[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 163 (Monday, September 21, 2020)]
[Senate]
[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.