Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died, the Supreme Court announced Friday night. Ginsburg’s passing gives President Donald Trump the opportunity to radically remake the Supreme Court for a generation by replacing the liberal feminist icon with a staunch conservative.
If Trump succeeds in filling Ginsburg’s seat with a justice in the mold of his two other appointees to the court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, it will be the court’s most extreme ideological shift since President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to replace legendary civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall in 1991.
Ginsburg, who was 87, had recently dictated a statement to her granddaughter. “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”