pursuit of the civil and legal rights of everyone.”
Republicans could barely constrain their excitement over the opportunity to cement control of the Court for a generation. News that Justice Ginsburg was growing increasingly ill had already inspired Donald Trump to roll out a list of candidates guaranteed to tear down the rights that Ginsburg so tirelessly defended—a list that includes Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Josh Hawley. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could not even finish his official note of condolence without mentioning his eagerness to fill her spot. No one actually bothered to interrupt Donald Trump, who was spending his evening at an airport screaming about Hillary Clinton, with the news. Less than an hour later, even though no one on the White House team had bothered to actually tell Donald Trump of the Justice’s death, came the announcement from the White House that there would be a nomination “within days.” McConnell immediately declared that the nominee would get a vote, in spite of the arguments he made four years ago in refusing to hold a vote on Merrick Garland for over nine months.
And now the nation moves through Rosh Hashanah, America is heading for a new year deprived of a leading light, driving into a world whose nature is so unknown.
Overnight, the powerful remembrances and memorials continued to pour in.
President Bill Clinton, who nominated Justice Ginsburg to the Court, said that, “With the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, America has lost one of the most extraordinary justices ever to serve on the Supreme Court. She was a magnificent judge and a wonderful person—a brilliant lawyer with a caring heart, common sense, fierce devotion to fairness and equality, and boundless courage in the face of her own adversity.” In addition, Clinton said that Justice Ginsburg’s time on the Court “exceeded even my highest expectations when I appointed her. Her landmark opinions advancing gender equality, marriage equality, the rights of people with disabilities, the rights of immigrants, and so many more moved us closer to ‘a more perfect union.’”
President Jimmy Carter, who appointed Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as one of his last acts in the White House, remembered the Justice as “A powerful legal mind and a staunch advocate for gender equality, she has been a beacon of justice during her long and remarkable career.”
President Barack Obama issued a statement on the impact of the Justice’s life and work. “Over a long career on both sides of the bench—as a relentless litigator and an incisive jurist—Justice Ginsburg helped us see that discrimination on the basis of sex isn’t about an abstract ideal of equality; that it doesn’t only harm women; that it has real consequences for all of us. It’s about who we are—and who we can be.”
President George W. Bush may not have agreed with Ginsburg, but he still recognized her importance. “She dedicated many of her 87 remarkable years to the pursuit of justice and equality, and she inspired more than one generation of women and girls. Justice Ginsburg loved our country and the law. Laura and I are fortunate to have known this smart and humorous trailblazer, and we send our condolences to the Ginsburg family."
Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt expressed both the admiration of so many, and the void left behind, at an online service on the brink of Rosh Hashanah. "She imagined the best for our country, she imagined the law being one that would protect all of the American citizens and could also be used as a document to find our North Star. At at time when equality was not given to women, she fought for us and she fought for us with grace, with humility, with persistence with chutzpah and with knowing that law better than anyone else. … Justice Ginsburg is so much bigger than 2020 and this moment that we are in. She is one of our great American heroes and she asks us to think big, to dream big, to be creators and to live in her legacy of justice."
For women, for Jewish Americans, for people of every faith and gender, the loss of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is enormously consequential. She cannot be replaced. She upheld the rights of everyone. She planted her small body, indomitable spirit, and unmatched mind against the forces that tried to tear down those rights. The struggle now will be over whether her lifetime of work is sustained, or ripped away.