Michael Vargas wrote on article for San Jose Spotlight arguing that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the last giant of the Supreme Court.
Justice Ginsburg’s incredible influence earned her the title of “Great Dissenter,” which is only bestowed on those rare few justices whose greatest work speaks to some future age the rest of us cannot yet see clearly. She joins the likes of Justice John Marshall Harlan, whose fierce rejection of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson would become law a century later in Brown v. Board of Education, and Justices Oliver Wendel Holmes, Jr., whose stirring defense of free speech in Abrams v. United States would lead to a renaissance for the First Amendment.
Sadly, Justice Ginsburg will probably be the last of these great giants to sit in the court’s marble palace for some time. The politicization of the court has put ideologues in control of the appointment and confirmation process and these ideologues don’t want great justices. They don’t want people on the high court capable of moving the public to accomplish great things or bending history toward a more just future. They want reliable votes.
