Editorial: Honor RBG’s legacy of a more-just America

First must come condolences, respect and thanks. Before wading into the raging controversy over when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg is replaced on the U.S. Supreme Court and the breathless speculation over what her death means for the presidential election, Americans should acknowledge the singular accomplishments of Ginsberg’s life and the enormous loss her death represents.

Ginsberg, who was 87 when she died on Friday of metastatic pancreatic cancer, took a long time to become an icon of progressive legal action and even pop culture. That wasn’t because her achievements weren’t brilliant, but because of the personal humility that made her as widely loved as she was respected. And it was because of the very sexism she worked so hard to eradicate.

While figuring out how to be a young mother and one of only eight women students at Harvard Law School in 1956, Ginsberg also had to nurse her husband — a fellow Harvard Law student — through a bout of cancer, taking notes for him in class.

When he landed a position with a New York City law firm upon his graduation, Ginsberg switched to Columbia’s law school to accommodate the move. She graduated first in her class but, as a woman, received no job offers from law firms other than to serve as a secretary. Instead, she clerked for a federal judge, taught at the Rutgers University and Columbia law schools and enlisted in the growing battle for women’s equality by founding the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project.

It was in this role that she significantly changed America for the better. She argued six gender-discrimination cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, winning five. The cases were brilliantly chosen to build a foundation of precedents that changed laws nationwide. As Moira Donegan writes in The Guardian, “One moment, much of family, tax and financial law was made of statutes that codified men as breadwinners and beneficiaries, women as dependents. Within just five years, all these laws were declared unconstitutional.”

Ginsberg became the second female Supreme Court justice when President Bill Clinton appointed her in 1993, but few knew of her leading role in dismantling legalized gender discrimination until the 2018 film “On the Basis of Sex.” By that time, she also had become beloved for the steely but calm persona behind her fierce dissenting opinions amid an increasingly conservative court.

Now comes the inevitable fight over her replacement. When conservative Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Republicans in the Senate outraged Democrats by refusing to even hold confirmation hearings on President Barack Obama’s chosen replacement, saying it was, at more than eight months away, too close to the election and the next president should choose.

Any Republican with a shred of intellectual honesty must recognize that now, six weeks before an election, waiting to make a replacement is far more justified — as they argued four years ago.

We are disappointed but unsurprised that Sen. Rob Portman, who said in 2016 that no president should nominate a justice in an election year, is saying the opposite now.

And the condolences mentioned earlier? They’re for all of us. America is poorer and its prospects less bright without Ruth Bader Ginsberg.