DELUSIONAL...

 

BUSH’S LESSON IN DEMOCRACY FOR A HIJACKED GOP

Conservative Republican former President George W. Bush just did what the current GOP doesn't have the guts, the grace, the ethics or the honesty to do: congratulated President-elect Joe Biden and VP-elect Kamala Harris on their election win.

He is apparently not only following normal democratic etiquette (in other words subordinating party interests to the voice of the people), but also attempting to serve as an example to the rest of the GOP. The thing is, it is no longer the GOP that he presided over in the era of 911 when Americans were much more united. It is the usurped GOP of Donald J. Trump—no longer the unifying party of Lincoln, but the divisive and dishonest party of Trump.

In that context, Mr. Bush can probably expect to be catalogued by congressional Trumpsters as a "dangerous socialist"—as former President Dwight Eisenhower would be if he were alive today.

That said, at least he'll be in good company, which is more than one can say for any Republican who still honors the name but is remaining acquiescently silent in the face of such shameless and tyrannical behavior.

 

REALITY

 

US President Donald Trump's own Department of Homeland Security has just rejected his claims of a rigged election. In a public statement, the DHS unequivocally described to what degree the 2020 presidential election was valid, fair and utterly transparent, stating: "The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.”

Maybe it's time for the GOP leadership to get their heads out of their...valises, and admit the same for the sake of democracy and the country. With the president having gone underground, in a fog of self-pity and bile, the rest of the political establishment, at least, should put on their big-boy pants and join the real world, for the sake of the Nation.

Joe Biden is the president-elect. Get over it and get to work, because the president is missing in action and conspicuous by his absence in the midst of the worst pandemic health crisis in living memory.

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

US democracy is under imminent domestic threat. The once unthinkable is happening under our noses. There is election interference and the threat is coming, not from Russia, China or Iran, but from the most imponderable of sources—the forty-fifth president of the United States and the highest offices of his administration. They are, in essence, seeking to orchestrate a virtual coup and to spark civil insurrection by creating a false scenario that they are maintaining with lies, innuendo and false testimony.

The threat is very real, although so far the country’s judicial system—not its Department of “Justice”—is staunchly resisting the attempt. It is only a matter of time until we see which of the two forces will win out, since “all the president’s men” in Congress are complicit in this fabrication. But in the meantime, every true small-d democrat needs to stand up and be counted, or, failing that, admit—whether internally or overtly—that he or she is on the side of autocratic rule.

This is not a drill.

Up until the recent intervention of Attorney General William Barr in the president’s delusional attempt to deny reality and pretend that he has even a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the current election, the futile actions being taken by the Trump administration’s campaign team were legal, if questionable in their legitimacy. If, on a county by county level, the Trump campaign team had reasonable doubts—the key word here being “reasonable”—about this or that ballot count, then, under the law, they could legally take those doubts to the appropriate court. They have done this multiple times already, and have overwhelmingly had their cases judicially dismissed for lack of any legal merit whatsoever. They have a right to persist as long as Judges accept hearing their filings. But the courts, despite uncommon pressure from the administration and the GOP, are doing their job and their patriotic duty to democracy by demanding facts, not hearsay. As in the case of a Trump filing that quoted a postal worker as claiming he had been pressured to hold up delivery of probable GOP-voted ballots, only to have the “witness” recant once he was standing tall before the court.

While legal, such attorney interventions have been a clear slap in the face to Democratic and Republican election officials alike, who have done a phenomenal job in their role as the last line of defense for democracy, by ensuring absolute transparency and meticulous ballot-counting in one of the most contentious elections of all time. Nor have they been concerned about the questions that the Trump campaign legal team has posed, standing by the clarity of both the polling procedures and the count, and assuring the public that results can be questioned as often as the candidates like, but will be what they are, because they are authentic and Trump has lost the race by a very decisive margin.

That margin is currently predicted by reliable poll-watchers to be no less than five million popular votes and, perhaps, as many as seventy or more electoral votes. In other words, the 2020 election is all over but the gnashing of teeth and bawling for Team Trump. And Donald Trump’s refusal to concede (as every other candidate in recent memory has done by this point) and the GOP’s continued tolerance of this puerile, narcissistic presidential whim, promise to go down in election history as a profound embarrassment for the Republican Party and as a potential source of very real shame for American democracy. Especially since the US is not some remote, inconsequential nation whose political comings and goings can pass totally unnoticed, but a powerful country once looked up to as the leader of the free world, but increasingly viewed under the influence of the Trump phenomenon as a tin-pot banana republic hiding behind First World cosmetics.

That perception was vastly augmented this week when the administration’s all-out effort to circle its wagons and refuse to surrender to the overwhelming tide of democratic outpouring meandered out of the territory of illegitimacy and into the realm of questionable legality. This happened when Attorney General William Barr cavalierly overlooked his appointed role as overseer of the rule of law in America and—as he has already done on no few occasions since taking office—used the sobering power of his post and taxpayer dollars to launch a partisan defense of the Trump campaign in detriment to the will of more than seventy-five million American voters. Never before in the history of the United States, has an attorney general abused his power in this way, by preemptively announcing the launching of probes into alleged election irregularities prior to final and official certification of the election results. Particularly on the basis of such factually thin accusations and hearsay.

And while the attorney general was busy aiding and abetting Trump in his ruse to call the validity of the election into question, the president himself was making moves unmistakably similar to those that I’ve witnessed as a foreign correspondent in no few coup attempts in other parts of the world. A lame duck with only two months to go before the democratically inevitable transfer of power—for the first time in American history we have doubts about how peaceful it will be—the president, in his role as commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, is shaking up the hierarchy at the Pentagon. Some news sources inside the military have referred to “the beheadings” that have taken place this week, in which the president has replaced career higher-ups with Trump loyalists.

And Trump has further doubled down by making sure that, so far, the Biden transition team has received no sign that it will be given access to data, intelligence and procedures to which it must be made privy before taking office in January. The idea being, why should they when neither the president nor his nefarious enablers will admit that Biden has won. Fortunately, Biden’s forty-seven years in public service and eight years as the nation’s vice-president—one of the most engaged vice-presidents in history—make him less vulnerable to these stumbling blocks than a less experienced president-elect would be. But it is still an astonishing attack on American ideals and traditions, as well as on the spirit of the Transition Act of 1963.

And yet, there can be no sincere denying that Biden has won. Indeed, specialized voting statistics experts estimate that, in an election that garnered massive turnout, when the last vote is counted, President-elect Biden will have won by the largest margin of any challenger since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Again, if this sort of thing were happening in any country but the United States of America, US intelligence would be observing it as an impending coup d’état.

But let’s return to Attorney General Barr, who has edged out even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for the ad hoc post of Enabler in Chief. Shortly prior to the election, there were those who sought to defend the AG’s restraint. Not only had he incurred Trump’s fury by telling the press that he didn’t figure the Durham Investigation would turn up any prosecutable wrongdoing against former President Obama or former Vice-President Biden in the 2016 election, or with regard to a probe into the activities of Biden’s son Hunter, but he also refused to open a separate Justice Department probe into the Bidens when the president promised his base that there would be one.

Earlier this week, however, Barr’s Trumpian restraint ended when he issued a memorandum providing authorization for a federal probe into President Trump’s clearly and provably false claims of “widespread nationwide voter fraud”. Trump’s fevered ego, which has never been able to accept defeat, thus got a booster shot of steroid-like vigor from none other than the country’s chief law enforcement officer, who, through his memo, gave credence to the president’s absurd claims that, for instance, anti-GOP voter fraud had been perpetrated with the acquiescence of the Republican secretary of state in Georgia and with that of the Republican city commissioner of Philadelphia, based entirely on the fact that the incumbent was losing in both places. In Trump’s specious “logic”, how on earth could a Democrat win where a Republican was in charge of the vote? 

All Barr had to do was tell his boss that it happened because the US is a democracy and election results are a fact, not a whim. But instead, he decided to use taxpayer dollars to indulge the president’s hissy fit, not even bothering to wait for final certification of the election outcome or for lower court decisions regarding any and all claims of possible fraud. As such, the AG used his powerful office, which is supposed to serve and protect the interests of every American, as a key piece in a conspiracy theory created and perpetuated by the president and his corrupt enablers at the highest levels of the GOP.

As a result, Richard Pilger, the Justice Department official charged with overseeing all investigations into election crimes, resigned his post on the spot. “Having familiarized myself with the new policy and its ramifications,” he wrote in an internal office message, “I must regretfully resign from my role as director of the Election Crimes Branch.” His resignation was accompanied by a letter of protest signed by some one thousand six hundred DOJ attorneys. Pilger’s  reasons for resigning and for the attorneys’ protest were clearly based on the fact that Barr’s memo ran counter to longstanding Justice Department best practices that include never investigating election fraud until local officials have completed all counting and certified the vote. The whole idea behind this practice is to prevent any federal administration’s bringing pressure to bear on local officials as a means of changing the outcome of an election. The fact that Barr is doing precisely that appears to make his motives crystal clear. 

Barr’s move comes against a murky background in which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—with whom the AG met the same day that he issued his memo—defended incumbent Trump’s supposed right to challenge the election totals even as they are still being counted. McConnell is clearly, like the president, subordinating what is best for the United States to his own political ambitions. He thinks he needs the unbroken support of the Trump base in order to maintain a Republican majority in the Senate during run-offs set for January 5, and that, to him, is worth burning the institution of American democracy to the ground. The theory being applied by both Trump and his surrogates is the same one that drove the Nazis rise to power in Germany in the nineteen-thirties: namely, that if you tell a big lie often enough, long enough and loud enough, it will eventually gain acceptance as “truth” among the masses.

Prior to McConnell’s tribute to his Caesar, in this fateful week for American democracy, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper with whom he has been on the outs ever since Esper rightly refused to obey a call from the president to deploy US troops against citizens protesting the George Floyd murder on the streets of American cities. There are rumors that “the beheadings” might continue, with CIA Director Gina Haspel’s and FBI Director Christopher Wray’s potentially being the next ones in line to roll.

Since Election Day, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that the president of the United States has gone full-blown, bat-shit crazy, raising the imminent-danger level of his previous conspiracy theories and unmitigated prevarication to that of a national security risk. Especially since it is playing on the paranoia of the most violent fringes of his base supporters, to the point that a scenario of armed civil insurrection is not at all unimaginable. The president is, in effect, seeking, no matter how insane it may seem, to ignore the clear outcome of a valid democratic election and to install an autocratic regime in the United States of America. And while this sci-fi-like phenomenon of a rogue president trying to overthrow American democracy should have always at least been a contingency we needed to contemplate, what never should have been in the cards was the adherence of any of the country’s other institutions to one man’s insane ambitions. But here we are...  

As for my own reaction to all of this, I’ve been a journalist, political observer, researcher and commentator most of my adult life and, at age seventy, have never before witnessed the astonishing phenomenon currently unfolding in the US in any major democracy on earth. That it is taking place in my own country which, like many other people worldwide, I have always seen as one of the greatest democracies on earth, and indeed as the founder of modern democracy as the world knows it, is a source of unfathomable pain and sadness to me.

I continue to respect the ideas and ideals of conservatives, liberals, libertarians, democratic socialists and many other shades of political philosophy in between. And as always, I am ever open to the lively exchange of ideas and to the democratic idea of finding a middle ground on which we can all work together for the common good. But I no longer consider Trumpism to fall within these boundaries.

The fact that anyone who fervently believes in democracy might have voted for Trump in 2016, and even again in 2020, might challenge my own sense of suspension of disbelief, but I will, to paraphrase Voltaire, “defend to the death” their right to vote for the legal candidate of their choice. But what I can no longer abide is anyone’s attempted defense of President Trump’s move to discredit a properly conducted election, his refusal to accept the proven results and concede the victory of his rival in the best American spirit of a peaceful and democratic transfer of power, or his clear and continuing attempts to breed false doubts about the election and to incite sedition and potential violence as a means of rejecting the voice of democracy and illegally and illegitimately maintaining his grip on power.

Nor can I any longer tolerate anyone’s claim that this is an election like any other or that Donald Trump was ever “just another president”. His consistent rejection and/or subversion of every notion of American tradition and ideals, of everything that has ever been right or decent or fair about the American constitutional system renders him, to my mind, incomparable not only to his Democratic predecessor, but also to former Republican presidents including Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and even Richard M. Nixon, all of whom served, in their own way, in the name of the American people and respecting the authority and sanctity of the Constitution and the rule of law.

Donald Trump is not an outlier. He is a wrecker and destroyer whose actions only serve his own ambitious purposes. Be forewarned that I, for one, will no longer tolerate the perpetuation of his lies as “alternative truth” or his autocratic designs as “politics as usual”. This election is “the hill I will die on” for American democracy.

 

ATTITUDE

 

ELECTION DAY

Today is Election Day. This is not just another day for me, even though I already voted absentee weeks ago, as I have for decades, except in 2016, when I actually flew back to my native Ohio and went to my polling place in Cuyahoga County to cast my ballot. That was an act of faith for me, as it was for the majority of American voters who—by a margin of nearly three million—did not vote for the current occupant of the White House. And let me just say that, above and beyond the election outcome, what I’m seeing on this particular Second Tuesday, makes me feel the most optimistic that I have since 2016.

Perhaps the reason that Election Day is such a special day for me is because, as a young reporter and correspondent, back in the mid-1970s to early 1980s, I had the opportunity to live and work under a harsh military dictatorship, under which the ballot boxes had been locked up and the citizens of the country where I was living had no voice in the political and social process. Or at least, the only voice they had was the one they were willing to venture at risk to their physical freedom, their lives and the lives of their loved ones. During that time reporting on my base country and on surrounding countries where authoritarian regimes were also firmly ensconced, I came to truly appreciate the democratic system under which I had been reared, with all of its faults, but more significantly, with all of its virtues.

The lessons I learned through the risks I took in those years in order to report as accurately as possible the horrors and abuses that were taking place under that regime led me, in 1986, once democracy had been restored and I was managing editor of a newspaper, to accept a post that the US ambassador offered me on the Fulbright Scholarship Commission, a program designed to promote understanding through education between the US and other nations. I did so because I felt it was important to send a message of solidarity and friendship among democracies with the US providing an example of outreach to countries seeking to consolidate their only recently regained democratic status. I felt that the importance of this was rooted in the fact that the US was one of the world’s most successful democracies as well as the biggest.

Because of this unique learning experience of witnessing tyranny close up and personal, I’ve been particularly dismayed by what I’ve seen in the US over the past four years. This anxiety has been heightened not so much by a president who has shown utter disdain for the democratic process, civil rights and the rule of law, but by a hijacked ruling party that has let him get away with it and by a large sector of the population that has not only acquiesced to, but has enthusiastically embraced the president’s authoritarian designs and penchant for violent division.

Many people feel that I exaggerate when I refer to the rise of authoritarianism in the US, but I have seen this movie before and I know how it ends. If there is one lesson I have learned well it is that populist dictators don’t rise to absolute power in spite of their people but because of them. The road to authoritarianism is paved with rights abdicated by, not taken from the people. It is only after that authoritarian power has been consolidated that people lose their rights completely and the reality of autocratic rule becomes obvious. But by then, it is too late. Ask Russia. Ask Venezuela.

So why am I optimistic? Because for way too long now, I’ve noted how many of my compatriots give lip-service to American democracy, but without accepting responsibility for it. There is all too often an attitude of democracy’s being an inviolable institution that, once firmly established, takes care of itself. In my own very real experience, nothing could be further from the truth. Though to many it may sound corny and cliché, we the people must defend democracy daily, a defense which starts with the democratic principle that, while I may disapprove of what you say, I will defend to the death your right to say it. But also that when we see the ugly shadow of tyranny rearing its head, we have an obligation not to remain silent but to make our voices heard.

The most effective way of making one’s voice count in a democracy is by voting. In some democracies the vote is compulsory. In the US, where it is one of our greatest rights, but optional, people in recent years have been largely apathetic about exercising this sacred democratic right, with usually only about half of those eligible actually casting a ballot. Even in 2016, a highly contentious presidential election, only fifty-five percent of eligible Americans cast their vote, or about one hundred thirty-eight million voters.

My optimism flourished this morning, then, when I awoke to the news that, whether by mail-in, absentee or early-voting, a hundred million Americans had already cast their vote, smashing all election records. And news throughout the day today tends to show that actual in-person voting at the traditional polling stations is heavy.

Until the results are in, it’s impossible to know what that means in terms of which ticket will win the race. But what it indicates to me is that the vast majority of the people of the United States have been aroused from their political slumber over the past four years and, like never before in the recent history of the United States, have awakened to the fact that democracy doesn’t happen on its own. We make it happen. And if the current administration has done nothing else in favor of democracy, there is at least this—that the people are awake and, one way or another, taking responsibility for the destiny of the country.      

 

A LEGACY DISREGARDED

Ruth Bader Ginsburg left us one of the greatest legacies in the history of the US Supreme Court. It could be best described as a continuous and ardent defense of individual rights in the face of state overreach and abuse of power. Her last request was that, in a controversial election year and down to the wire before voting day, the voice of the people should be heard before someone was chosen to attempt to take her place. That request was not only not heeded, but was demonstratively and almost viciously disregarded. Justice Ginsburg deserved better.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

The death of this iconic American jurist was all but lost in a chaotic  pre-electoral news cycle fraught with extenuating circumstances—the worst pandemic in a hundred years that the administration has chosen to ignore in hopes that it will simply go away, the most divisive political climate in recent memory and perhaps since the Civil War, widespread demonstrations to demand respect for human and civil rights around which extreme elements from the outer fringes of both left and right have sought to stoke violence, and a sitting president who has incited violence himself while suggesting that he could very well not accept the outcome of the current democratic process and, if he loses next week’s election, could presumably have to be removed from office by force.

Nor did the administration and the Republican-led Senate (read: Majority Leader Mitch McConnell) give us time to mourn and honor Justice Ginsburg as she deserved. Instead, they made it immediately clear that they planned to pick an extreme conservative out of a hat—women’s names only, to try and appease female voters whom the current president is shedding like coronavirus at a super-spreader event—and ramrod her appointment through the Senate in the nick of time before the First Tuesday in November. And that is precisely what they have done.

It would be unfair to either woman to say that Amy Coney Barrett, who this week initiates her tenure as a new associate justice of the US Supreme Court, “replaces” Justice Ginsburg. She couldn’t, because Ginsburg’s shoes are unfillable—at least by any of the candidates that the President considered. And, besides, that’s not what Coney Barrett is there to do. No matter what sort of justice she proves to be in what will very likely be her decades in the post, for the moment, Justice Barrett is a ringer, a linchpin nomination designed to pack the Court with conservatives so as to affect US law for generations to come, even though there is every indication that the majority of Americans are currently of a much more liberal political bent. There is reason to suggest that she has been chosen not because of any judiciously even-handed interpretation of the law that she may have, or claim to have, but, indeed, because of her extremely conservative views, as they emerge from her past writing, speeches, decisions, associations and statements, no matter how carefully she avoided reflecting those views during Senate hearing questioning by opposition lawmakers.

Amy Coney Barrett at the White House

Seeking to strike any comparison between Coney Barrett and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be almost cruel. Next to RBG’s extraordinary accomplishments by the time she first came to the Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett is a relative novice. But taken beyond the boundaries of her ostensibly being a “replacement” for Ginsburg, she indeed has a sound (though not astounding) legal curriculum vitae.

After graduation from an all-girls Catholic high school in New Orleans, where she was class vice-president, Coney Barrett attended Rhodes College in Memphis, where she majored in English literature and minored in French, graduating magna cum laude in 1994. She was awarded a full tuition scholarship to Notre Dame Law, where, among other honors, she served as executive editor of the Notre Dame Law Review. She graduated at the top of her class earning a juris doctor suma cum laude degree in 1997. That same year she began clerking for DC District US Court of Appeals Judge Laurence Silberman. The following year, she went to work as a clerk for US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and remained with him throughout 1998 and 1999. For the next three years, she worked for a boutique law firm in Washington that later merged with a bigger law firm in Texas. Following the merger, she participated on the research team for a lawsuit entitled Bush v Gore, emerging from controversy over the 2000 presidential election results. Her firm represented George W. Bush. The rest of her credits are academic and include teaching or acting as a research fellow at George Washington University, University of Virginia Law, and at her alma mater, Notre Dame, imparting subjects related to the federal courts and constitutional law and researching and writing on topics related to constitutional law, originalism, statutory interpretation, and stare decisis (litigation according to precedent) for the Columbia, Cornell, University of Virginia, Texas and Notre Dame Law Reviews, among other publications.  

In 2010, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Coney Barrett to serve as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure. It wasn’t until 2017, that she was named by the Trump administration to serve as a federal judge for the US Seventh District Court of Appeals, thus providing her with less than three years’ experience on the federal bench. Her ultimate Senate confirmation in that post was contentious, since Democrats saw her as a political appointee chosen more for her staunch anti-abortion stance and her dubious stated views on whether Rowe v Wade should be overturned than because of her general record as an attorney and educator. She is also believed to favor overturning the Affordable Care Act and to hold staunchly rightwing views on immigration. Nor did she prove herself capable, during her Supreme Court nomination hearing, of clearly answering what her response would be if President Trump were to try and make good on his threat to refuse to give up the White House if he is defeated in next week’s election—an act that, if carried out, would be clearly unconstitutional, if not seditious. These topics and her relative inexperience were some of the same issues that came up regarding the eleventh-hour GOP rush to place her on the Supreme Court while they still hold a Senate majority in case they are voted out of office, which, according to recent polls, appears not unlikely.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg, meanwhile, has been described in liberal legal circles as, quite simply, “the most important woman lawyer in the history of the Republic,” and one of the most famous and popular justices in the history of the Supreme Court. The “notorious RBG”, as she was fondly known, has quite literally become a pop icon, something few if any other Supreme Court justices in history can boast. And, by contrast and comparison, Amy Coney Barrett has become an unwitting catalyst for the posthumous exponential growth of Ginsburg’s popularity, particularly among American women. In her place at the other end of the spectrum, Coney Barrett is cast by liberals as the GOP’s “handmaid”—a reference to Margaret Atwood’s political fiction, The Handmaid’s Tale, in which, from one day to another, an all-pervasive quasi-evangelical state policy is violently imposed to disempower women.

By the time RBG was appointed to the Supreme Court by the Clinton administration in 1993, she had already served as a federal judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia for nearly thirteen years, having been nominated for that post by the Carter administration in 1980. She was known as a prudent, judicious and moderate jurist who was adept at seeking points of agreement with her conservative colleagues—including her later fellow Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia—and reaching a consensus for the appellate court’s final decisions.

Daughter of a Ukrainian-born father and a first-generation Polish-American mother, RBG attended the same public high school in Flatbush (Brooklyn), New York, as Senators Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer and Norm Coleman. She lost her mother, who had inspired and encouraged her to be all she could be, to cancer the day before her graduation. Despite this blow, by age seventeen, she not only had her high school diploma but was also enrolled in the academically prestigious Cornell University, majoring in Government, and graduating first in her class in 1954.

She married her husband, tax attorney Martin Ginsburg, right out of college at twenty-one, and accompanied him to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, where he was assigned for active duty as an ROTC Army Reserve officer. There, she landed a job working for the Social Security administration for two years, but was demoted in her second year after she became pregnant. This early incident was one of the personal injustices that she suffered that would later affect her interpretation of sexual discrimination under the law.

Another was when she enrolled and was accepted at Harvard University’s Law School. She was one of only nine women out of a class of several hundred. Early in the year, the dean of Harvard Law invited all nine women to his home for dinner and, once they were seated at his table, asked each to explain why she had decided to come to Harvard Law to take a place that could have been filled by a man.

RBG later transferred to Columbia Law in New York City, from which she graduated in 1959, tying for top of her class. While studying, she became the first woman in history to be on the staff of both the Harvard Law Review and the Columbia Law Review. In 1960, with the recommendation of the dean of Harvard Law, she sought a position as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, but was turned down strictly based on her sex. She later sought a similar position, with the recommendation of Columbia Law professor Gerald Gunther, on the staff of New York Southern District Federal Court Judge Edmund Palmieri, but was also at first rejected because of her gender. But Gunther doubled down, telling Palmieri that he would never again recommend a Columbia Law graduate to the Judge if he failed to hire Ginsburg. She then got the job, and held it for two years. Ironically, young legal professionals like Amy Coney Barrett who never have had to smash through the gender barrier to gain access to jobs in the federal legal system owe an enormous debt to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, parts of whose legacy the GOP is now seeking to undo.

From 1961 to 1963, RBG worked on an international legal procedure project sponsored by Columbia Law, for which she learned Swedish and carried out extensive research at Sweden’s Lund University, the result of which was a book that she co-authored with Swedish legal expert Anders Bruzelius—a member of a famous family of Scandinavian jurists.  It was while in Sweden that she further developed her stance on democracy and women, noting that anywhere from twenty to twenty-four percent of all Swedish law students were women, while in the US, with a few brilliant exceptions like herself, the legal profession tended to be a closed boys’ club. She also took note of the fact that one of the Swedish judges whom she interviewed for her project was eight months pregnant and still on the job. She came back from Sweden convinced that a more equal and democratic world for women than the one in the US was possible.         

When Ginsburg acquired her first teaching post at Rutgers Law in 1963, she was one of only a score of female law professors in the entire country. She taught civil procedure at Rutgers until 1972. While teaching there, RBG co-founded the Women’s Rights Law Reporter. It was the first US legal journal whose entire focus was set on women’s rights.

RBG in the '70s

In 1972, she became the first tenured woman professor ever to teach at Columbia Law. She remained at Columbia until 1980. While there, she became the co-author for the law school’s first sex discrimination casebook. Also during that time, she put in a year as a research fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences.

Also en 1972, RBG became a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project. The following year, she became general counsel for that project. As such, she was a front-line participant in some three hundred general discrimination cases that the ACLU filed by the end of the next year. As the project’s general counsel, it was her job to personally argue six discrimination cases that the US Supreme Court heard between 1973 and 1976. She won favorable Supreme Court decisions five out of those six times.

Constitutional scholars tend to agree that Ginsburg chose her battles carefully, going after sex discrimination one precedent at a time rather than battling the Court for a blanket ban on all gender discrimination, which, in those times, she was unlikely to achieve. By concentrating on specific statutes throughout the country, she was creating the building blocks for a broader assault on gender inequality. Nor did she limit her plaintiffs to women, since by adding the cases of some men, she was implicitly proving that sex discrimination affected everyone, not just women. Examples included cases in which men, on the basis of gender, were denied benefits that women received—e.g., a widowed man who was denied Social Security benefits paid to widows caring for small children but not to widowers in the same situation, and a male caregiver denied a tax deduction provided to female caregivers.

Additionally, she couched the language of her legal briefs, preferring the term "gender" to the trigger-word "sex", which, she felt, might distract male judges hearing the cases. And it is important to note that her equality advocacy work during this time played a direct and significant role in ending gender discrimination in no few fields of law, as well as in tapping into the Fourteenth Amendment granting equal rights protection to African Americans, so as to seek its application to gender discrimination as well. Indeed, she drafted the brief for the historic Reed v Reed case argued before the Supreme Court, basing it on the applicability of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to women, as well as to blacks.

Legal scholars and civil rights advocates tend to agree that RBG’s work at the ACLU should be credited with making major legal inroads for women on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution and that her repeated victories largely discouraged legislators from continuing to treat women differently than men under the law. This has prompted many, including her conservative friend and fellow justice, Antonin Scalia, to compare her step by step, precedent by precedent building of women’s constitutional equality with how the country’s first black Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall, built the case of African American equality. Said Scalia, "She became the leading (and very successful) litigator on behalf of women's rights—the Thurgood Marshall of that cause, so to speak." Linda Hirschman, an attorney/writer and the author of Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World, calls Ginsburg “quite simply the most important woman lawyer in the history of the Republic.”

And she, in essence, maintained that incisive attorney’s view in her thirteen years as a federal judge and her nearly three decades as a Supreme Court Justice. Instead of switching hats and distancing herself from the lawyerly view of her clients’ needs and rights, she merely switched clients, and her new client was “we the people.” This was probably because her interpretations were based more on what was legitimate than what was “legal” and she wasn’t afraid to shake discriminatory laws to their illegitimately vested foundations and seek to force them to conform to the true spirit and letter of the Constitution.

RBG with Sandra Day O'Connor

Outstanding lawyer, researcher, teacher and judge, she was, without a doubt, a remarkable jurist. But she was also, first and foremost, a small-d democrat, who, nevertheless, took a judicious view of democracy and realized that it was, as the old saying goes, “the worst form of government, except all the others.” As such, she knew its weaknesses: namely, that if minority rights weren’t protected under law, it would be easy for the majority to disregard them in the name of democratic majority rule, and that majorities might well seek to influence the electoral process in order to ensure their permanence in power. Through her advocacy, public legal practice and decades on the bench, RBG worked tirelessly to ensure that constitutional interpretation encompassed an ever broader swath of equality.

A landmark Supreme Court case that typifies Justice Ginsburg’s influence in broadening the meaning of discrimination in the United States is the 1996 United States v Virginia. Written by Ginsburg and passed in a seven to one decision, the overwhelming Supreme Court majority struck down the Virginia Military Institute’s traditional male-only admissions rule. The only dissenting justice was William Rehnquist, while Justice Clarence Thomas recused himself because his son was enrolled in the VMI at that time. In drafting the decision, RBG stated that the institute had failed to demonstrate “exceedingly persuasive justification” for banning women from admission. The ban was, then, unconstitutional, since it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In seeking to get around the equality requirement, the State of Virginia offered the same sort of “separate but equal” ploy so often utilized to perpetuate racial discrimination, but this time applying it to gender. In short, it offered a program entitled the Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership (VWIL), to be provided through the nearby liberal arts school, Mary Baldwin College.

But Justice Ginsburg’s majority decision argued that the VWIL would not provide the same rigorous military training that men received at the VMI, nor would it boast the same curriculum, faculty or ultimate career opportunities to women as to men, including those arising from the contacts and reputation implicit in attending the all-male academy. Again drawing the parallel between racism and sexism, Ginsburg referred to Sweatt v Painter, a 1950 decision in which the Court had ruled that it was unconstitutional to segregate law schools in Texas because an alternative all-black law school that had been set up failed to provide the same benefits to its students that the prestigious and long-standing white school did. According to the Ginsburg majority decision, "The VWIL program is a pale shadow of VMI in terms of the range of curricular choices and faculty stature, funding, prestige, alumni support and influence."

She went on to write, “Generalizations about ‘the way women are,’ estimates of what is appropriate for most women, no longer justify denying opportunities to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description.” What she was subtly yet radically telling the society of those times, legal scholars say, was that if there is any woman who can meet a state’s standard for any sort of opportunity, then no woman can be denied access to that opportunity.

Perhaps the prime role of the Supreme Court should be protection of “we the people” against the frailties of democracy and the overarching power of both federal and state government. Ginsburg had a profound understanding of this responsibility. And a perusal of her advocacy, her appellate court performance and her victories and dissents in her many years on the Supreme Court make clear the debt she is owed not only by women, but also by racial and ethnic minorities, the LGBT community, political dissidents and people accused of alleged crimes—in other words, every social group or individual whose civil and human rights have too often been ignored by those representing the majority in a supposedly democratic society. In short, this diminutive woman with her enormous intellect and heart was no less than the epitome of justice, equality and the rule of law.

In a nation in which so many women owe protection of their basic rights to the persistent commitment to equality of this iconic Supreme Court justice, it is ironic that another woman has been picked by the Senate majority—one of those domineering majorities whose nefarious influence Justice Ginsburg spent her life seeking to limit—to try and  ensure that some of the results of victories fought and won by RBG and other staunch advocates of true democracy are eventually dismantled.

There is no way to know precisely how Amy Coney Barrett will perform as a Supreme Court Justice, but it seems clear that she has an almost diametrically opposing view to that of Ruth Bader Ginsburg when it comes to the tenets of democracy and, in particular, the basic rights of American women, including their reproductive rights. If members of the far-right who proposed her are successful in their hopes that she will do their bidding, it will be a slap in the face to the legacy of “the notorious RGB” and sadly, American democracy will be the worse for it.