September 19, 2020 / 7:31 AM / CBS News

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the longest serving woman on the U.S. Supreme Court and a strong liberal voice on issues dividing the nation, has died, the Supreme Court said on Friday. She was 87.

"Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died this evening surrounded by her family at her home in Washington, D.C., due to complications of metastatic pancreas cancer," the Court said in a statement.

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Ginsburg revealed in July 2020 that she was undergoing chemotherapy for a recurrence of cancer. She had previously been treated for four bouts with cancer over the years, including a pancreatic tumor in 2019 and growths in her lung in 2018.

Her death leaves a vacancy on the Supreme Court that is sure to set off an intense partisan battle over her replacement, as a conservative Trump nominee could tip the balance in closely divided cases.

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Supreme Court Fight Exposes Bipartisan Hypocrisy

On Friday the liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. The discussion about the Senate confirmation of her replacement reveals the utter hypocrisy of U.S. politics and politicians.

The stakes are high:

The blunt fact is that the opportunity to seat a third justice represents a monumental political opportunity for President Trump. He would go down in history as one of the most significant presidents, whether or not he wins a second term. The last Republican president to install three justices in his first term was Richard M. Nixon. A likely Trump nominee would be Notre Dame's Amy Coney Barrett, whom Trump has previously considered for a seat on the court.

Trump will have the opportunity to put the final seal of defeat on the liberal era that began with the Roosevelt administration and ran through the Obama administration. A sixth Republican justice would essentially ensure that any sweeping liberal programs a President Joe Biden or another Democratic president might endorse would be condemned to the ash heap of history before it even had an opportunity to become established.

The Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is now arguing that any decision over the new supreme court judge should be left to the next president:

The Senate shouldn't take up the vacancy on the Supreme Court opened by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg until after voters have expressed their choice in the election, former Vice President Joe Biden said Friday.

The Democratic presidential helpful kept in lockstep with his colleagues now in the Senate minority, who wasted little time after the announcement of Ginsburg's death in stating their belief that Washington must wait.

Unsurprisingly the Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell disagrees with Biden:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said unequivocally Friday night that President Trump's Supreme Court nominee to fill the vacancy of late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg "will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate."

Four and a half years ago the situation was inverse. Then President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace the deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The Republican led Senate blocked the decision:

On February 13, 2016, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died. Later that day, Senate Republicans led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a statement that they would not consider any nominee put forth by Obama, and that a Supreme Court nomination should be left to the next President of the United States. President Obama responded that he intended to "fulfill my constitutional duty to appoint a judge to our highest court," and that there was no "well established tradition" that a president could not fill a Supreme Court vacancy during the U.S. President's last year in office.
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After a period of 293 days, Garland's nomination expired on January 3, 2017 at the end of the 114th Congress. On January 31, 2017, President Donald Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to fill the Court vacancy. On April 7, 2017, the Senate confirmed Gorsuch's nomination to the Supreme Court.

Mitch McConnell's argumentation back then was the opposite of his current one.

The same holds for Joe Biden. Contrary to his current position then Vice President Joe Biden argued in 2016 that the Senate should proceed with the Garland nomination. His problem though was the he had earlier argued differently:

Vice President Joe Biden slammed Senate Republicans Thursday for citing the "Biden Rule" as reasoning for why they won't hold a hearing for Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama's Supreme Court pick.

In a Thursday speech, Biden called Republicans "frankly ridiculous" for relying on comments he made in 1992 about the dangers of holding Supreme Court confirmation hearings in the midst of presidential elections.

Biden's 1992 position, which he contradicted in 2016, is the same one he is espousing now:

In the part of Biden's 1992 speech that has been oft-cited by McConnell and other Republicans, Biden said then-President George H.W. Bush shouldn't name a nominee if a vacancy arose until after that year's November election.

"Should a justice resign this summer and the president move to name a successor, actions that will occur just days before the Democratic Presidential Convention and weeks before the Republican Convention meets, a process that is already in doubt in the minds of many will become distrusted by all," he said. "Senate consideration of a nominee under these circumstances is not fair to the president, to the nominee, or to the Senate itself."

While McConnell flip-flopped on the issue Biden exceeded his hypocrisy by flip flopping to then flip again. Neither of them has principals. Neither of them is serious in their arguments. That is because they are just two slightly diverging men serving the same unitary oligarchy:

The opportunistic galvanization process has already begun before Ginsburg's body is even cold, with liberal influencers calling Democrats to rally to a November win for "the notorious RBG" and Trump supporters dropping their faux anti-establishment schtick and metamorphosing into a bunch of mini-Mitch McConnells. Leftists are being shrieked at by mainstream Dems that they need to fall in line and support Biden or they're personally responsible for every civil right that is taken away by Ginsburg's replacement.
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If you understand that America has a two-headed one-party system designed to shrink the spectrum of acceptable debate down to arguments about how oligarchic agendas should be facilitated rather than if they should, what you see is a single entity threatening to take away your civil liberties if you don't support it. A single establishment threatening to punch you with its right hand if you don't let it punch you with its left.

All the screaming that will follow now is in vane. Hillary Clinton could offer to replace Ruth Ginsburg but the funeral home would likely reject that. The die is now cast.

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As much hagiography Ruth Ginsburg is now receiving it is her and the Democrats fault that this is happening. Ginsburg should have resigned when she was urged to do so:

The calls for Ginsburg to step down began in 2011 when Randall Kennedy, a Harvard law professor and former clerk to the late Thurgood Marshall, wrote a piece in The New Republic gently urging Ginsburg, then 78, to retire while Obama was in office.
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After Obama's 2012 reelection, the Ginsburg retirement calls came with a new urgency. In December 2013, the National Journal ran a piece titled, Justice Ginsburg: Resign Already!, in which writer James Oliphant observed that the passage of Obamacare would likely hand Senate control to the Republicans in 2014, thus preventing Obama from naming a Ginsburg successor.

In summer 2013 then President Barack Obama invited Ginsburg for a talk. It was seen as a request to her to retire. But Obama did not offer an adequate replacement for her position. The details are not know but Ginsburg rejected whoever Obama had in mind:

Referring to the political polarization in Washington and the unlikelihood that another liberal in her mold could be confirmed by the Senate, Ginsburg, the senior liberal on the nine-member bench, asked rhetorically, "So tell me who the president could have nominated this spring that you would rather see on the court than me?"

Ginsburg, in a wide-ranging 75 minute interview with Reuters in her chambers late on Thursday, also acknowledged that President Barack Obama had invited her to a private lunch last summer at the White House. It was an unusual move, she conceded.
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Ginsburg said on Thursday that even if she had retired, the president would have been more likely to have chosen a compromise candidate than a liberal.

The good-enough centrist nominee Obama offered as a replacement for the progressive Ginsburg was, in her judgment, not perfect enough. In consequence important Supreme Court decisions like Roe vs. Wade are now in jeopardy.

Liberals should rue this but are unfortunately unlikely to learn from it.

Obama urges GOP-led Senate to leave Supreme Court seat empty until after 2020 race following death of Justice Ginsburg
19 Sep, 2020 05:12

Former US President Barack Obama has called on the Republican-controlled Senate to delay its confirmation vote to replace Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, citing the GOP's own playbook during his administration.

"Four and a half years ago, when Republicans refused to hold a hearing or an up-or-down vote on Merrick Garland, they invented the principle that the Senate shouldn't fill an open seat on the Supreme Court before a new president was sworn in," Obama wrote in a statement, referring to his pick to replace Scalia.

As votes are already being cast in this election, Republican Senators are now called to apply that standard. The questions before the Court now and in the coming years... are too consequential to future generations for courts to be filled through anything less than an unimpeachable process.

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Trump tells Republicans 'we're in position of power' to replace RBG
19 Sep, 2020 14:47

President Donald Trump has asked the Republican Party to press ahead with replacing Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg "without delay," hours after her death. Democrats have vowed to resist.

"We were put in this position of power and importance to make decisions for the people who so proudly elected us, the most important of which has long been considered to be the selection of United States Supreme Court Justices," Trump said on Saturday in a tweet addressed to his party.

"We have this obligation, without delay!" he added.

Ginsburg's death came just days after Trump announced a list of potential Supreme Court nominees. Among the most likely candidates are Amy Coney Barrett and Amul Thapar, both of whom were selected for appeals court positions by Trump in 2017.

Whoever Trump nominates, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has vowed to bring the president's choice to a vote in the Senate, where the GOP holds a 53-47 majority. However, a number of Republican senators have come out against holding confirmation hearings before November's election, and should three defect, McConnell's plans could be jeopardized.

Senate Democrats vocally oppose confirming a new justice before November. In a statement following Ginsburg's death, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that "The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president."

Ginsburg herself released a statement immediately before her death, saying "my most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

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The federal government shouldn't dictate what local schools across the country teach — and in the past, conservatives have rightly denounced the idea that it should. Here, for instance, is Phyllis Schlafly in 2014 railing against Obama-era Common Core standards, which Schlafly saw as an "attempt to compel all U.S. children to be taught the same material and not taught other things parents might think important." Yet like so many other conservative principles, this one seems to have fallen by the wayside in the Trump era. Now, President Donald Trump is announcing plans for (yet another!) executive order, this one to create a "patriotic education" curriculum for U.S. public schools.

Not only is Trump's plan an attempt to impose curriculum on local school districts across the country with merely the president's pen and phone [Obama's claim and actions], but that curriculum sounds like the sort of propaganda we've come to expect from authoritarian regimes.

If Trump's announcement speech is any indication, the kind of "patriotism" the president has in mind comes with a hefty dose of MAGA rhetoric about the "anti-American" left trying to indoctrinate small children with "Marxist doctrine holding that America is a wicked and racist nation."

There's of course nothing wrong with honoring America's roots and teaching children about all the beautiful and positive things in American history. (And we currently do just that!) There's also nothing wrong with teaching the children the truth about all the ugliness in American history too. A good education should — in age-appropriate ways — encompass both.

Many schools fall short of this ideal at present. One way to ensure that gets even worse is to have whoever is in power in Washington — be that Trump, or Joe Biden, or some future unknown leader — setting an American history curriculum for every single student in every public school district across the country. Whoever is in charge, that's a recipe for a biased and propagandistic version of history.

Can individual states, cities, or school districts do much better? Some will, some won't — but the beauty of a decentralized system is that 1) it's easier for parents and teachers to change the bad parts of a local curriculum than it is a national one, and 2) it leaves room for parents to pull their children out of schools that don't do well at this, or at something else, and enroll them a school that does better.

Ultimately, the best antidote for politicized lessons and public-school propaganda is school choice. When parents can choose between a range of local education options — traditional public schools, traditional private schools, charter schools, online schools, small-group-based "education pods," homeschooling, etc. — we leave fewer kids trapped in schools whose values don't align with their families and communities — and less room for whoever is in the White House to try to set everyone's lessons from on high.