Hillary Clinton called in to The Rachel Maddow Show shortly after news broke of the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“I hope that every American knows she was a historic, courageous person who moved our country forward in all the right ways,” said Clinton.
“I’m devastated by this Rachel,” Clinton added. “Just losing her is such a massive hole 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 such a devastating loss for justice and equality. What Ruth Bader Ginsburg did was to make it abundantly clear that the Constitution had to explicitly wherever possible be interpreted as providing for the equal rights of men and women.”
“With her loss, it is not only a personal loss but it’s a real threat to the steady march toward progress that we need to continue,” Clinton said.
In a second segment, Clinton dug into the upcoming SCOTUS vacancy battle.
Said Clinton: “Mitch McConnell denied Barack Obama. … That set in motion a series of events that did great damage to the Senate that can only be remedied by removing Mitch McConnell as the leader of the Senate. That has to happen in this election by getting a Democratic senate majority. But 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 McConnell to enact the greatest travesty, the monument to hypocrisy that would arise from him attempting to fill this position.”
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“If we have any hope of overcoming the divisiveness and the absolute poisonous atmosphere that currently infects our politics and unfortunately has riddled our institutions like the senate with this kind of ‘power over everything else’ mentality, I hope that there will be several Republican senators who say, ‘we are going to wait to see what happens with the election,'” Clinton continued.
“Every possible procedural obstacle has to be thrown in the way of this power drive by McConnell. There are things that can be done. They literally have to be done 24/7. … All these things may be difficult. But let’s go down fighting. And let’s not give an inch in the face of the kind of hypocrisy that met President Obama when he tried to fulfill his Constitutional obligation and appoint Merrick Garland to the Court.”
