Small American flag recovered amid World Trade Center debris at the Fresh Kills Landfill. 9-11 exhibit at the East Tennessee History Museum. 2003 Smithsonian photo by Hugh Talman.
The United States is no longer. It is not united and it no longer has a government that is of the people, by the people, or for the people.
The Republicans in the Senate majority represent 18 percent of the country’s population; 60 percent of the Senate now represents just 24 percent of the country. Let that sink in.
The United States is not a democracy. The principle of one man, one vote has become a travesty.
Now Mitt Romney (R-UT), the lone Republican senator who voted to impeach Donald Trump, has announced that he supports the move to allow Trump to nominate the next justice of the Supreme Court. Romney’s decision almost certainly guarantees that the replacement of liberal icon Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be a hard-right-leaning conservative.
We can anticipate the resulting 6-3 majority to muzzle the liberals. In addition to the Senate, Republicans control the judiciary and possibly the executive branches of the government.
We can expect the minority “majority” to overturn every Democratic initiative to safeguard the country and protect its people. Republicans will achieve their fondest goals. They will
revoke Roe v. Wade, erasing the woman’s right to choose that RBG was instrumental in establishing almost 50 years ago.
dismantle the social safety net devised by Democratic administrations
Social Security, envisioned by Franklin Roosevelt in the depths of the Great Depression
Medicare and Medicaid, initiated under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society
Obamacare, Barack Obama’s first step toward universal health care
abolish regulations that combat climate change, protect the environment from commercial exploitation, reform the banking system
stifle any attempt to regulate guns
What can the gagged majority do? It’s clear that a country so divided cannot stand.
Civil war is one response. The blue states could secede. Geography is an impediment, because Democrats inhabit not only the East and West Coasts that are separated by a vast expanse, but also great cities in the Republican Midwest like Chicago. Republicans tote guns, Democrats by and large don’t. I suspect the food supply from the Farm Belt is largely in Republican hands.
At this moment I’m not coming up with alternatives to this nightmare scenario. I ask readers to argue with me and suggest ways to cope with the untenable situation that we face.
Looking down from the steps of the supreme court on mourners and demonstrators gathering following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 9/18/2020 Photo by Rosa Pineda
NOOOO!!!
The anguished cry rose across the country with the news that the legendary, beloved Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had lost her final battle. She fought determinedly and won the first skirmishes, but cancer’s relentless invasion ultimately overcame her body.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
She must have suffered during the last few years with several surgeries complicated by three broken ribs, but she refused to let such inconveniences interrupt her work. Thanks to her crusade against the mistreatment of women and minorities, RBG changed the lives of all Americans. We can rejoice that Ginsburg was celebrated during her lifetime for her remarkable achievements. Many artists and great minds die in obscurity, deprived of the satisfaction of knowing their works would be widely acclaimed.
Ruth was a barrier-breaker and a high-achiever. She was among the first women admitted to Harvard Law School. When Marty, her husband, got a job in New York, she moved with him and completed her law studies at Columbia. During her last year she made Law Review and finished at the top of her class, while simultaneously caring for her baby and Marty, stricken with cancer.
Her professors from both Harvard and Columbia recommended her for a clerkship on the Supreme Court. But Justice Frankfurter, a good friend of theirs, would not consider her because he refused to hire a woman. This was not the first nor the last of continual rebuffs. Each one increased her sensitivity to the abuse of marginalized groups, especially women.
How many women born 50 years ago or less understand how inequality made women’s lives and aspirations radically different from those of men? How many know that until the 1970s, when old laws were struck down and new laws began to change the culture, women were rarely if ever seen in corporate boardrooms, in the houses of Congress, state legislatures or the courts? They were prohibited from serving on juries (so they never could be judged by juries of their peers) and often were not hired or promoted in order to protect jobs for men.
Women suffered domestic inequality as well. It grew from a culture that didn’t question the unproved assumption that women have to be protected because they are weak— essentially inferior to men. Inequality was not confined to the home. The premise that women are dependent on men was also embedded in the entire American legal system. Not until the first two women in history— Sandra Day O’Connor first, followed by Ginsburg— were appointed to the Supreme Court and gained the power to challenge those laws, did the barriers that were holding women back begin to crumble.
Even before Ginsburg became an Associate Justice at the Supreme Court, however, she argued five landmark cases before it in less than a decade. Her victories in these cases during the 70s transformed women’s constitutional status.
Ginsburg’s primary goal was to equate discrimination against sex to offenses against race, applying the Fourteenth Amendment to both. In Frontiero v. Richardson she maintained that
Sex like race is a visible, immutable characteristic bearing no necessary relationship to ability. Sex like race has been made the basis for unjustified or at least unproved assumptions, concerning an individual’s potential to perform or to contribute to society.
Ginsburg’s work has made it possible for women to no longer be singled out because of their sex and treated differently from men under the law. Ginsburg taught, for example, that alimony and shorter work hours are actually harmful to women because they enable dependency. Shorter work hours also mean lesser jobs for women and less pay.
Ginsburg understood that sex-role stereotyping can also adversely affect the dominant sex. Men are in a double bind: they do not benefit from all the talents of their wives, they have to work harder and they miss out on quality time with their children.
Justice Thurgood Marshall and his tactics served as a model for Justice Ginsburg in her crusade for women’s equality. Marshall led the battle for civil rights in the Supreme Court. His strategy of achieving small, incremental changes culminated in the sweeping change of the Civil Rights Act. The achievements in civil rights and women’s rights of Justices Marshall and Ginsburg brought about radical and profound change in American society.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg richly deserves the hagiographic reverence accorded to her. A diminutive woman, she presumably had tiny feet, but no one has feet large enough to fit into her shoes. She will be sorely missed, and those who follow her have an obligation to preserve her legacy and build on it.
“How do women achieve true parity in political representation?” The question is simultaneously simple and impossibly complex, perhaps triply so, when you add progressive feminism to the mix.
What do we want from our politics? Given the relatively pathetic female percentages that Americans see among elected officials, from Congress to state legislatures, how can we insist not just on equal numbers, but also on representation that powers our overall goals as progressive thinkers? Such a demand may seem impossibly naïve after even the charismatic and brilliant politician elected president in 2008 was unable to change the toxic ways of Washington.
But that demand feels more essential than ever, given the determination of the evangelists and the hard right to drag the rest of the country back to medieval chastity belts, Victorian debtor’s jails and Cold War-era McCarthy-style accusations and inquisitions. We need seats at the table where policy is made. “If you’re going to change things,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg toldThe New York Times in 2009, “you have to be with the people who hold the levers.” This from someone who has fought all her life for justice, and who, years before she was appointed to the bench, founded the Women’s Rights Law Reporter and ran the ACLU Women’s Rights Law Project.
V B I 