A little over four and a half years ago, I wrote: “For someone who abhors rabid partisanship, an election year—especially a presidential election year—is already nightmarish. Add in the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and you understand why right now I’d much rather just shut everything off and cuddle with the furry one.
“What’s most troubling in this hyperpartisan atmosphere is the lack of respect and decorum. A man just died—yes, an often-controversial jurist, but still a man who mattered in the lives of those who loved him; the least he’s due is a temporary cessation of the partisan carping that’s come to mark American political life.”
That time we were “treated” to a refusal to give the nominee to fill Scalia’s seat, Merrick Garland, even a meeting because it was eight months till Election Day. This time, there’s a move to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat almost immediately despite it being only about six weeks to the election.
Is it any wonder people are upset? This “rules for thee but not for me” attitude is one of the uglier things about hyperpartisanship in our national politics. Worse, it’s overshadowing the legacy of someone who, like her dear friend Scalia, was a master of dissent and a brilliant jurist.
Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court by Bill Clinton on June 22, 1993, after having spent 13 years on the D.C. Circuit bench and being recommended by both Attorney General Janet Reno and Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch.
Ginsburg was a trailblazer for gender equality before she ever ascended to the federal bench. Jennifer Schuessler wrote Monday in The New York Times: “Justice Ginsburg’s towering reputation as a legal thinker rests on work she pioneered in the 1970s, through the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project, which she co-founded. In a string of landmark cases, she successfully challenged the Supreme Court’s view that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment guarded only against racial discrimination, but permitted sex discrimination (which was often justified as being for women’s own good).”
Jacob Gershman of The Wall Street Journal wrote that one case in particular proved an enduring template for her work even though it was never heard by the Supreme Court. In a 1972 brief for Struck v. Secretary of Defense, which involved a pregnant Air Force captain deemed unfit for service, Ginsburg wrote: “Laws which disable women from full participation in the political, business and economic arenas are often characterized as ‘protective’ and beneficial. Those same laws applied to racial or ethnic minorities would readily be recognized as invidious and impermissible. The pedestal upon which women have been placed has all too often, upon closer inspection, been revealed as a cage.”
Years later in the 1996 Virginia Military Institute case, Ginsburg would write for the majority (Scalia wrote the only dissent) that inherent differences between men and women “remain cause for celebration, but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial constraints on an individual’s opportunity.”
Fayetteville attorney and friend Christy Ferguson Comstock posted on her Facebook account over the weekend what a lot of people were probably thinking: “My guess is that most women lawyers of my generation were inspired by RBG. When I was preparing for the LSAT in 1987, male leaders in our church asked me to reconsider, sharing it was improper for a woman to question a man in public, and observing that would be inherent in lady lawyering. They suggested teaching, pointing to my mother’s teaching career. My parents quickly put this nonsense to bed.
“Fast forward to my first legal job where my Republican conservative male boss and I watched Bill Clinton campaign, win the presidency and appoint RBG. I later heard RBG speak privately in Fayetteville thanks to another mentor, Professor Al Witte. At that point, I stood on the shoulders of a small gritty group of women trial lawyers in Arkansas who had forged our path, kicking open doors and dispelling any notion that women trial lawyers were inferior. It was thrilling to meet the second woman on the Supreme Court, who inspired all of us to tackle anything. My husband who worked her protection detail shared that the U.S. Marshals loved their spirited protectee, ‘Ruth Badey.’ … I feel duty-bound to help ensure there are plentiful opportunities for all of those women coming behind us. Thank you for everything, RBG.”
RBG’s legacy is encapsulated, I think, in something she said at a 2017 talk at Stanford University: “To make life a little better for people less fortunate than you, that’s what I think a meaningful life is. One lives not just for oneself but for one’s community.”
If only more people thought that way.
I ended that 2016 column on Scalia, after citing the trials Barack Obama would have to endure to get his nominee a fair hearing in a Senate riven by hyperpartisanship and seemingly without shame, with this: “Sadly, I think the Senate may be beyond the capacity for embarrassment.”
I really wish that that had changed in the ensuing time, but it hasn’t. God help us all.
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Assistant Editor Brenda Looper is editor of the Voices page. Read her blog at blooper0223.wordpress.com . Email her at blooper@ adgnewsroom.com.