September 21, 2020 - Issue: Vol. 166, No. 163 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 2nd Session
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Remembering Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Executive Session); Congressional Record Vol. 166, No. 163
(Senate - September 21, 2020)
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[Pages S5725-S5726] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] Remembering Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, this weekend the United States of America passed a sad milestone--200,000 recorded deaths from COVID-19. We are a nation in mourning. In addition to 200,000 family, friends, and neighbors we have now lost to this brutal pandemic, America is also mourning the loss of a historic champion of equality, a woman who spent her entire life, every ounce of her strength and talent she was given, in pursuit of America's highest ideal: equal justice under the law. Jewish teaching says that those who die just before the Jewish New Year are those whom God has held back until the last moment because they were most needed on Earth. So it seems fitting that Ruth Bader Ginsburg left this world as the Sun was setting last Friday, marking the start of Rosh Hashanah. Years before, Ruth Bader Ginsburg made history as only the second woman ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Even at that time, she had already earned an enduring place in American history. She has been called the Thurgood Marshall of the gender equality movement. As a lawyer and law professor, she was the mastermind in the 1970s behind a legal strategy that finally began to dismantle an American legal system that treated women in many ways as second-class citizens. Law Professor David Cole called her strategy ``radical incrementalism.'' It is hard today for many Americans to imagine how deeply entrenched and how commonly accepted gender discrimination was in American law-- and American society--before Ruth Bader Ginsburg began her legal crusade to make real for women the words carved above the doors of the U.S. Supreme Court: ``Equal Justice Under Law.'' The legal challenges she brought changed the way the world is for women and for all Americans. Before she began her legal crusade, women were treated, by law, differently than men. Hundreds of State and Federal laws and programs restricted what women could do. Many jobs were legally closed to women. Many basic economic, social, and legal rights that we now take for granted were legally denied to women for no reason other than gender. Before the legal victories achieved by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a woman often could not--on her own--buy a car, open a checking account, get a credit card, sign a lease, obtain a mortgage, buy real estate, open a business, or obtain a business loan. She needed a man to co-sign. Before Ruth Bader Ginsburg, women could be--and were--barred from public institutions and excluded from whole professions. They could be demoted or fired if they became pregnant. In fact, Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself was forced to accept a lower paying job at the Social Security Administration when she became pregnant, at the age of 21, with her first child. Her legal strategy was cautious and strategic. Knowing that she needed to persuade mostly male judges--including an all-male Supreme Court--she chose cases that illustrated how gender discrimination can also harm men. She took up the case of a young widower whose wife died in childbirth. The man wanted to stay home to raise his son but was denied Social Security survivor benefits because such benefits by law could only go to widows. [[Page S5726]] Decades later, when that little boy grew up, Justice Ginsberg officiated at his wedding at the Supreme Court Building. Her goal was simple but compelling: to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment's promise of equal protection under the law covers women as well as men. As I said, it was not only women who benefited from her life's work. If you are a man who has been covered by your wife's medical benefits, thank Ruth Bader Ginsburg. If you are a man who has been able to claim Social Security survivor benefits or name a woman as executor of your estate, thank Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We have not erased all gender-based inequality, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg knew well. And some of the legal victories for equal justice are now threatened. Some have been diminished outright. She also knew that. Her concerns about these threats to hard-won rights was the basis for some of the most famous, fiery dissents--and why this often quiet, soft-spoken woman took the unusual step many times of reading her dissents from the bench. She wanted us to understand what was at stake so that we could join her in the fight. That is what she did in 2007, in the case of Lilly Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire. The Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that a woman who was paid less than her male coworkers for years, doing exactly the same work, could not sue her former employer for wage discrimination. The woman only learned about the pay gap after she retired, but a conservative majority on the Court ruled that she had lost her chance at justice by failing to sue within 6 months of her first unequal paycheck. In her dissent, Justice Ginsburg challenged Congress to correct this injustice, and we did. The very first law signed by President Barack Obama was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. A framed copy of that signed law hung in Justice Ginsburg's Supreme Court chambers as a gift from President Obama. He signed it with the following inscription: ``Thanks for helping create a more equal and just society.'' In her dissent in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the heart of the Voting Rights Act, Justice Ginsburg pointed out the awful irony of the majority decision. She wrote that throwing out the need for jurisdictions with histories of voter suppression to clear changes in their voting laws before elections because the laws had already worked was ``like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.'' She was right. Our democracy would be stronger today had just one more Justice on the Supreme Court agreed with her. It is up to Congress now to heed her warning by passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act which languishes on the desk of Senator McConnell. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a champion of workers' rights, of disability rights, LGBTQ rights, and environmental justice. And she was a woman who believed deeply that part of America's greatness is the welcome and safety and opportunity that America has offered to immigrants and refugees for most of our history. Like me, Justice Ginsburg was a child of an immigrant who came to this country partly to flee religious persecution. My mother and her family left Russian-occupied Lithuania partly to escape anti-Catholic persecution. Ruth Bader Ginsburg's father left Odessa, Russia, for New York when he was 13 to escape anti-Jewish pogroms. Her mother was born in New York 4 months after her family moved from Austria--extended family members later died in the Holocaust. Justice Ginsburg's mother was like my mother in another way: They were both very intelligent women who were denied their full education because money was tight and because they lived during a time when expectations about what women could achieve were so low. Like my mother, Celia Ginsburg used to take her child to the public library where she would check out as many books as she could read. She saved her pennies so that her daughter could one day get the college education she was never able to get herself. Celia Ginsburg dreamed that her bright, young daughter might grow up, if she were lucky and worked very hard, to become a high school teacher. Instead, Ruth Bader Ginsburg grew up and changed history. She changed America for the better. America is fundamentally different and fairer as a nation because of the vision and work of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I recalled over the weekend, and repeated it to my wife, this amazing statistic; that Ruth Bader Ginsburg battled cancer five times over nearly 20 years and then, of course, lived through the death 10 years ago of her beloved husband Marty, but she almost never missed a day on the bench. She worked through chemo sickness, broken ribs, and terrible pain, but, nevertheless, she persisted. I want to read you something she said many times. I really liked this. What is the difference between a bookkeeper in New York's garment district and a Supreme Court Justice? One generation--my own life bears witness. The difference between the opportunities available to my mother and those afforded me.'' Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not simply take opportunities afforded to women. More than perhaps any American in history, she helped create those opportunities. Loretta and I offer our deepest condolences to her friends and to her family, especially her daughter Jane and her son James, who now calls Chicago home, and her grandchildren and her great-granddaughter. May her memory be a blessing and may her life be a guiding light for all of us.
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