With Roe v. Wade in Doubt, Some Liberals Fault Ruth Bader Ginsburg for Not Retiring Early

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.”

Judging by a recent article in Politico, some Ginsburg effigies may already be engulfed in flames. With Republican-appointed justices outnumbering their Democratic counterparts six to three on the Supreme Court, and the future of Roe v. Wade (1973) currently in serious doubt, even some of Ginsburg’s biggest fans are now souring on her legacy. Here’s Politico:

“It’s certainly hard for me, now, to think of her work and of her—and not to, these days, work up a degree of regret and anger,” says Dorothy Samuels, who authored The New York Times‘ legal editori