Paula lugones
09/18/2020 - 22:58
Clarín.com
World
When someone says RBG in the United States, everyone knows who they are talking about.
They are the initials of the judge who may have been the most famous in the world, a symbol of the struggle for gender equality and civil rights, a heroine for the progressivism of this country, the protagonist of Netflix documentaries, a pop icon and a figure for a wave of young feminists wearing T-shirts and drinking coffee from "Notorious RBG" mugs.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a judge of the United States Supreme Court since 1993, died this Friday at the age
of
87
after fighting several years against cancer.
Beyond a career that marked the country and the fight for civil rights, his death now leaves a vacancy in the highest court that augurs a great battle in these months as President Donald Trump and the Republicans will try to replace her with a conservative judge .
The Court reported in a statement that Ginsburg died of "complications" in the pancreatic cancer that she suffered and that she was accompanied by her family to her home in Washington DC until the end.
The President of the Court, John Roberts, said that the United States had lost
"a jurist of historical stature
.
"
“All of us in the Supreme Court have lost a beloved companion.
Today we mourn, but we are confident that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her, a tireless and determined champion of justice. "
Campaigning in Minnesota, Trump said
"she was an amazing woman"
with an "amazing life."
She had once called him a
"scammer",
although she later apologized.
Nominated by former President Bill Clinton in 1993, Ginsburg was the oldest judge of the nine who make up the Supreme Court and had been interned several times in recent years.
She came to court after a career dedicated to feminist causes and civil rights.
In the 1950s, Ginsburg was top of her class at Harvard,
where there were only eight women out of more than 500 men.
She graduated and then moved to New York where no law firm hired her just because she was a woman.
Thus, she dedicated herself to teaching at Columbia University, where she is remembered as one of the great figures who have passed through its classrooms.
In 1972 she was one of the founders of the Women's Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which had the goal of changing the laws to promote equality between men and women.
In those years she married Martin, a classmate:
"He was the only young man I dated who cared that he had a brain,
" Ginsburg said.
Lawyer, he used to stay at home taking care of her children while she went out to fight for women's rights.
In court, Ginsburg's strategy
was not to advocate for radical change, but rather he did an ant job: he
used the rulings against racial segregation to show that the same was true of women.
He was reaping victories that created legal antecedents to gradually corner discrimination in a world where there were only white men in the Courts.
His clever strategy was seen with a great triumph in 1975 in the case of Stephen Wiesenfeld, a man who was denied widowhood financial aid by the government because it was reserved for women.
Ginsburg got the justices to rule unanimously in his favor (which was obviously easy for them) but then went further: shortly afterwards, the Supreme Court agreed to review whether, for centuries, he had acted with a macho bias.
As an attorney, she won 5 of the 6 civil rights cases that she filed in the Supreme Court.
In the 1980s, she began her judicial career in the Washington Court of Appeals and from there she jumped to the Supreme Court in 1993 under the leadership of Democratic President Bill Clinton and thus became the second judge to occupy a seat in that Court, after the conservative Sandra Day O'Connor.
Little by little, RBG became the most progressive judge of the court and her writings in the rulings began to attract the attention of the youngest, especially after in 2013 the magistrate opposed ending part of a law that guaranteed the right to the vote of African Americans and had been approved in 1965.
The different collars that she used to decorate her black toga, her fiery writings on her failures, became famous and she was christened "Notorious RBG", after the famous rapper "Notorious BIG".
She was fascinated by this new role of reference for young women and was filmed doing weights and sit-ups in a gym at the age of 85
with a personal trainer and came to film a documentary about her life that was seen in cinemas and had great success in Netflix.
His health in recent months was very weak and he had been admitted to the hospital several times.
She had been affected by the death of her husband, also from cancer, and of Judge Antonin Scalia, her courtmate, with whom they had
a deep friendship despite the fact that they were totally opposed ideologically.
They both went to the opera together and even made their own with their story called
"Scalia / Ginsburg
"
His death now opens a tough political battle for the vacancy
he leaves, a few weeks before the November 3 elections.
A few days before his death, RBG expressed its will that his successor be appointed after the presidential elections of November 3, but
the government of President Donald Trump does not seem willing to please her because it seeks to appoint a conservative who will definitely incline the court towards the right.
In the United States, the president nominates the 9 justices of the Supreme Court and confirms them in the Senate, where Republicans today have a majority.
Magistrates are appointed for life.
Last week Trump presented a list of potential Supreme Court candidates should he be reelected in November, which includes Republican Senators Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, all very close to him conservatives.
In 2016, after the death of Conservative Justice Scalia, then-President Barack Obama tried to nominate a magistrate,
but Republicans froze the appointment
arguing that it was an election year.
With Trump's triumph, they then managed to impose a conservative and then added another.
But Senate Leader Mitch McConnell
said they will accelerate the nomination:
"Americans re-elected our majority in 2016 and expanded it in 2018 because they support President Trump's agenda, particularly his outstanding nominations for federal justice," he said.
"The Trump nominee will receive the vote in the Senate," he added, although he did not clarify when that debate would take place, if before or after the elections.
Paradoxically, this same senator had said in 2016 that Americans "should have a voice in the election of the next judge of the Court, and this vacancy (Scalia's) should not be filled until we have a new president."
Now think otherwise.
When RBG's death was known, the flag of the Court building in Washington was placed at half mast and women spontaneously approached the place.
One hugged her and said:
“Don't just be a judge.
It was Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
She was not just a judge ”.
Washington. Correspondent