Ruth Bader Ginsburg was 87 years old when she died in 2020. Had she retired from her position as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court several years earlier, when Barack Obama was president and the Democratic Party still controlled the U.S. Senate, she would have guaranteed that a Democratic appointee took her place. Instead, Ginsburg's replacement, Amy Coney Barrett, was nominated by President Donald Trump and swiftly confirmed by a Republican-led Senate.
When I profiled Ginsburg in 2019, I noted that her "future legacy, even among the progressive left, is unclear. Will she be remembered as a legal trailblazer who helped to shape the course of constitutional law? Or will she be burned in effigy for 'letting' Trump pick her replacement? Ginsburg's critics on the right, meanwhile, might just end up thanking her for sticking around for so long."
