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Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker urged President Trump and the US Senate “to allow the American people to cast their ballots for President before a new justice is nominated or confirmed.”
In a tweet Saturday, Baker called the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg “not only a loss for the court but for the entire nation.”
On Friday, Baker endorsed incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine in her upcoming election. His endorsement was featured Friday in an ad paid for by the Republican Jewish Coalition.
“As governor of Massachusetts I work with both parties to get things done. Susan Collins does that in the senate. She’s pro-environment, pro-women, pro-Maine. We need more leaders like Susan. I hope you reelect her,” he said.
Collins released a statement Friday evening on the passing of Ginsburg, but did not mention whether the nomination of a new justice should happen before or after the presidential election.
Read the tweet:
The British embassy in Washington, DC, has lowered its flags in honor of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, according to its official Twitter account.
Read the tweet:
A Trump adviser close to the process said the White House would like to announce a pick for the Supreme Court before the first presidential debate, which is scheduled for Sept. 29.
Some more context: One source close to the process of searching for a new Supreme Court justice believes that the top of President Trump’s list includes Judges Amy Coney Barrett, Barbara Lagoa and Amul Thapar.
Jill Biden, the wife of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, briefly mentioned the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg during an Ohio virtual canvassing launch event Saturday.
Biden said that Ginsburg lived “an illustrious and fearless life.”
The remaining Supreme Court justices have released statements following the death of their colleague Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Read excerpts from their statements below:
Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.
Justice Clarence Thomas
Justice Stephen G. Breyer
Justice Samuel A. Alito
Justice Sonia Sotomayor
Justice Elena Kagan
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy
Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, said Ruth Bader Ginsburg will “forever be known as a woman of brilliance” following her death Friday.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham indicated that he would attempt to advance a Supreme Court nominee from President Trump this year.
On Twitter, Graham pointed people to remarks he made on filling a Supreme Court seat earlier this year.
Graham also quoted Trump’s tweet which called for the GOP to act quickly on a nominee, saying, “I fully understand where the President is coming from.”
One of the articles Graham posted on Twitter was an interview he did with “Full Court Press with Greta Van Susteren,” in which he explained that he would try and confirm a Supreme Court nominee if there was an opening, even though it is an election year.
He told Van Susteren that he believed this situation would be different than with Merrick Garland because in this case, the Senate and the executive bodies are controlled by the same party, which was not the case in 2016.
One source close to the process of searching for a new Supreme Court justice believes that the top of President Trump’s list includes Judges Amy Coney Barrett, Barbara Lagoa and Amul Thapar.
In the run up to the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation, Trump met with both Barrett and Thapar; it’s unclear if he’s had a face to face meeting with Lagoa.
Some history: Barrett, Trump’s nominee to the 7th circuit, is a favorite of supporters of religious liberty who point to her extensive writings on faith and the law. During her confirmation hearing, ranking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, asked her if the “dogma lives loudly in her.”
The comments infuriated Barrett’s supporters, who said Feinstein was trying to apply a religious litmus test. In a 2013 publication affiliated with Notre Dame, Barrett was quoted as saying she thinks it is “very unlikely at this point” that the court is going to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Thapar is a long time favorite of Sen. Mitch McConnell. Thapar now sits on the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. He was the first American of South Asian descent to be named to an Article III judgeship. Lagoa hails from Florida and was the first Hispanic woman and the first Cuban American woman on the Supreme Court in Florida. She has deep connections in the state that could be a battleground.
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Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday from complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer.
Ginsburg was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2009. Earlier this year, she announced a recurrence of the cancer, having discovered lesions on her liver.
Experts say that about 95% of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer will die from it. There are currently no general screening tools for pancreatic cancer, and there are often no symptoms in the early stages, when the tumor would be most treatable. The cancer is often discovered at more advanced stages, sometimes when it has spread to other organs, known as metastasis.
The National Cancer Institute named pancreatic cancer as the third-leading cause of death from cancers, after lung and colorectal cancers in 2018. The institute says that about 10% of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer will survive for five years or more.
The American Cancer Society estimates 57,600 people will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2020 and 47,050 will die due to the cancer.
Some context: Ginsburg is the second icon lost this year who battled with pancreatic cancer.
Civil rights icon and late US Democratic Representative John Lewis was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer last year and died this July.
Higher rates of pancreatic cancer are seen in men and African Americans. The risk of pancreatic cancer also increases with age. The average age of diagnosis is 71, and nearly 90% of patients are older than 55.
CNN’s Elizabeth Landau contributed to this report.
Shana Knizhnik, who created the blog Notorious RBG in 2013 and co-authored a book by the same name, explained why Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life and work resonated with young people — and young women, in particular.
Knizhnik discussed how the blog’s name was inspired by the rapper Notorious B.I.G., a Brooklyn native, like Ginsburg.
“It started out as a joke, right? It was sort of a play on contrasts between this amazing rapper who died very early in life and this diminutive…octogenarian Supreme Court justice,” Knizhnik, a lawyer, told CNN.
She said that Ginsburg served as a role model for many young people.
Ginsburg officiated Knizhnik’s wedding ceremony one year ago today.
Watch more:
For young women, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a role model who demonstrated what‘s possible for them.
Seeing a woman on the Supreme Court was inspirational, and that representation matters, said 20-year-old Eve Levenson, a junior at George Washington University in Washington, DC.
Levenson met Justice Ginsburg during her first week of college, she told CNN.
“RBG was one of the main reasons I grew up believing that despite what anybody said about my religion, ethnicity, or gender that I could do anything I set my mind to,” Levenson, who is Jewish, added. “Seeing yourself represented in the highest court of the land is a powerful image.”
Kimberly Collins, a 20-year-old Black woman, is a member of Scales of Justice Academy, a program which exposes underserved girls to the legal profession, she said.
According to Collins, the most profound lesson Ginsburg taught her, “is that the fight for equity and justice is worth every single obstacle and setback,” she said.
“As a woman of color, it was not normal for me to connect or receive this kind of inspiration from the few women that had national platforms,” Collins told CNN. “Yet, I connected with RBG. With her it was different. I knew she was fighting for me.”
Ritika Iyer, a 20-year-old Hindu Indian woman, spoke to Ginsburg’s legacy of dissent.
“RBG taught me that it’s ok to disagree and be vocal about it. As a women, I sometimes tend to not want to rock the boat. But the way she would vehemently dissent and refuse to put up with the status quo inspired me to be more vocal about my opinions,” she said.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that the state will honor the life and legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a statue in Brooklyn, her birthplace.
Read his message:
Mourners gathered this morning in front of the Supreme Court to pay tribute to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Last night, hundreds of people showed up in front of the building after news broke that Ginsburg had died.
CNN’s Ariane de Vogue shared photos of some of the signs placed at the makeshift vigil:
A campaign aide said Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff walked down to the Supreme Court this morning following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Mourners have been gathering in front of the building this morning to pay their respects to the late justice.
In a statement released overnight, Harris called Ginsburg “a relentless defender of justice in our country and a legal mind for the ages.”
Harris tweeted the following photo from her visit:
President Trump, in his first tweets of the day following the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, appeared to indicate that he will move forward on appointing a nominee “without delay.”
Some background: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed on Friday that whomever Trump nominates to replace Ginsburg will get a vote on the Senate floor.
GOP aides are skeptical that there is enough time to confirm a nominee before Nov. 3, given that Supreme Court nominees typically take two to three months to process, according to a review of recent confirmation proceedings.
But that process could be sped up if McConnell, who controls the majority of the chamber, has the votes to confirm a replacement, and there is enough time to confirm someone in a lame-duck session of Congress after the November elections.
Gov. Greg Abbott today ordered all Texas flags to be lowered to honor the life and legacy of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Abbott’s decision to lower the flags follows similar actions from the governors of Kentucky and Connecticut.
As America mourned the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — a brilliant trailblazer for women and an equal rights icon — a fierce new political debate began unfolding Friday evening.
With just 45 days until the election, the battle over who will replace her and when that Senate vote will occur is already reshaping the stakes in more than a half-dozen closely fought Senate races, while galvanizing impassioned voters on both sides of the presidential campaign.
The death of a Supreme Court justice so close to the November election was all but certain to thrust America’s culture wars back to the center of the political debate in a year dominated by the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.
That battle has the ability to breathe new energy into the electorate — activating conservative Republicans who have grown weary of President Trump but view the election as a chance to shape the court, while also mobilizing millions of female voters who are already infuriated by Trump’s degradation of women and would view his ability to nominate three Supreme Court justices in a single term as an assault on their values.
Read the full analysis here.
Before Justice Ginsburg’s death, President Trump had talked privately this summer about the prospect of nominating a female justice in order to boost his support among women voters, people familiar with the conversations said.
Now that the prospect has become a reality, Amy Coney Barrett’s name has emerged as a favorite after being considered for Trump’s previous Supreme Court vacancies. She was confirmed as a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 2017 after being nominated by the President.
Advocates pushing for Barrett last time were told by White House officials after Brett Kavanaugh was nominated that she was very much still in the running for another vacancy, according to one person familiar with the conversations. There was a belief among her supporters that Trump favored nominating her to replace a female justice like Ginsburg, the person said.
Her nomination now is far from assured: Among administration officials, there is a sense they have no room for error given the tight timing and fraught election year politics of this vacancy.
While Barrett is still a favorite, hers would be a tough confirmation (as it was in 2017) given her opposition to abortion and a devout Catholic faith that Democrats have claimed would color her legal views.
It’s not clear yet whether Trump and his aides believe a more widely accepted nominee would be a smarter route — or whether such a nominee even exists in the current political climate.
One official said the President could begin meeting with nominees next week as the White House ramps up its preparations for a confirmation.
Read about other notable names on Trump’s list of nominees here.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has ordered all state office flags to be lowered to half-staff in honor of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The flags will remain in that position until sunset on the day of Ginsburg’s internment, a statement from the governor’s office said.
Beshear reacted to Ginsbrug’s death in a tweet, calling her a “trailblazer who served our country and our people.”
After news broke that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died, hundreds showed up outside the Supreme Court last night to pay tribute to her with a makeshift memorial on the building’s steps.
Vigils also took place in other cities, including Denver and San Francisco.
Watch the scene outside the Supreme Court:
At about 9 p.m., the crowd had grown since the announcement of Ginsburg’s death at around 7:30 p.m., CNN reported from the scene.
