Hillary Clinton: Ginsburg ‘paved the way for so many women, including me’

Hillary Clinton, the former first lady and Democratic nominee for president, honored Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday after her death. She also warned that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnnell (R-Ky.) is sure to try to fill her seat before the election.

“Justice Ginsburg paved the way for so many women, including me,” Clinton wrote on Twitter. “There will never be another like her.”

The Supreme Court said in a statement Friday night that Ginsburg died “surrounded by her family at her home in Washington, D.C., due to complications of metastatic pancreas cancer.”

“I’m devastated by this,” Clinton told MSNBC, calling in later in the evening. “It’s not only a personal loss but it’s a real threat toward the steady march toward real progress that we need to continue.”

She went on to predict that Democrats will have to fight a “double standard” by Republican senators who will push to fill Ginsburg’s seat with President Trump’s nominee despite opposing former President Barack Obama’s attempt to fill the seat left open by late Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016.

“Of course he’s going to do everything that he can to fill that seat,” Clinton said of McConnell, who’s already vowed that Republicans will move to fill Ginsburg’s vacancy.

“I often wondered during that time when Mitch McConnell was truly wrecking havoc on our Senate, on our norms [after Scalia died] … Presidents have a right to appoint judges to fill vacancies and Mitch McConnell denied Barack Obama that right. And that set in motion a series of events that I think did great damage to the Senate that can only be remedied by removing Mitch McConnell in the Senate,” she said.

“In the meantime, the Democrats who are in the Senate will have to use every single possible maneuver that is available to them to make it clear that they are not going to permit Mitch McConnnell to commit the greatest travesty, the monumental hypocrisy that would arise from him attempting to fill this position,” she added.

Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, nominated Ginsburg as a Supreme Court justice in 1993.

The Clintons did a group interview with Ginsburg at Georgetown University last year. Bill Clinton said at the event that he knew he was going to nominate Ginsburg within 10 minutes of meeting her.

“They just hit it off,” Hillary Clinton told MSNBC on Friday.

“Just losing her is such a massive hole,” she continued. “In my young adulthood, my becoming a lawyer, both practicing and teaching law, looking up to her and following her career. But much more than that, it is a devastating loss for justice and equality. What Ruth Bader Ginsburg did was make it abundantly clear that the Constitution had to be explicitly whenever possible be interpreted as providing for the equal rights of men and women.” 

The justice, who has come to be known as “Notorious RBG,” was the court’s leading liberal. Clinton warned that “the court is at the top of that list” of what’s at stake in the November election.

Updated 9:22 p.m.