Justice Ginsburg’s Warning To A Dysfunctional Nation

BY IAN MILLHISER OCT 28, 2015 8:00AM

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been a national figure for at least half of her life. As founding director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, Ginsburg probably did more than any other litigator in the nation’s history to abolish sex discrimination and gender stereotyping. As an appellate judge, she was among the most admired members of the federal bench and frequently fed her law clerks to the Supreme Court. Now, she is one of the nine most powerful judges in the country.

Yet Ginsburg is more famous today than she has been at any other point in her career. Popular memes compare the elderly justice to divas and hip hop stars. Young people tattoo her likeness on their body.

One widely shared image matches Ginsburg’s grandmotherly face with a Beyoncé lyric — “All them fives need to listen when the ten is talking.” Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a book marking Ginsburg’s new role as a pop cultural icon, is already a bestseller one day after its official release.

Yet, while Ginsburg has achieved fame rarely enjoyed by people who spend their days toiling over word processors and case books, this also must be a bittersweet moment for the elderly justice. As Notorious RBG chronicles, Ginsburg the Icon was not born from the justice’s many triumphs on both sides of the Supreme Court’s bench. It was born from an historic defeat for liberalism. As one activist is quoted saying early in the book, “everyone was angry on the internet at the same time” on the day the Supreme Court gutted much of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. Their anger was mirrored by Ginsburg, who likened the Court’s decision to invalidate much of the act because it successfully eliminated much voter suppression to “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Amidst this anger, Notorious RBG co-author Shana Knizhnik launched a tumblr by the same name, which humorously likened the diminutive Ginsburg to the swaggering rap star Notorious B.I.G.

In the coming months, Knizhnik’s tumblr would feature tributes to Ginsburg ranging from Valentines to Halloween costumes to infants dressed as “Ruth Baby Ginsburg.”

Shelby County, however, was not an isolated case. It was one of a series of cases, on topics ranging from pay discrimination to abortion to birth control, where Ginsburg penned strongly worded dissents. Ginsburg is an icon, but she is an icon of defiance standing against a tide of conservatism. In her ninth decade of life, Notorious RBG paints her as a woman who is unbowed and determined to maintain her vigil, but also uncertain how she can stand against the tide.

“Anger, resentment, envy. These are emotions that just sap your energy.” Notorious RBG quotes Ginsburg as saying in an unusually Yoda-like moment. She believes that she has achieved what she has accomplished because she fights “in a way that will lead others to join you.” Justice Ginsburg’s belief that erroneous thinking can be cured through persuasion defines her career as a judge. For this reason, her mere willingness to show her anger in dissenting opinions is both an expression of despair and a warning that one of the nation’s most able minds has run out of tools to turn back the tide. As Knizhnik’s co-author Irin Carmon writes in the New York Times, Ginsburg will turn only to overt anger after she has “tried everything else.”

The tide of conservatism is still coming, and the Notorious RBG has tried everything she knows to stop it.

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http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/10/28/3716526/justice-ginsburgs-warning-to-a-dysfunctional-nation/