The Real Tragedy in the Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
By: Aidan Hess
Tags: Society, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Politics, Current Events, Congress

The Real Tragedy in the Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Why must the death of one 87-year-old woman throw the entire US political system into irreconcilable crisis?

Because of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last Friday, one of the nine seats on the United States Supreme Court is now vacant. To fill this vacancy, the President of the United States must first nominate a candidate who then must be confirmed by the Senate. This period of selection and nomination is typically a months-long process involving several rounds of hearings for different candidates, leading up to a final confirmation vote. Nevertheless, it now appears the GOP intends to rush to fill the vacancy prior to the 2020 presidential election which is only 44 days away. Indeed, less than two hours after Ginsburg’s death was reported, the Trump administration had been reportedly making preparations to announce a nominee for the seat prior to the first presidential debate.

This harkens back to a similar scenario which occurred during the runup to the 2016 presidential election, when a GOP-controlled Congress successfully barred the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland under the pretense of ‘letting the voters decide’ who should appoint the vacancy left in the wake of the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Senator Mitch McConnell, one of the most adamant voices against nominating a Supreme Court in an election year back in 2016, is now singing a different tune and promising that Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the Senate floor. The unabashed hypocrisy appears to matter less to GOP leaders than taking advantage of an opportunity to pack the court. After all, appointing Supreme Court justices yields perhaps the most long-lasting impact sitting elected officials can have on the US political system.

But right there’s the rub: we all have seemed to take for granted the inchoate, even self-destructive nature of our democracy. Now, I should be very clear that the GOP representatives now attempting to rush through a Supreme Court confirmation are no doubt unprincipled cynics worthy of the utmost derision. But these sorts of character condemnations do not take us very far. Instead, what we must face up to is that they are allowed to be unprincipled because of the political system that we also tacitly support — even and especially in our critique of their abuses of it. Put simply, when your political system runs on layers and layers of byzantine codes and procedures, miles of bureaucratic red tape, and an exceedingly arbitrary relation between the representers and the represented, you will have people at the top empowered to make decisions without recourse or accountability.

My point, then, is that focusing too much of our energies on depicting the GOP as the bad guys tampering with our fragile democracy elides us to the fact that the system is fundamentally, constitutively broken. For one, the Democrats have given absolutely no reason they wouldn’t do the exact same thing should they be in the position the GOP now finds themselves in. The weak-willed insistence on “consistency” as the “basic principle of law” coming from former President Barack Obama notwithstanding, Democrats are hardly innocent when it comes to exploiting our political system in pursuit of their own self-preservation. We are talking about the party of corporate bailouts, mass deportation, drone wars, and the biggest oil and natural gas boom this country has ever seen, after all.

But again (!) the point is not to simply tar and feather Democrats either. In their own special brand of unprincipled cynicism, they are being the politicians which this broken system allows them to be. It is useless to attack the characteristics or behaviors of individuals in lieu of an attack on the system itself. You will vote them out of office and they will be replaced with new representatives who will be compelled by this very same structure to act exactly the same as who they replaced. If you are upset with the behaviors of either the GOP or the Democrats, there is no other option: you have to attack the structure.

In other words, you have to agitate in ways that makes the entire system tremble. You have to exceed the forms of ‘doing politics’ which the state has sanctioned and sanitized for you (voting, protest, etc.) and, in turn, invent new ways of making oneself heard, holding your political representatives accountable, and at the most fundamental level reshape the structures of power which oppress and exploit you. And, given the inertia of the structures of power you are faced with, the only way to meet it with an even greater force is all together, in shared struggle.

As I see it then, the real tragedy is that, in mourning for what Ginsburg’s untimely death will mean for not simply the upcoming election but the next several decades of Supreme Court decisions, we treat as immutable the very system that makes her death such a valuable political token. So, instead of bemoaning the exploits of the current ruling party, I insist we must analyze and critique not simply their exploits but the conditions of possibility of those exploits. We have to, in other words, view present GOP behavior as symptomatic of a political system which in the first place allows it. What we should want, above all, is not to trade places with bad actors but more fundamentally for their acts to be structurally impossible to reproduce.

Regardless of how anyone feels about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I hope we can all agree that the death of one 87-year-old woman shouldn’t yield an irreconcilable juridical crisis warranting arbitrary and unaccountable political maneuvers from our nation’s leaders. In turn, I hope that acknowledgment of this fact can widen our perspective beyond ‘getting the bad guys out’ toward confronting and transforming the structures of power which let them be ‘bad guys.’

This means having a grander and longer-term political vision than simply getting Biden in office in November. We cannot let the election sap us of all our energies. We cannot let an only very slightly more respectable sitting president breed complacency for a system which is still, with or without Biden as president, fundamentally broken. We cannot, in short, get caught up in another round of musical chairs, replacing nominally bad guys with nominally better guys while leaving the conditions of corruption and cynical self-interest intact.