Absent Friends

A Fearless Girl tribute to RBG pic.twitter.com/JQbv2nG5z9

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) September 22, 2020

Mourners quietly filed past the flag-draped coffin of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg outside the Supreme Court, as the U.S. began three days of tributes to the liberal icon https://t.co/RSpLqrEpZu pic.twitter.com/Z5l3v1J3JF

— Reuters (@Reuters) September 24, 2020

She was small in stature but even the tallest looked up to her. Her voice was soft but her message rang loud and clear and will echo forever. Thank you, RBG. Rest In Peace. Respectfully, Dolly Parton pic.twitter.com/Sra7ge5K9b

— Dolly Parton (@DollyParton) September 19, 2020

"Tough, brave, a fighter, a winner. But also thoughtful, careful, compassionate, honest"

Fellow justices, friends and family gather at a private ceremony to honour Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburghttps://t.co/zI3p5gBLqh pic.twitter.com/UQVQj6Z73S

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) September 23, 2020

.@CharlesPPierce: "She literally was bigger than life, right there before your eyes. It was an honor to watch her work." https://t.co/7Bu6qv3YzX

— Esquire (@esquire) September 19, 2020

… In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg measured Roberts for a feckless child who understands less about this country and its history than he knows about Sumerian calligraphy. She told him in no uncertain terms what his fanciful decision would mean in the real world.

Congress approached the 2006 reauthorization of the VRA with great care and seriousness. The same cannot be said of the Court’s opinion today. The Court makes no genuine attempt to engage with the massive legislative record that Congress assembled. … One would expect more from an opinion striking at the heart of the Nation’s signal piece of civil-rights legislation…Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

It was more than a clever metaphor, although clever it was. It was a statement of remarkable prescience, a statement from someone who knew that the dark elements in American history never die, but only sleep until the opportunity to wreak the old vengeances reveals itself again, as it almost always does. Justice Ginsburg fought those forces in the days when nobody even acknowledged their existence. Her career runs parallel to that of Justice Thurgood Marshall—two champions of freedom and equality who won great victories in front of a Court that they eventually were asked to join. It is a very small club. To join you need a will of iron, an unshakable granite commitment to principle, and a good measure of controlled, implacable ferocity. It is the ferocity that is the most important thing…

So I choose to honor the memory of Justice Ginsburg by honoring the controlled ferocity that burned in her small, wiry frame. I remember the first time I sat in on oral arguments in the Supreme Court. She looked as though her chair would swallow her up. But, when it became her turn to question the litigants, I swear to god it looked as though she grew as I was watching. The force and precision of the intellect she brought to bear gave her size and heft that made her look like a giant. She literally was bigger than life, right there before your eyes. It was an honor to watch her work. Now, the umbrella is gone and, Christamighty, is it ever raining.

“Born the year Eleanor Roosevelt became First Lady, Ginsburg bore witness to, argued for, and helped to constitutionalize the most hard-fought and least-appreciated revolution in modern American history: the emancipation of women.” https://t.co/5kABEaaZwM

— Michael Luo (@michaelluo) September 18, 2020

And those millions are giving tens of millions to Democratic candidates and voting in droves.

Exactly as RBG wanted. https://t.co/eNsQs2i8qq

— Greg Pinelo (@gregpinelo) September 22, 2020

More than 100 of Justice Ginsburg's former clerks meet her casket at the Supreme Court steps https://t.co/uwRWzBSAwj pic.twitter.com/xraaNCPh94

— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) September 23, 2020

Read this whole thread by @palmore_joe, a former law clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — a wonderful anecdote that beautifully demonstrates the amazing person she was. #SCOT https://t.co/I0X1mEBEMJ

— David Lat (@DavidLat) September 19, 2020

One day, I accompanied the Justice to a speech at the Georgetown Law Center. Afterwards, we squeezed into an elevator with Court security officers and Georgetown personnel to depart. When the doors closed, the Justice asked, "where is the daycare center?" 3/x

— Joe Palmore (@palmore_joe) September 19, 2020

At the front desk, she announced, "Hello, I'm Justice Ginsburg. My clerk, Joe, is looking for a daycare spot for his son, Simon. We'd like a tour." The Justice and I then navigated the blocks, toys, and toddlers to check out the daycare center. Together. 5/x

— Joe Palmore (@palmore_joe) September 19, 2020

RBG looked to make We the People real for those who had been left out of it for so long. https://t.co/4TGFzGhnau

— Irin Carmon (@irin) September 21, 2020

My favorite RBG fact has always been that she listed the queer Black feminist Pauli Murray, who developed the argument that the equal protection clause applies to sex discrimination, as a coauthor in her first brief to scotus. https://t.co/m8QCc3ZERS

— Noa Yachot (@NoaYachot) September 19, 2020

… One reason Ginsburg might have been reluctant to retire is that like many women of her generation, it took so long for her to get a chance, and even longer for her to become the person she was supposed to be. She did not even begin to be a “flaming feminist litigator,” as she would later describe herself, until she was 37 years old. That year, 1970, she taught Rutgers’s first class on women and the law at the prodding of insurgent female law students, and took on the cases of women whose letters piled up at the local ACLU affiliate.

It was a neat intergenerational relay. If younger women pushed her to take less shit, the work of the women who came before her provided a blueprint. In a mere month of reading everything on women and the law at the library, she discovered that the law had for a century enshrined discrimination by treating it as a favor, the same thing she’d been told her whole life. In the next decade, she would co-found the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and embark on an audacious legal strategy to transform the constitutional understanding of gender.

Two visionary lawyers, the leftist feminist Dorothy Kenyon and the queer Black theorist Pauli Murray, had long argued that gender discrimination violated the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause, which had previously applied only to race. The Supreme Court had never agreed. It hadn’t budged much from its ruling a century earlier barring a woman from practicing law because, per one justice, “The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.” In her second brief to the Supreme Court, 1973’s Frontiero v. Richardson, Ginsburg would coolly observe that “the method of communication between the Creator and the jurist is never disclosed.”

Her very first brief, two years earlier in Reed v. Reed, hadn’t just cited Kenyon and Murray; Ginsburg listed them as co-authors. When fellow ACLU lawyer Burt Neuborne objected that that just wasn’t done, Ginsburg said she didn’t care. “Women generations before said the same things my generation was saying, but they did so at a time when no one, or precious few, were prepared to listen,” she later explained. Though often treated as singular, Ginsburg never stopped calling herself lucky. “I had great good fortune in my life to be alive and have the skills of a lawyer when the women’s movement was revived in the United States,” she told me…

How to solve USPS budget problems: issue stamps right away of RBG and John Lewis.

— Pete Souza (@PeteSouza) September 21, 2020

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg fought for all of us. She was a giant of the Court and unflinching in her pursuit of equal justice under the law. Because of her life’s work, we are closer to that more perfect union we’ve always strived to be. pic.twitter.com/o30ZCuj10G

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 19, 2020

Justice Ginsburg was often asked when there would be enough women on the Supreme Court. Her response: “When there are nine.” She also shared this wisdom for a happy marriage: "Sometimes it helps to be a little deaf." https://t.co/XmufVLBYXq

— The Associated Press (@AP) September 20, 2020

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg served until her last day. Rep. John Lewis walked the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 2020 after announcing his Stage 4 pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Rep. Elijah Cummings signed subpoenas from his death bed. What do we owe them? EVERYTHING we can give.

— An Ethical Donald (@donaldonethics) September 20, 2020

If anything, RBG should be angry that she didn't get to retire a year ago with @HillaryClinton as President. RBG could have enjoyed her final year listening to opera and spending time with her family. Instead, she had to sit on the same bench as Brett "I like beer!" Kavanaugh.

— Nell Scovell (@NellSco) September 22, 2020

Justice Ginsberg will be buried at Arlington alongside her husband, a Korean War-era veteran. https://t.co/IiJtLC8O74

— Bryan Bender (@BryanDBender) September 21, 2020

How do you mourn the loss of a great champion for justice like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? You mourn deeply & you vow to continue her work with even greater resolve. Her death must bring us to life.

— Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II (@RevDrBarber) September 19, 2020

If McConnell over reaches, I’m believing the people will over perform, and we could see an election like never before. RBG often quoted Justice Brandeis: “The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.” May she Rest In Peace. We must rise with power!

— Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II (@RevDrBarber) September 19, 2020

The Supreme Court has hung a black drape over the entrance to the main chamber and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's chair. The tradition dates back to 1873, and has been followed for every Justice who has died in active service since.

It will stay there for 30 days. pic.twitter.com/PgtDHPg4hu

— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) September 20, 2020