Rbg Voting Quotes

I think when it’s wrong,” Scalia says, “it should be destroyed.” But no one, probably least of all Supreme Court justices, changes her or his mind after being called an idiot. Actually changing the law means getting to five votes.

You know, the Court is not like a legislature; we don’t vote a particular way because we would like that outcome. We have to account for everything we do by giving reasons for it. So there’s no cross-trading at all on the Court. What there can be is, instead of deciding the great big issue, we can agree on a lower ground, on a procedural issue, perhaps. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was a grand master at that—getting the Court to come together on a ground on which we could agree, and defer the bigger battle for another day.

I should explain how things work at the Court. When the Court is sitting, we sit two weeks in a row; we meet on Wednesday afternoon to talk about Monday’s cases, and on Friday morning to talk about Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s cases. The chief starts by summarizing a case and then expressing his tentative vote. When all of us have had our say, the chief justice will give us our homework. That is, he will assign people to write the opinions from the sitting. When he’s not in the majority, the most senior justice in the majority has that job. Maybe twice a term, the opinion will come out not as the conference voted initially, but on the other side.

Today the equal protection guarantee extends to women, but if you ask the question “Back in 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment became part of the Constitution, did the people at that time envision that women would be citizens equal in stature to men?” The answer, surely no. But as I see the equality idea—it was there from the beginning and was realized by society over time. So I would say this: It’s true that in 1868 women were a long way from having the vote. But then the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, and women gained the vote. We had the civil rights movement of the 1960s aimed at making the equality guarantee real for race—as it should have been from the beginning. Those developments inform my view of what the Equal Protection Clause means today.

This theme of the rise of populism around the West is crucial. Are you concerned that we’re seeing the rise of the kind of demagogues the Founders feared? RBG: Yes. JR: Social media is part of that? RBG: Yes, and an important part is the discontent seen among people who feel that our institutions of government pay no attention to them, as illustrated by J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. JR: Fixing democracy is a task bigger than any of us. But what are some things that could be done? RBG: One key thing is to teach children about democracy. They don’t learn about it in school as they did in civics classes when I was young. By the way, did you see the show What the Constitution Means to Me? JR: Not yet, but I know you did see it. What did you think? RBG: I loved it. At the end of the second act, a teenager comes on stage to take part in the conversation about the Constitution. Two young women alternate in that role. The older one, age eighteen, played the role the night I attended. She just graduated from high school, and I will stay in touch with her. I was uplifted by those young women. JR: What is uplifting about them? What’s the message of the play? RBG: The play begins with a young woman who wins American Legion competitions, by spouting rosy things about the Constitution. Then, she questions whether the Constitution is as protective as she portrayed it in her youth. At the end, she puts the question to the audience: Should we keep it or should we do it over? Our audience voted overwhelmingly to keep it, and it’s been overwhelmingly that way for most audiences. JR: Why are people moved to keep it? And why should we keep it? RBG: What reason is there to think we would do better if we started over from scratch?

Killing the Voting Rights Act because it had worked too well, she had added, was like 'throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.