Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Legacy is Tarnished

not like she was a spring chicken when she was nominated by Clinton

Yeah, she was a Cunt but the Yassss Kweens want us to deny it.

Sadly it's true. At the end she traded strategy and clear thinking for being the Frida Kahlo of the Supreme Court (eye glasses subbing for unibrow.)

Normally it would not have made a long term backward slide, but it wasn't normal times and of this she was well aware.

Dianne Feinstein should learn something from this and fucking retire.

Dianne Feinstein doesn’t even know she’s alive anymore. Biden and her sometimes talk to each other and repeat the same stories and they laugh like it’s the first time they’ve heard that tale. Congress and the White House have become one large old age home. Dementia is what they do best.

Feinstein is 10 years older than Biden

I said on DL back in 2019 that she should’ve retired in 2009 and was viciously attacked for it.

I'm ashamed both she and Feinstein are from Brooklyn. Throw in Schumer, too. I hate that spineless asshole who makes a hick from a state with no money look like he's the boss.

After the shenanigans with Mitch McCunt and Merrick Garland, there was no sense in retiring until after the 2016 election. I think that RBG hoped/expected Hillary to win, and could then retire to let the first female president nominate a justice. But when Trump won and had the House and Senate, at his beck and call, it became a waiting game to see if she could manage to outlive his presidential term. It became an increasingly risky gambit, and unfortunately, she fell a few months short. The Republican mockery that greeted her dying wish was just the icing on the cake, as far as they were concerned.

RBG is rolling over in her grave right now.

For fucks sake, Kennedy stepped down in the shadiest of circumstances, but Ginsberg gets all the slagging. Newsflash: even if Ruth had stepped down during Obama's presidency and if by chance McConnell didn't pull some shit to deny Obama his replacement, the conservative majority would just be 5-4 instead of 6-3 and Roe would still be effectively dead.

Ruth liked to think of herself as the smartest woman in the world who would never die. She was weird too.

And let's not forget Tony and his Maureen and Ruth and her Martin went to the opera together. So palsy-walsy.

Hopefully Justice Breyer can take a hint

R11 beat me to saying the exact same thing.

The disaster was Trump beating Clinton in 2016. The court would now be dominated by liberals. Republicans played the long game and won for now. Progressives were too involved with PUMA and other bs to save the SC,

[quote]The court would now be dominated by liberals

And an actual reflection of who the majority of this country is.

This is all Susan Sarandon's fault.

[quote]And an actual reflection of who the majority of this country is.

Not by a whole fucking lot if Trump took 46.9% of the popular vote.

An actual reflection of what this country is is Trump elected in 2016 and coming too damn close to re-election in 2020. It's federal and state legislatures fucked likes never in modern times by crippling partisanship and grandstanding grabs at popularity via Twitter.

I wish there were some substantial, sane liberal majority, but that's like saying that New Orleans is safe from flooding. Something of an unwise overstatement.

Boris is so desperate to erase news of Republican failures, Afghanistan and Ron DeSantis corruption/mass murder that we get this shit..

F&F this Republican deflection thread.

R11 is incorrect. Roberts sided with the 3 Liberal Justices this week, so if Ginsburg's seat had stayed in Liberal/Democratic hands, there would have been a Majority of votes to stop the Conservatives.

RBG's fuckup was not retiring before the 2014 elections. Obama had a nice lunch and she made it clear she wasn't interested and he backed off. He shouldn't have. There should have been a concerted effort to get her to step down before the 2014 election (or even AFTER the 2014 election when Dems had a lame duck senate after getting their asses kicked). She stuck it out like a conceited moron and the country will continue to pay the price for decades. SHAME ON HER.

R20 Read the opinions in the case, carefully.

CJ Roberts said he would have granted the temporary injunction so the Court could consider the constitutionality of the Texas law. In his dissent he said nothing about its constitutionality.

Most pointedly, he did not join in the dissents of the other dissenting justices, who made their objection to the law clear.

So how the CJ will come down on the law's constitutionality remains a question mark.

R20, as R22 pointed out, he only partially sided with the 3. There are currently SIX votes to overturn Roe, not 5. 5 of the 6 just don't happen to give a shit about giving the 6th's a veneer of legitimacy.

If Ruth Bader Ginsberg had not been nominated and instead the position filled by a sensible man, Roe would not be under threat today.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg could have kept her legacy had she retired when Obama suggested it to her.

R25 Bah bah she should have worked until she was 140!

Turning Justices into celebrities has skewed the court and certainly made Ginsburg seem much more indispensable as an individual jurist than she was or should have been. Same with Scalia and his self-indulgent bullshit opinions.

R27 All the adulation RBG got in her later years really did have that adverse effect. Not always good to turn a justice into a hero.

She was absolutely a trailblazer in her own right, but she wasn't irreplaceable. There are tons of brilliant, liberal minds who could've replaced her.

[quote] I'm ashamed both she and Feinstein are from Brooklyn.

R8 Dianne Feinstein is not from Brooklyn. She was born and raised in San Francisco, and has lived there her entire life.

Truth is, a brilliant liberal justice who writes brilliant liberal dissents is not what this Court needs.

The Court needs a moderately liberal justice who can write opinions that persuade a majority to join in and who can persuade the authoring justice to tone down the opinions in which s/he joins in.

THAT's being an effective justice.

R11, another fact you have forgotten is that in the first two years of Obama's 2nd term, the Democrats controlled the Senate, McConnell was powerless to stop an Obama nomination. Ginsburg was already 80 at that time, had bouts with cancer, including pancreatic cancer. She is definitely to partly to blame for being replaced by someone the exact opposite of her!

It’s only easy in hindsight to say that RBG should’ve retired years before she died, while the Dems controlled both the presidency & the Senate.

The question is, has Justice Breyer learned anything from Ginsburg's mistake?

My mistake, R30. I was thinking of Boxer.

Feinstein has filed paperwork to run again in 2024:

R33, it's not really hindsight to have been aware that someone who would be 80 by the end of Obama's first term and 84 at the end of his second term, and who had pancreatic cancer to boot might die at some point in the next few years so it would be a good idea to replace her while Obama is still president.

(This is without even mentioning the ridiculousness of how judges are appointed to the US Supreme Court and the terms of their appointment.)

I love discussions like this, as I learn a lot about how other countries do things. I have to be honest, I had no idea how we appointed judges here in the U.K., but this American Vox article explains it pretty well.

R38, probably no other country in the world selects their supreme court judges in the bizarre and highly politicised way the US does. Even authoritarian states probably have a less politicised method, without lifetime appointments.

In other countries, abortion is also a matter for the elected legislature, not the supreme court.

Good points made by R37, R38 & R39.

It's also useful to compare the Canadian Supreme Court to the U.S. In Canada the appointments are are less political and the Supreme Court judges aren't pawns of the political parties that appointed them. Plus there is mandatory retirement at 75 so that the judges know in advance when they have to step down and don't stay on the Court into their 80's and 90's.