Trump to pick woman for US Supreme Court
US president woos female vote with his promise as opponents refuse to rule out second impeachment
Donald Trump has promised to nominate a woman within days to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but faces a titanic battle to get his choice confirmed in the Senate, as Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat speaker of the House of Representatives, refused to rule out impeaching him to block his path. Mr Trump is seeking to woo female voters after a poll showed him trailing Joe Biden by 11 points among women ahead of November’s election.
DONALD TRUMP has sought to woo female suburban voters after he yesterday promised to nominate a woman to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the US Supreme Court.
His pledge came as Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat speaker of the House of Representatives, refused to rule out impeaching the president to block his nominee, saying her party would “use every arrow in its quiver”.
Mr Trump faces an increasingly titanic struggle to get his choice confirmed in the Senate, which Republicans hold 53-47.
Last night, Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator from Alaska, said she opposed moving forward with a nomination before the Nov 3 election. Susan Collins, a Republican senator from Maine, had already done so.
Former astronaut Mark Kelly, a Democrat, also looked set to win a special Senate election in Arizona, which would give them another vote.
At a freewheeling rally in North Carolina, Mr Trump defied Democrat calls to delay a nomination until after the election, saying he would name his choice within days. His supporters chanted “Fill The Seat”.
He took an impromptu poll from the crowd, asking them to cheer for either a woman or a man to be his pick. The crowd cheered considerably louder for a woman.
The president said: “That’s a very accurate poll because that’s the way I feel. It will be a woman. A very talented, very brilliant woman, who I haven’t chosen yet. I will be putting forth a nominee next week. It will be a woman.”
Female voters have been identified as the key to winning the election, particularly suburban women in the battleground states.
A recent opinion poll showed Mr Trump trailing Joe Biden by 11 percentage points among all female voters, a wider margin than Hillary Clinton achieved over him in 2016. Among suburban women Mr Trump was 14 points behind.
In a phone call with Mitch Mcconnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, Mr Trump mentioned two Supreme Court candidates – judges Amy Coney Barrett, 48, a devout Catholic, and Barbara Lagoa, a CubanAmerican. Their elevation would establish a 6-3 conservative majority on the court.
It could lead to the overturning of Roe v Wade, the 1973 law legalising abortion, and affect the future of Obamacare among many other issues.
If Mr Trump loses the election he still has until Jan 20, inauguration day, on for the Senate to confirm his pick, which he described as “plenty of time”.
But Mrs Pelosi refused to rule out impeaching him in those circumstances.
Asked whether she would unleash the tactic, Mrs Pelosi said: “Well, we have our options. We have arrows in our quiver that I’m not about to discuss right now. Protecting our democracy requires us to use every arrow in our quiver.”
Such a move would make Mr Trump the only US president to be impeached twice. The Supreme Court vacancy, following Justice Ginsburg’s death from cancer, has turbocharged enthusiasm among Trump supporters and Democrats, who raised $60million (£46million) in less than 24 hours.
At Mr Trump’s rally, Paulette Fittshur, 59, said: “It was God’s perfect timing in this election.”
Alexandria Ocasio-cortez, the Leftwing Democratic congresswoman, told her supporters they were in “the fight of our lives”. She added: “We need to focus on voting for Joe Biden. I don’t care if you like him or not.”
Protesters gathered outside Mr Mcconnell’s home in Kentucky with a sign saying “Ruth Sent Us”. Justice Ginsburg’s death already leaves a more conservative court and that could affect rulings related to the election.
RUTH BADER GINSBURG, who has died aged 87, was the second woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court; she was a moderate who moved to the Left as her country’s politics shifted Rightward, her birdlike stature and quiet manner making her an unlikely cult hero. Although vilified by detractors as antiamerican, her campaigning work as a lawyer tackling discrimination and her progressive pronouncements on the Court meant that she was long the darling of US liberals.
But it was not until her eighties that she became a true cultural phenomenon; her face, instantly recognisable behind giant spectacles, plastered across birthday cards, beer cans and coffee mugs, tattooed on fans’ bodies and painted on finger nails.
That transformation came in the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise presidential victory in 2016, as shocked liberals, devastated by Hillary Clinton’s defenestration and mourning the loss of Barack Obama, searched for a new champion.
They found one in Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in every way the antithesis of President Trump: a softly spoken Jewish grandmother who stuck up for minorities and challenged injustice, she was modest, reserved and calm. Where Trump’s genius lay in instinct and bombast, hers was rooted in hard work and intelligence; learning was something to be prized, not dismissed or mocked.
Just about the only thing the pair had in common was their home town of New York: her birthplace in Flatbush is 10 miles as the crow flies from Donald Trump’s boyhood neighbourhood of Jamaica Estates, Queens.
She was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993. Among her most famous findings were her majority opinion in United States v Virginia (1996), which declared the male-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute to be unconstitutional; and her dissent in Ledbetter v Goodyear (2007), which ultimately led to expanded equal pay legislation.
The nickname “Notorious RBG”, a play on the moniker adopted by the rapper “The Notorious B.I.G.”, took off following a scathing dissenting opinion in Shelby County v Holder (2013), which struck out an aspect of the civil rights-era Voting Rights Act. Born on the social media platform Tumblr, the joke gained widespread attention when the comedian Kate Mckinnon began a recurring turn as the judge-turned-hip hop gangsta on the television show Saturday Night Live.
She was born Joan Ruth Bader on March 15 1933 in the working-class neighbourhood of Flatbush, Brooklyn. Her father Nathan, a first-generation immigrant from Odessa, sold furs; her mother, Celia (née Amster), was born a few months after her own parents had arrived in the US from Austria.
Nathan and Celia, both Jewish, resented having been deprived of a college education for reasons of religion and gender respectively (Jews were barred from higher education in Odessa, while Celia’s parents would only pay for her brother to attend university).
Celia in particular was determined that Ruth would not experience the same fate, instilling in her the lesson: “Be a lady – and be independent.”
After the death to meningitis of her oldest child, Marylin, at the age of six, Celia Bader made it her life’s work to see that little Kiki, as Ruth was known in the family, excelled at school, hoping she would become a history teacher. (It was at Celia’s suggestion that teachers began calling Ruth by her middle name, wanting her to stand out from a number of other “Joans” in her elementary class.)
But Celia Bader died of cervical cancer the day before her daughter’s high school graduation. It was then that the hitherto observant Ruth parted ways with her faith: under Jewish tradition, only men can form a quorum of mourners, and the exclusion from her mother’s minyan, or prayer service, rankled.
Having fulfilled her mother’s ambitions by scoring top grades at school Ruth enrolled at Cornell University, upstate New York, at a time when girls were still a rarity on campus. She met her future husband, Martin Ginsburg, aged 17.
She often said she was only able to become a trailblazer because the gregarious Marty was one already – comfortable putting his wife’s career aspirations ahead of his own and sharing family duties in an era when such things were unusual. He was the family cook (she was barred from the kitchen) and, their children have suggested, the more overtly caring parent.
In the 2018 biographical documentary RBG, she described his view as: “A woman’s work, whether at home or on the job, is as important as a man’s”, and elsewhere she has said: “I became a lawyer because Marty supported that choice unreservedly. Meeting Marty was by the far the most important thing that ever happened to me.” When President Clinton was seeking a nominee for the Supreme Court in 1993, it was Marty who lobbied for her to get the job, ringing round his contacts.
Having married straight out of college, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was inspired by the Mccarthy hearings to enter the law, seeing it as a vehicle for societal change. She enrolled at Harvard Law School, where Marty had begun the previous year, one of nine women in a class of 500.
By now, she was also a mother. Juggling classes with child-rearing kept her sane, she recalled, allowing her to focus on work in the day when her daughter was with a child minder, while giving her brain a rest in the afternoon and evening when she took over caring duties.
Life became more complicated, however, when Marty Ginsburg developed testicular cancer during his third year. Ruth attended both sets of classes, arranged for his friends to provide him with lecture notes so he could keep up with assignments. She finished near the top of her class, having survived on two hours’ sleep a night.
Her struggles during Marty’s illness, and the couple’s first forays into tackling sex discrimination, were captured in the 2018 film On The Basis of Sex, starring Felicity Jones.
Marty made a full recovery, and became one of the country’s leading tax attorneys.
Unwilling to be apart from him because of his health, Ruth Bader Ginsburg transferred to Columbia University in Manhattan, graduating joint top of her class. Yet she could find no law firm willing to take on a woman. She turned to academia, going on to teach law at Rutgers (which justified paying her less than male colleagues on the grounds that her husband had a “good job”). She hid her pregnancy with her second child under baggy clothes.
Soon the emerging women’s movement captures her attention. After a number of female students implored her to take on the subject, in the early 1970s she began teaching a groundbreaking course on gender and the law.
It was her husband, as a tax lawyer, who uncovered the case which launched her crusade to strip the law of inequality. An unmarried Colorado salesman, Charles Moritz, had been refused a tax deduction for nursing care for his elderly mother because he was a son rather than a daughter.
The couple challenged the ruling, arguing that the tax authorities were in breach of the constitution by assuming that only women were caregivers. This led to an invitation from the American Civil Liberties Union, under whose auspices in 1972 Ruth Bader Ginsburg led the Women’s Rights Project, a campaign to challenge the many laws at both federal and state level which allowed discrimination on the grounds of gender.
In two years, the Project tackled more than 300 laws; in Frontiero v Richardson (1973), the first case Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued before the Supreme Court, she spoke on behalf of Sharron Frontiero, a lieutenant in the US Air Force who was denied a housing allowance available to married men because she had a husband and not a wife.
Modelling her strategy on that set by the civil rights activist lawyer Thurgood Marshall, she saw the legal battle to achieve equality for women as a series of steps, often arguing cases on behalf of men, which had the broader effect of undermining the legitimacy of discrimination on the grounds of gender.
Her five victorious Supreme Court cases (out of six) included a challenge to different male and female legal drinking ages; overturned a law which made jury service in Louisiana voluntary for women (which, she argued, put female defendants at a disadvantage); and won equal social security benefits for widowers.
At the time, she felt, the all-male Court was ignorant of the scale of the discrimination experienced by American women. “I did think of myself as kind of a kindergarten teacher in those days because the justices didn’t think discrimination existed,” she remarked in RBG.
In 1980 she was nominated to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia by President Jimmy Carter, part of his drive to increase the number of women and minorities on the federal circuit. She gained a reputation as a consensus-seeking moderate with an ability to forge friendships with conservative judges.
So benign was Ruth Bader Ginsburg considered that many in the feminist movement opposed her nomination to the Supreme Court in 1993 on the grounds that she was not radical enough. Her confirmation was approved in the Senate by 96 votes to three.
Bill Clinton has said she was not his first choice for the role, but after calling her in for an interview at the White House, he recalled: “All of a sudden I wasn’t the president interviewing her for the Supreme Court, we were two people having an honest discussion about what’s the best way in the moment and for the future to make law. Within 15 minutes I decided I was going to name her.”
Once on the Court, Bader Ginsburg seemed to find common ground with moderates, including the first female justice, Sandra Day O’connor, a Ronald Reagan nominee. Rankings produced in 1993 put her in fourth place of the nine judges on a scale of liberal to conservative ideology.
Over time, as the centre of gravity on the court shifted to the Right with appointments made under President George W Bush, she moved further towards the liberal wing.
But despite the increasing number and forcefulness of her dissents during the Bush and later Trump eras, she retained an ability to maintain friendships with those she disagreed with. This included an unlikely yet close affinity with the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the conservative who argued for a literal interpretation of the constitution.
They dined and attended the opera together. She cracked a rare smile at his jokes – their friendship was even the subject of an opera by Derrick Wang. “She is a very nice person,” said Scalia. “What’s not to like? Except for her views on the law.”
She often suggested that the ideal number of women justices on the (nine-strong) Supreme Court would be nine. “People are shocked,” she once. “But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.”
In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, she was forced to apologise for bad-mouthing Donald Trump, at the time the presumptive Republican nominee, joking that she might move to New Zealand should he win. Her mistake, along with the entire Washington liberal elite, had been to underestimate Trump’s appeal.
The misstep came at a time when she was under pressure to retire, a move which would have allowed Barack Obama to appoint her successor and keep a liberal seat on the Court.
Concern about the frail octogenarian’s ability to survive the Trump years was exacerbated by health scares: she survived two bouts of cancer and a number of more minor ailments, each fall or hospitalisation sending liberal America into paroxysms of anxiety.
She insisted that she remained up to the task, never missing a day at the Court during her cancer treatment. Images of her working out in the Supreme Court gym – she could do 20 push-ups well into her 80s – became an internet sensation.
While she maintained that she still had work to finish at the Court, others saw her refusal to retire as a sign of her need to keep busy after Marty’s death in 2010.
She maintained her habit of working until 4am, often returning to her study after a night out with her family or trip to the opera. Her night-owl ways tripped her up in 2015 when she fell asleep at the State of the Union address.
Opera was her passion – she sometimes lamented that she lacked the talent to sing it, although she had played the piano and cello as a girl – with Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini among her favourites.
She appeared in onstage cameos several times, including once with Scalia in Ariadne auf Naxos.
Among her many awards and honours were the LBJ Foundation’s Liberty and Justice for All Award, the World Peace and Liberty Award and the Berggruen Award for Philosophy and Culture, as well as honorary law degrees from Willamette University, Princeton and Harvard, and induction into the Women’s Hall of Fame,
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is survived by her daughter, Jane, a law professor, and her son, James, the president of a classical music recording company.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, born March 15 1933, died September 18 2020