A Future Without Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is a Chilling Prospect

By Moira Donegan, Guardian UK

28 August 19

The 86-year-old justice can’t live forever, and it increasingly looks like women’s freedoms won’t either

ou can find her face on enamel pins, tote bags, posters, and greetings cards. She stares at you from T-shirts, from stickers, from stationery, from inside embroidery hoops, her face rendered in tiny squares of thread. She is shown stern faced, eyes impenetrable behind her oversize glasses; or with the tiny smile of someone who knows a secret. Sometimes she is shown with a toy crown on her small head, cocked slightly askew in reference to a famous photo of the Brooklyn rapper Biggie Smalls. Underneath, the word “Notorious”.

These tributes have come under ridicule and rebuke, often by men, as an argument arises on the American left that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 86, should retire from the US supreme court – or, preferably, should have retired during the Obama administration. Ginsberg has pancreatic cancer, Americans learned this week, and it’s not the first time recently the court has made announcements about her health. In November 2018, she fell and broke three ribs. When she had a CT scan for that injury, it was discovered that there was cancer on her lungs. She had surgery and went back to work. It’s what she’s done for years: the first time she was diagnosed with cancer was 20 years ago, in 1999.

The cult of personality that has sprung up around Ginsburg, making her a hero to liberal American women and a beloved figure of pop culture lionization, has something to do with how much she has endured on the bench, how much she has suffered to be there, and her tenacious, implacable refusal to step down and retire in the face of her illness. It has something to do, too, with the content of her career and her public statements, in which she has advocated strongly for women’s place in public life and for their full and equal citizenship. Before the court, in her career as a lawyer, legal academic, and activist, she worked to extend the 14th amendment and the Civil Rights Act to women; she was founder of the ACLU’s women’s rights project and an ardent opponent of laws that sought to treat women as lesser than men. With the possible exception of Catharine MacKinnon, no legal mind has been so influential on the subject of gender.

Since she was appointed to the court by Bill Clinton, Ginsburg has been a vote to protect the increasingly besieged rights to abortion, to contraception, and to anti-discrimination laws that extend women sex-based protections. This has been the central belief of her career, a belief that is less popular and more heatedly endangered than it once was: that women are subjects of American democracy just as men are, and that they should be as free as men are. “I’m sometimes asked when there will be enough,” she once said, referring to a question she gets with some frequency about the number of women on the supreme court (there are currently three). “And I say, ‘When there are nine.’”

On the symbolic level, the drama of her fight to remain on the bench is the drama of women in American democracy. Many people do not want her there, and are eager for her to leave; dark and unremitting forces are at work to remove her. But she stays. In a recent interview with NPR’s Nina Totenberg, she spoke defiantly of her own endurance. “There was a senator, I think it was after my pancreatic cancer” – Ginsburg has had pancreatic cancer once before – “who announced with great glee that I was going to be dead within six months. That senator, whose name I have forgotten, is now himself dead. And I am very much alive.”

Ginsburg’s perseverance in the face of her own pain and enemies’ eager anticipation of her death is what has made her a beacon, ripe for idolization and symbolism by American women. After all, women’s rights and citizenship is in as precarious and endangered position as Ginsburg’s health. The Trump administration has effectively gutted the title X federal family planning program, and six states have only one abortion clinic remaining.

The Trump administration supports religious exemptions to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate, and those exemptions are likely to be so broadly defined as to essentially make the mandate moot. Sexual harassment persists in public and in the workplace, and a massive conservative movement, led by organizations like the Federalist Society and assisted by the calculating dishonesty of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, has conspired to transform the judicial branch of the federal government into an activist force of reaction.

The White House is occupied by a man who has bragged about committing sexual assault and been credibly accused of rape, and the last supreme court vacancy was filled by Brett Kavanaugh, a beer-drinking rightwinger who has been multiply accused of sexual assault and who seems eager, along with his conservative colleagues, to strike down Roe v Wade. Meanwhile, the 2005 case Castle Rock v Gonzales ruled that women have no affirmative right to protection from domestic violence from the police, not even if they have a restraining order against their abusive partner – a case that some legal scholars argue effectively ended the extension of the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause to women. Ginsburg herself dissented in that case, along with Justice Stephens, but she was in the minority. She usually is.

What does it mean when one ageing jurist comes to represent the political participation of an entire sex? What does it mean when that one ageing jurist seems frailer and sicker than ever before, just as the forces of misogyny are emboldened and ready to restrict women’s rights? No one who has spent much time thinking about Ginsburg can doubt her resolve, and her commitment to the principle of women’s full citizenship seems as steadfast and uncompromising as ever. But she is very sick, and one day she will retire, or die. American women may learn that making one woman a symbol of their citizenship rights was as unsustainable an idea of having just nine people appointed to protect those rights. Ginsburg can’t live forever, and it increasingly looks like women’s freedoms won’t, either.

The Washington Post's War on Bernie Continues

By Tim Higginbotham, Jacobin

28 August 19

The war on Bernie Sanders carried out by the Washington Post is unfair, dishonest, and never-ending. As long as Sanders stands with workers in opposition to the bosses and billionaires who own the media, he can expect more of the same treatment.

ernie Sanders recently announced his Workplace Democracy Plan, a sweeping labor platform that would double union membership, ban “right to work” laws, give federal workers the right to strike, and institute sectoral-wide bargaining, to name just a few highlights. It’s possibly the boldest, most comprehensive labor platform ever released by a US presidential candidate.

But if you rely on the Washington Post for your news, you wouldn’t know any of this.

The headline of their sole report on the platform: “Sen. Bernie Sanders Changes Medicare-for-All Plan in Face of Opposition by Organized Labor.” To justify such a spin, the paper seized on just one detail from the plan — a mandate that employers raise employee wages with savings from Sanders’s separate Medicare-for-All bill — and framed it as a flip-flop on Medicare for All, rather than what it actually was: a clear win for the labor movement that’s in line with everything Sanders has argued for his entire political life.

The headline (which has since been slightly edited) was a blatant lie. Sanders didn’t alter a word of his health-care plan, on which he’s campaigned consistently for years. His labor platform simply concretized the labor-friendly side effects of Medicare for All, which has always been far better for workers than any competing proposal.

As a stand-alone occurrence, this would have been an upsetting, but forgettable, case of biased reporting. But it continues a disturbing trend in the Washington Post’s 2020 coverage. Here are some of the worst examples.

Shortly following the release of his labor platform, Sanders unveiled his fourteen-thousand-word Green New Deal plan — far and away the most comprehensive climate change platform of any presidential candidate. The Post published four negative opinion pieces about the plan (including one from the editorial board claiming “Sanders’s climate plan will take us nowhere,” and another calling it, incredibly, worse than Trump’s border wall promise). To counter this, the paper published only one positive opinion piece.

When Kamala Harris actually flip-flopped on health care by abandoning Sanders’s Medicare-for-All bill in favor of a plan to permanently preserve private insurance, the Post rewarded her with an editorial board op-ed framing her proposal as a favorable alternative to Sanders’s. They claimed Sanders’s bill is “disruptive, expensive,” and “unrealistic,” while baselessly claiming Harris’s plan is “equally, if not more, serious” about achieving universal coverage. (To clarify the facts: Sanders has an actual legislative bill that would guarantee universal coverage in four years. Harris has a Medium post that aims to get there in ten.)

To support the counterfactual narrative that unions are opposed to Medicare for All, the Post gathered quotes from union leaders who oppose the policy. Among those quoted was Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants. “When we’re able to hang on to the health plan we have, that’s considered a massive win,” she said. The Post cut her quote here, suggesting that she was speaking out against Medicare for All. The problem: Nelson and her union strongly support the single-payer policy, as would have been made clear had the Post included the rest of her quote: “But it’s a huge drag on our bargaining. So our message is: Get it off the table.” (The article has since been corrected.)

The Post’s “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler has repeatedly lied about Medicare for All while presenting himself as the arbiter of objectivity. In a particularly bad example, he made three false claims in a single article while arguing that it was dishonest for Sanders to claim that Medicare for All would save the United States $2 trillion. (In fact, Sanders was correctly citing a conservative study on his bill. More recent studies have shown it would save over $5 trillion.)

Back in early 2016, the Post infamously ran sixteen stories in sixteen hours criticizing Sanders, with headlines like “Bernie Sanders doesn’t know how to talk about black people,” and “Here’s something Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders have in common.” If this demonstrates anything, it’s that the paper’s hostility toward Sanders has been prevalent since he first became a serious presidential contender.

It would take a novel to list every instance of Washington Post bias against Sanders. Suffice to say, their coverage has been anything but balanced.

Sanders has strongly criticized the unfair treatment, pointing out that Jeff Bezos — the richest man on earth and an enemy of Sanders’s class-struggle campaign — owns the paper, and thus his own corporate interests might hold some influence over its coverage. The suggestion deeply offended Washington Post higher-ups: Martin Baron, executive editor of the paper, even suggested that Sanders was peddling conspiracy theories.

But it’s not a conspiracy theory to suggest that a billionaire-owned media outlet will reflect billionaire interests — it’s a common-sense observation.

Bezos’s largest claim to wealth, Amazon, paid zero federal income taxes last year and even led an effort to halt a small tax that would have alleviated homelessness in Seattle. The continuation of their free ride depends on public policy that allows them not to pay anything, and the Washington Post holds a lot of power in US politics. As Bezos himself said, “it’s the newspaper in the capital city in the most important country in the world.”

This is not to say that Bezos makes direct editorial decisions, or that he plays any active role at all in the paper’s publication. Sanders himself never argued this, and clarified that he doesn’t believe it in recent interviews. But Bezos does hold ultimate authority over the Post, and if he takes a hands-off approach as owner, it’s because he’s generally happy with the job Baron is doing as executive editor. And if Bezos is happy with the job Baron’s doing, it’s because Baron is editing a newspaper that satisfies billionaires like Bezos.

Just look at the paper’s structure. The Post has a robust business section healthily staffed with reporters and columnists, the target audience of which is not exactly working class. Meanwhile, the paper has no labor section, no labor reporters, and very little coverage of genuine working-class issues.

When the Post covers Medicare for All, free college, the Green New Deal, or similarly expansive proposals designed for the benefit of the working class, it tends to focus on cost rather than social impact. Yet the working class represents the overwhelming majority of the US population. A news source seeking to report objectively on society would cover working-class issues commensurate to the class’s scale.

The Post centers its coverage on the wealthy for two possible reasons: political motive, or profit. Either way, it plays in Bezos’s favor and will continue to do so: he has the wealth to publish the paper indefinitely, even at a loss.

The Post does, of course, employ talented writers who don’t reflect Bezos’s worldview — Elizabeth Bruenig for instance, has written multiple Sanders-friendly columns for the paper, while reporters like Jeff Stein routinely produce solid, objective analysis. And it’s not just the Post — the New York Times, the Atlantic, MSNBC, and other major media sources are guilty of the same biases and unfair coverage.

But Sanders’s critique has never been of individual journalists or a specific news source. Instead, he has always aimed to highlight the inherently biased nature of corporate- and billionaire-owned media. As he told John Nichols of the Nation: “I think what we have to be concerned about .?.?.?is that you have a small number of very, very large corporate interests who control a lot of what the people in this country see, hear, and read. And they have their agenda.”

That agenda — without exception — directly contradicts the interests of the working class. As long as Sanders stands with workers in opposition to bosses and billionaires, he can expect more of the same treatment.