Ruth Bader Ginsburg Had Heart Surgery

AP Photo/Cliff Owen, File

BuzzFeed

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg underwent a surgical procedure for coronary blockage at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center Wednesday morning.

Ginsburg is resting comfortably and is expected to be discharged in the next 48 hours, according to a Supreme Court news release.

The 81-year-old justice was admitted to the hospital Tuesday night after experiencing discomfort during routine exercise, the court announced. She underwent a procedure to place a stent in her right coronary artery.

Ginsburg, appointed to the bench in 1993, is expected to be back on the bench for oral arguments in pending cases next week, Bloomberg News reported.

Why the Supreme Court should be the biggest issue of the 2016 campaign

The Washington Post

Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg | (Tim Sloan/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)

Supreme Court justice and pop culture icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg left the hospital yesterday after having a heart stent implanted and expects to be back at work Monday. Despite various health issues over the years, Ginsburg insists that she is still of sound body at age 81 (her mind isn’t in question) and has no plans to retire before the end of President Obama’s term to ensure a Democratic replacement. If she keeps to that pledge, and presuming there are no other retirements in the next two years, the makeup of the Supreme Court could be a bigger campaign issue in 2016 than ever before. It certainly ought to be.

Ordinarily, the Supreme Court is brought up almost as an afterthought in presidential campaigns. The potential for a swing in the court is used to motivate activists to volunteer and work hard, and the candidates usually have to answer a debate question or two about it, which they do in utterly predictable ways (“I’m just going to look for the best person for the job”). We don’t usually spend a great deal of time talking about what a change in the court is likely to mean. But the next president is highly likely to have the chance to engineer a swing in the court. The consequences for Americans’ lives will probably be more consequential and far-reaching than any other issue the candidates will be arguing about.

As much as we’ve debated Supreme Court cases in recent years, we haven’t given much attention to the idea of a shift in the court’s ideology because for so long the court has been essentially the same: divided 5-4, with conservatives having the advantage yet liberals winning the occasional significant victory when a swing justice moves to their side. And though a couple of recent confirmations have sparked controversy (Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor were both the target of failed attempts to derail their nominations), all of the retirements in the last three presidencies were of justices from the same general ideology as the sitting president. The last time a new justice was radically different from the outgoing one was when Clarence Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall — 23 years ago.

Whether a Democrat or a Republican wins in 2016, he or she may well have the chance to shift the court’s ideological balance. Ginsburg is the oldest justice at 81; Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy are both 78, and Stephen Breyer is 76. If the right person is elected and the right justice retires, it could be an earthquake.

Consider this scenario: Hillary Clinton becomes president in 2017, and sometime later one of the conservative justices retires. Now there would be a liberal majority on the court, a complete transformation in its balance. A court that now consistently favors those with power, whether corporations or the government, would become much more likely to rule in favor of workers, criminal defendants and those with civil rights claims. Or alternately: The Republican nominee wins, and one of the liberal justices retires. With conservatives in control not by 5-4 but 6-3, there would be a cascade of even more conservative decisions. The overturning of Roe v. Wade would be just the beginning.

Look at what the Supreme Court has done recently. It gutted the Voting Rights Act, said that corporations could have religious beliefs, simultaneously upheld and hobbled the Affordable Care Act, struck down a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act and moved toward legalizing same-sex marriage, all but outlawed affirmative action, gave corporations and wealthy individuals the ability to dominate elections and created an individual right to own guns — and that’s just in the last few years.

Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, there is probably no single issue you ought to be more concerned about in the 2016 campaign than what the court will look like after the next president gets the opportunity to make an appointment or two. The implications are enormous. It’s not too early to start considering them.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Citizens United Was The Current Supreme Court’s Worst Ruling

RUTH BADER GINSBURG | (Photo by Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post via Getty Images) | The Washington Post via Getty Images

Ya think…?

The Huffington Post

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg expressed her extreme regret over several of the current Court’s rulings in a wide-ranging interview published in The New Republic Sunday evening, including their rejecting the commerce clause of President Barack Obama’s health care law, and issuing a huge blow to the Voting Rights Act in their Shelby County v. Holder decision.

But the first Supreme Court ruling Ginsburg would send to the guillotine would be the Court’s decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, giving corporations and unions the green light to give and spend unlimited sums of money on independent political activity. “If there was one decision I would overrule,” Ginsburg told The New Republic, it would be Citizens United.

“I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be,” she said.

 Ginsburg said that the Court, in CItizens United as well as in the case of Shelby County, “should have respected the legislative judgment.”

“Legislators know much more about elections than the Court does. … I think members of the legislature, people who have to run for office, know the connection between money and influence on what laws get passed.”

According to Ginsburg, things may have played out differently had Justice Sandra Day O’Connor not retired so soon. She told The New Republic that O’Connor would have sided with the minority on Citizens United, Shelby County, as well as the Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling.

“I think she must be concerned about some of the court’s rulings, those that veer away from opinions she wrote,” Ginsburg said.

Read the full interview here.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: My male colleagues didn’t really understand the Hobby Lobby case

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg | Screenshot

Bingo!

The Raw Story

Speaking with Katie Couric on Yahoo Global News, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that five of her male counterparts on the court have “a blind spot” when it comes to women’s issues.

After noting that all three female justices were in the minority in the recent Hobby Lobby decision, Couric asked Ginsburg whether she “believed the five male justices truly understood the ramifications of their decision.”

Following a long pause, Ginsburg said, “I would have to say, ‘No.’”

“But,” she added, “justices continue to think, and can change. So I’m ever hopeful that if the Court has a blind spot today, its eyes can be opened tomorrow.”

“But you do, in fact, feel that these five justices had a bit of a ‘blind spot’?” Couric asked.

“In Hobby Lobby?” Ginsburg replied. “Yes.”

“Because they couldn’t understand what it is like to be a woman?” Couric asked.

“They all have wives. They have daughters. By the way, I think daughters can change the perception of their fathers.”

Ginsburg went on to note that her opinions on these matters are contained in her dissents, and that there is a tradition of dissents becoming “unquestionably, the law of the land.”

In her scathing dissent in the Hobby Lobby case, Ginsburg noted that the majority’s willful misreading of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act would have unintended consequences.

“Little doubt that RFRA claims will proliferate, for the Court’s expansive notion of corporate personhood – combined with its other errors in construing RFRA – invites for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faith,” she wrote.

Earlier this week, in fact, the Satanic Temple declared that it would use the majority’s interpretation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act just as Ginsburg predicted groups would.

 

Watch the entire interview with Ginsburg via Yahoo Global News here.