featured graphic for an editorial on the passing of Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Cartoon is a detail of a licensed cartoon by Daryl Cagle.

Room with a View: On the Passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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Lots and lots of pixels will flicker and die in uncounted editorials regarding the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG), Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, who died at an awkward time of week and awkward point of the election cycle last Friday, September 18.

After her latest hospitalization, I personally thought that she was not going to last much longer. However, the caboose to that thought was an irrational belief in her demonstrated tenacity and strength in a prolonged battle against an uncaring opponent — metastatic pancreatic cancer. Because of her prominence, her medical difficulties were well known. She went down fighting, with all kinds of class and dignity.

May flights of angels sing her to her rest, and may Antonin Scalia welcome her with open arms to join in a heavenly reward.

Which should not lead anybody to think that I agreed with all of her politics or judicial legacy:

Once on the Supreme Court, she wrote majority opinions in the most significant rulings of our time. Over 50 years, as litigant and judge, Ginsburg became to women what Thurgood Marshall was to Blacks. She extended equal rights to the LBGTQ community, the mentally ill, immigrants, women who wanted to be cadets at Virginia Military Institute and ones who wanted a safe abortion. And when the court shifted right, she shifted with it, becoming the great dissenter.

Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog provides a good RBG retrospective:

At her Supreme Court confirmation hearing, Ginsburg told the Senate Judiciary Committee that her life story “could happen only in America.” Born Joan Ruth Bader on March 15, 1933, she was quickly nicknamed “Kiki” by her older sister Marilyn, who died in 1934 of meningitis at the age of six. The Baders lived in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn. Neither of her parents attended college: Her father, Nathan, came to the United States from Russia as a teenager and worked as a furrier; her mother, Celia Amster Bader, was born a few months after her parents arrived in the country from Austria and worked in a garment factory to put her brother through college. Ginsburg later said that her mother “made reading a delight and counseled me constantly to ‘be independent,’ able to fend for myself.” The Baders were Jewish, and Ginsburg recalled, as a child, seeing a sign in front of a Pennsylvania resort that said “No dogs or Jews allowed.”

I recommend reading the entire article.

A quick note on local priorities

The article we published last week on the passing of RBG did not rise to be included in our Top Ten list by Sunday. That surprised me.

Our readers are more interested in unemployment benefits and the non-responsive California Employment Development Department.

Oh, the politics!

Political pundits left, right, and center are spewing forth how President Trump should spin gold from the now-open seat on the Supreme Court, or how unseemly it would be for him to do so. As reported by one of her granddaughters, RBS’s “last wish” was for the seat to remain open until after the November election. Here is Stephen Kruiser on that:

[Democrats are] rallying around Ginsburg’s purported “last wish,” which I don’t for a moment believe happened. It sounds like those convenient “My 8-year-old said…” stories they love to make up over on the Left. Democrats are such ghouls and so afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome I can see any one of them lying about a loved one’s dying words to score some political points, especially because ORANGE MAN BAD.

Presidents are elected to a four-year term. There is nothing in the Constitution that says that the fourth year in its entirety is a lame duck year during which the incumbent should do nothing until the November election that will either confirm his lame duck status or remove it.

My feeling is that not only have chickens come home to roost on Democratic heads, the chickens are pooping. If President Trump and Senate Majority Leader McConnell don’t have a new justice confirmed before November 30 (when a vote could become trickier depending on the outcome of the Senate race in Arizona between incumbent Republican Martha McSally and Democratic challenger Mark Kelly), they both deserve to go down in flames for political incompetence. (McConnell is up for re-election in Kentucky this year.)

After Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, progressives collectively fell on a fainting couch — the end of the world! At that time, I wrote a piece on how they should pull themselves together and get to work. Not that my insignificant editorial had anything to do with it, but shortly thereafter the resistance was born, and progressives came back breathing fire.

At first, I was happy — because one-party rule is by its nature unhealthy for a republican democracy. (See: California.)

Then came the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. I was disgusted and repelled by tactics used by Democrats in their attempt to deny the confirmation.

I like neither candidate for president. I wish that there were a realistic way to deny both Trump and Biden the presidency without launching into an even worse scenario.

There is not.

So here’s to Trump and McConnell cooperating to seat a new Associate Justice as soon as possible, and to the Republicans maintaining their hold on the Senate after the election.

Licensed through cagle.com.
Licensed through cagle.com.

3 Comments

  1. Now that the big nominating ceremony at the White House on October 26 is over by a week and a day, we find out that the nominee was possibly Covid-19 positive and infected numerous people at the ceremony. In true Republican tradition, only a handful of attendees were wearing masks in their total dedication to anti-masking. Now some of those showing their freedom from masking are also Covid-19 positive. Could not happen to a more deserving group of people, specially the ones that were also in attendance at the first presidential debate and refused to wear masks….. MAGA

    1. Author

      Raymond,

      Thank you for reading Orange County Breeze, and for taking the time to comment on this article.

      I believe that you are in error when you assert that Amy Coney Barrett (the nominee) was possibly COVID-19 positive and infected numerous people at the Rose Garden ceremony.

      It is my understanding that Ms. Barrett had contracted COVID-19 earlier in the summer and recovered, so she would not have been contagious.

      Again, thank you for reading Orange County Breeze.

      Stay safe, stay healthy!

      Shelley Henderson
      editor, Orange County Breeze

  2. From a personal viewpoint, May Justice Ginsburg Rest In Peace. She was loved by her family and admirers who will greatly miss her. I didn’t agree with Justice Ginsburg on most issues, but she was appointed to the Supreme Court and served our nation.

    From a political viewpoint, if Justice Ginsburg was so concerned about being replaced with another liberal, she should have retired during Barack Obama’s presidency. By 2015-2016, Justice Ginsburg was frail, old and sick. She selfishly refused to retire when a liberal would have taken her place. Now President Trump will replace her with a conservative Justice.

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