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John Lewis, lion of US civil rights , dies at 80

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Selma, Alabama - 7 March 2015

1. John Lewis and President Barack Obama walk across Edmund Pettus Bridge on 50th anniversary of march

2. SOUNDBITE (English) Rep. John Lewis, (D) Georgia:

"We were beaten, tear-gassed, some of us was left bloody right here on this bridge. "

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Congressional leaders pay respects to Rep. Lewis

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Washington - 27 July 2020

3. Various of casket of late Rep. John Lewis being brought into US Capitol Rotunda

4. Lawmakers rise to give standing ovation in honor of Lewis after recording of his speech is played

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Trump visits brother, Robert, at New York hospital

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

New York - 14 August 2020

5. U.S. President Donald Trump's motorcade arrives at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan

6. Wide exterior of hospital

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Ex-WH adviser Steve Bannon arrested in fraud scam

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

Washington DC - 16 January 2018

7. Steve Bannon arrives on Capitol Hill to testify

Rome - 26 March 2019

8. Close of Political Strategist Steve Bannon posing for photographers at Foreign Press Association in Rome

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Bannon pleads not guilty in border wall scheme

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

New York - 20 August 2020

9. Steve Bannon, US President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, leaves a Manhattan federal court and walks through media scrum to a waiting SUV which drives off

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Melania Trump bronze statue unveiled in Slovenia

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sevnica - 15 September 2020

10. Local folk artist Ales Zupevc unveils bronze statue representing US First Lady Melania Trump UPSOUND Music

11. Close of statue

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US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies

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ASSOCIATED PRESS / POOL

POOL

ARCHIVE: Washington - 1 June 2017

12. Various views, U.S. Supreme Court photo opportunity, including Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

ASSOCIATED PRESS

ARCHIVE: Chicago - 9 September 2019

13. SOUNDBITE (English) Ruth Bader Ginsburg, US Supreme Court Justice:

"I don't know what it will take, but we really should get back to the way it was when people were examining the qualifications of someone to be a judge rather trying to guess how they would vote."

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Memorial for Ginsburg outside US Supreme Court

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

Washington, DC - 21 September 2020

14. Flowers and tributes outside US Supreme Court

15. Closeup of a picture of Ginsburg next to flowers

01:43:16

Trump's top contenders to take RBG's court seat

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

Washington - 12 May 2020

16. Wide of United States Supreme Court building

17. Close-up engraving reads "Equal Justice Under Law"

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Bidens pay their respects to Ginsburg

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Washington DC - 25 September 2020

18. Various of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's casket to lay in state

19. Presidential Nomine Joe Biden and his wife Dr. Jill Biden paying their respects

John Lewis, a lion of the civil rights movement whose bloody beating by Alabama state troopers in 1965 helped galvanize opposition to racial segregation, and who went on to a long and celebrated career in Congress, died. He was 80.

Lewis’s announcement in late December 2019 that he had been diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer - “I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now,” he said - inspired tributes from both sides of the aisle, and an unstated accord that the likely passing of this Atlanta Democrat would represent the end of an era.

Lewis was the youngest and last survivor of the Big Six civil rights activists, a group led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that had the greatest impact on the movement. He was best known for leading some 600 protesters in the Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

At age 25 - walking at the head of the march with his hands tucked in the pockets of his tan overcoat - Lewis was knocked to the ground and beaten by police. His skull was fractured, and nationally televised images of the brutality forced the country’s attention on racial oppression in the South.

Within days, King led more marches in the state, and President Lyndon Johnson soon was pressing Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act. The bill became law later that year, removing barriers that had barred Blacks from voting.

Lewis joined King and four other civil rights leaders in organizing the 1963 March on Washington. He spoke to the vast crowd just before King delivered his epochal “I Have a Dream” speech.

A 23-year-old firebrand, Lewis toned down his intended remarks at the insistence of others, dropping a reference to a “scorched earth” march through the South and scaling back criticisms of President John Kennedy. It was a potent speech nonetheless, in which he vowed: “By the forces of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them together in an image of God and democracy.”

It was almost immediately, and forever, overshadowed by the words of King, the man who had inspired him to activism.

Lewis was born on Feb. 21, 1940, outside the town of Troy, in Pike County, Alabama. He grew up on his family’s farm and attended segregated public schools.

As a boy, he wanted to be a minister, and practiced his oratory on the family chickens. Denied a library card because of the color of his skin, he became an avid reader, and could cite obscure historical dates and details even in his later years. He was a teenager when he first heard King preaching on the radio. They met when Lewis was seeking support to become the first Black student at Alabama’s segregated Troy State University.

He ultimately attended the American Baptist Theological Seminary and Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He began organizing sit-in demonstrations at whites-only lunch counters and volunteering as a Freedom Rider, enduring beatings and arrests while traveling around the South to challenge segregation.

Lewis helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was named its chairman in 1963, making him one of the Big Six at a tender age. The others, in addition to King, were Whitney Young of the National Urban League; A. Philip Randolph of the Negro American Labor Council; James L. Farmer Jr., of the Congress of Racial Equality; and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP. All six met at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York to plan and announce the March on Washington.

The huge demonstration galvanized the movement, but success didn’t come quickly. After extensive training in nonviolent protest, Lewis and the Rev. Hosea Williams led demonstrators on a planned march of more than 50 miles from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama’s capital, on March 7, 1965. A phalanx of police blocked their exit from the Selma bridge.

Authorities shoved, then swung their truncheons, fired tear gas and charged on horseback, sending many to the hospital and horrifying much of the nation. King returned with thousands, completing the march to Montgomery before the end of the month.

Lewis turned to politics in 1981, when he was elected to the Atlanta City Council.

He won his seat in Congress in 1986 and spent much of his career in the minority. After Democrats won control of the House in 2006, Lewis became his party’s senior deputy whip, a behind-the-scenes leadership post in which he helped keep the party unified.

In an early setback for Barack Obama’s 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Lewis endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton for the nomination. Lewis switched when it became clear Obama had overwhelming Black support. Obama later honored Lewis with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and they marched hand in hand in Selma on the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday attack.

Lewis also worked for 15 years to gain approval for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Humble and unfailingly friendly, Lewis was revered on Capitol Hill -- but as one of the most liberal members of Congress, he often lost policy battles, from his effort to stop the Iraq War to his defense of young immigrants.

He met bipartisan success in Congress in 2006 when he led efforts to renew the Voting Rights Act, but the Supreme Court later invalidated much of the law, and it became once again what it was in his youth, a work in progress. Later, when the presidency of Donald Trump challenged his civil rights legacy, Lewis made no effort to hide his pain.

Lewis refused to attend Trump’s inauguration, saying he didn’t consider him a “legitimate president” because Russians had conspired to get him elected. When Trump later complained about immigrants from “s---hole countries,” Lewis declared, “I think he is a racist ... we have to try to stand up and speak up and not try to sweep it under the rug.”

Lewis said he’d been arrested 40 times in the 1960s, five more as a congressman. At 78, he told a rally he’d do it again to help reunite immigrant families separated by the Trump administration.

“There cannot be any peace in America until these young children are returned to their parents and set all of our people free,” Lewis said in June, recalling the “good trouble” he got into protesting segregation as a young man.

“If we fail to do it, history will not be kind to us,” he shouted. “I will go to the border. I’ll get arrested again. If necessary, I’m prepared to go to jail.”

In a speech the day of the House impeachment vote of Trump, Lewis explained the importance of that vote.

“When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something, to do something. Our children and their children will ask us ‘what did you do? what did you say?” While the vote would be hard for some, he said: “We have a mission and a mandate to be on the right side of history.”

Lewis’ wife of four decades, Lillian Miles, died in 2012. They had one son, John Miles Lewis.

***

On July 27th lawmakers paid tribute to the late Rep. John Lewis, a long-time Georgia lawmaker and icon of the civil rights movement.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others attended a private ceremony in the Rotunda before Lewis' body is moved to the steps on the Capitol's east side for a public viewing, an unusual sequence required because the COVID-19 pandemic has closed the Capitol to the public. Inside the Rotunda and outdoors, signs welcomed visitors with a reminder that masks would be required.

Some of the lawmakers in attendance at the private memorial wore face masks reading, "good trouble," a reference to a famous quote by the late Lewis. An audio recording of a speech by Lewis was also played during the ceremony that included him explaining the need for civil disobedience and "good trouble" to rectify social injustices.

***

President Donald Trump on August 14th paid a visit to his younger brother, Robert Trump, at the New York hospital where he has been hospitalized.

The president entered New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan wearing a face mask.

“I hope he’s okay,”Trump said shortly before arriving at the hospital. "He’s having a tough time.”

The hospital visit came ahead of Trump's scheduled weekend trip to his private golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

The White House did not immediately release details about why Robert Trump, who is 72, had been hospitalized, but officials said that he was seriously ill.

Robert Trump, one of the president's four siblings, recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Trump family seeking to stop publication of a tell-all book by the president’s niece Mary titled “Too Much and Never Enough."

Robert Trump had previously worked for his older brother as a top executive at the Trump Organization.

Once a regular bold face name in Manhattan's social pages, he has kept a lower profile in recent years.

He married his longtime girlfriend, Ann Marie Pallan, in March, according to the New York Post. He divorced his first wife, Blaine Trump, more than a decade ago.

In a 2016 interview with the New York Post, he described himself as a big supporter of his brother's run for the White House.

“I support Donald one thousand percent,” Robert Trump said.

***

Former White House adviser Steve Bannon was arrested on August 20th on charges that he and three others ripped off donors to an online fundraising scheme “We Build The Wall.”

The charges were contained in an indictment unsealed in Manhattan federal court.

Federal prosecutors alleged that Bannon and three others “orchestrated a scheme to defraud hundreds of thousands of donors” in connection with an online crowdfunding campaign that raised more than $25 million to build a wall along the southern border of the United States.

A phone at the office of Bannon's lawyer went unanswered Thursday morning. A spokeswoman for Bannon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

***

US President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, was pulled from a luxury yacht and arrested on August 20th on allegations that he and three associates ripped off donors trying to fund a southern border wall.

He's the latest in a long list of Trump allies to be charged with a crime.

The organizers of the “We Build The Wall” group portrayed themselves as eager to help the president build a “big beautiful” barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border, as he had promised during the 2016 campaign.

They raised more than $25 million from thousands of donors and pledged that 100% of the money would be used for the project.

But according to the criminal charges unsealed Thursday, much of the money never made it to the wall.

Instead, it was used to line the pockets of group members, including Bannon, who served in Trump's White House and worked for his campaign.

He allegedly took over $1 million, using some to secretly pay co-defendant Brian Kolfage, the founder of the project, and to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal expenses.

Hours after his arrest, Bannon pleaded not guilty during an appearance in a Manhattan federal court.

He is the latest addition to a startlingly long list of Trump associates who have been prosecuted, including his former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, whom Bannon replaced, his longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, and his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

Trump has also made clear that he is willing to use his near-limitless pardon power to help political allies escape legal jeopardy, most recently commuting the sentence of longtime political adviser Roger Stone.

Bannon was taken into custody around 7 a.m. by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service on a 150-foot (45-meter) luxury yacht called Lady May, which was off the coast of Connecticut, authorities said.

The boat is owned by exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui and currently for sale for nearly $28 million. According to Marine Traffic, a commercial tracking service, the vessel's transponder signal went dark on June 17, shortly after it departed a port in Connecticut en route to Miami, potentially indicating its beacon was inoperable or had been turned off.

At his hearing later on August 20th, Bannon appeared with his hands cuffed in front of him and a white mask covering most of his face.

He rocked back and forth on a chair in a holding cell where he appeared via video with his lawyers on the telephone.

The magistrate judge approved Bannon’s release on $5 million bail, secured by $1.75 million in assets.

Neither Bannon, nor his spokesperson or attorney responded to requests for comment on August 20th.

After the arrest, Trump quickly distanced himself from Bannon and the project.

***

A bronze statue representing US First Lady Melania Trump was on September 15th unveiled in her native Slovenia to replace a wooden one that was set on fire in July.

The new sculpture is a replica of the original one that was commissioned by US artist Brad Downey and placed near Trump's home town of Sevnica, in central Slovenia.

The original statue - carved by local folk artist Ales Zupevc - was torched by unknown arsonists on July 4th 2020.

It was carved in a linden tree and pained in light blue to resemble Trump's outfit at her husband's swearing in ceremony.

The sculpture bares no obvious resemblance to the US first lady.

A group of locals gathered at the site watching as the new statue was unveiled.

Zupevc climbed the wooden stand, smiling as he stood by the life-size sculpture.

A plaque reads that it is "dedicated to the eternal memory of a monument to Melania which stood at this location."

Born Melanija Knavs in nearby Novo Mesto in 1970, the new U.S. first lady grew up in Sevnica while Slovenia was part of the Communist-ruled former Yugoslavia.

A country of some 2 million people, Slovenia is an Alpine nation, known as nature-loving and environment-friendly.

***

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a diminutive yet towering women’s rights champion who became the court’s second female justice, died on September 18th at her home in Washington. She was 87.

Ginsburg died of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer, the court said.

Her death just over six weeks before Election Day is likely to set off a heated battle over whether President Donald Trump should nominate, and the Republican-led Senate should confirm, her replacement, or if the seat should remain vacant until the outcome of his race against Democrat Joe Biden is known.

Chief Justice John Roberts mourned Ginsburg’s passing. “Our Nation has lost a jurist of historic stature. We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her - a tireless and resolute champion of justice,” Roberts said in a statement.

Ginsburg announced in July that she was undergoing chemotherapy treatment for lesions on her liver, the latest of her several battles with cancer.

Ginsburg spent her final years on the bench as the unquestioned leader of the court’s liberal wing and became something of a rock star to her admirers. Young women especially seemed to embrace the court’s Jewish grandmother, affectionately calling her the Notorious RBG, for her defense of the rights of women and minorities, and the strength and resilience she displayed in the face of personal loss and health crises.

Those health issues included five bouts with cancer beginning in 1999, falls that resulted in broken ribs, insertion of a stent to clear a blocked artery and assorted other hospitalizations after she turned 75.

She resisted calls by liberals to retire during Barack Obama’s presidency at a time when Democrats held the Senate and a replacement with similar views could have been confirmed. Instead, Trump will almost certainly try to push Ginsburg’s successor through the Republican-controlled Senate - and move the conservative court even more to the right.

Ginsburg antagonized Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign in a series of media interviews, including calling him a faker. She soon apologized.

Her appointment by President Bill Clinton in 1993 was the first by a Democrat in 26 years. She initially found a comfortable ideological home somewhere left of center on a conservative court dominated by Republican appointees. Her liberal voice grew stronger the longer she served.

Ginsburg was a mother of two, an opera lover and an intellectual who watched arguments behind oversized glasses for many years, though she ditched them for more fashionable frames in her later years. At argument sessions in the ornate courtroom, she was known for digging deep into case records and for being a stickler for following the rules.

She argued six key cases before the court in the 1970s when she was an architect of the women’s rights movement. She won five.

“Ruth Bader Ginsburg does not need a seat on the Supreme Court to earn her place in the American history books,” Clinton said at the time of her appointment. “She has already done that.”

On the court, where she was known as a facile writer, her most significant majority opinions were the 1996 ruling that ordered the Virginia Military Institute to accept women or give up its state funding, and the 2015 decision that upheld independent commissions some states use to draw congressional districts.

Besides civil rights, Ginsburg took an interest in capital punishment, voting repeatedly to limit its use. During her tenure, the court declared it unconstitutional for states to execute the intellectually disabled and killers younger than 18.

In addition, she questioned the quality of lawyers for poor accused murderers. In the most divisive of cases, including the Bush v. Gore decision in 2000, she was often at odds with the court’s more conservative members - initially Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.

The division remained the same after John Roberts replaced Rehnquist as chief justice, Samuel Alito took O’Connor’s seat, and, under Trump, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh joined the court, in seats that had been held by Scalia and Kennedy, respectively.

Ginsburg would say later that the 5-4 decision that settled the 2000 presidential election for Republican George W. Bush was a “breathtaking episode” at the court.

She was perhaps personally closest on the court to Scalia, her ideological opposite. Ginsburg once explained that she took Scalia’s sometimes biting dissents as a challenge to be met. “How am I going to answer this in a way that’s a real putdown?” she said.

When Scalia died in 2016, also an election year, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to act on Obama's nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to fill the opening. The seat remained vacant until after Trump's surprising presidential victory. McConnell has said he would move to confirm a Trump nominee if there were a vacancy this year.

Reached by phone late Friday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, declined to disclose any plans. He said a statement would be forthcoming.

Ginsburg authored powerful dissents of her own in cases involving abortion, voting rights and pay discrimination against women. She said some were aimed at swaying the opinions of her fellow judges while others were “an appeal to the intelligence of another day” in the hopes that they would provide guidance to future courts.

“Hope springs eternal,” she said in 2007, “and when I am writing a dissent, I’m always hoping for that fifth or sixth vote - even though I’m disappointed more often than not.”

She wrote memorably in 2013 that the court’s decision to cut out a key part of the federal law that had ensured the voting rights of Black people, Hispanics and other minorities was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

Change on the court hit Ginsburg especially hard. She dissented forcefully from the court’s decision in 2007 to uphold a nationwide ban on an abortion procedure that opponents call partial-birth abortion. The court, with O’Connor still on it, had struck down a similar state ban seven years earlier. The “alarming” ruling, Ginsburg said, “cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this court - and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women’s lives.”

In 1999, Ginsburg had surgery for colon cancer and received radiation and chemotherapy. She had surgery again in 2009 after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and in December 2018 for cancerous growths on her left lung. Following the last surgery, she missed court sessions for the first time in more than 25 years on the bench.

Ginsburg also was treated with radiation for a tumor on her pancreas in August 2019. She maintained an active schedule even during the three weeks of radiation. When she revealed a recurrence of her cancer in July 2020, Ginsburg said she remained “fully able” to continue as a justice.

Joan Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933, the second daughter in a middle-class family. Her older sister, who gave her the lifelong nickname “Kiki,” died at age 6, so Ginsburg grew up in Brooklyn’s Flatbush section as an only child. Her dream, she has said, was to be an opera singer.

Ginsburg graduated at the top of her Columbia University law school class in 1959 but could not find a law firm willing to hire her. She had “three strikes against her” - for being Jewish, female and a mother, as she put it in 2007.

She had married her husband, Martin, in 1954, the year she graduated from Cornell University. She attended Harvard University’s law school but transferred to Columbia when her husband took a law job there. Martin Ginsburg went on to become a prominent tax attorney and law professor. Martin Ginsburg died in 2010. She is survived by two children, Jane and James, and several grandchildren.

Ginsburg once said that she had not entered the law as an equal-rights champion. “I thought I could do a lawyer’s job better than any other,” she wrote. “I have no talent in the arts, but I do write fairly well and analyze problems clearly.”

***

People are continuing to pay their respects outside the US Supreme Court as they reflect on the legacy of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and come to terms with the approaching power struggle to fill her vacant seat.

Scores of flowers, pictures, candles, and small American flags were left near the Washington DC courthouse, along with and handwritten condolence messages and quotes from Ginsburg, who died Friday of metastatic pancreatic cancer at age 87 after 27 years on the court.

Angel Smith, a furloughed worker, came up from Richmond, Virginia just to celebrate Ginsburg at the growing memorial.

She said it was disheartening to see some people already move on to discussing her passing as an opportunity to replace her.

"I just hope that the next person is somebody who could be on that same level as her," Smith said. "Her final wishes were appropriate, and I think they should be respected. And after I put down my flowers and my sign and my candle, I came off to the side and I said a prayer for this country. I asked that they honor her wishes and that they wait."

President Donald Trump metSeotember 21st with Judge Amy Coney Barrett at the White House as the conservative jurist emerged as a favorite to replace the Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, the start of a monumental Senate confirmation fight over objections from Democrats it’s too close to the November election.

Trump said he expects to announce his pick by week’s end, before the burial of Ginsburg, the court's liberal icon, at Arlington National Cemetery.

***

President Donald Trump's has said he would nominate a conservative woman to replace Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on September 18th at the age of 87.

Trump, who will announce his nominee on September 19th, says he's confident his choice will be confirmed, but some disagreement is forming on whether the pick should focus on cementing the conservative majority on the court, or assist in Trump's reelections efforts.

Mark Sherman, a Supreme Court Reporter for the Associated Press, said five women are rounding out Trump's Supreme Court pick shortlist: Amy Coney Barrett, Barbara Lagoa, Joan Larsen, Allison Rushing, and Kate Todd.

"They have in common that they're all well-regarded conservatives. Four of them are federal judges, and the fifth is a lawyer in the White House," Sherman said.

Barrett, 48, is widely considered to be the front-runner. She was previously considered as a finalist for Trump's second nomination to the high court, which eventually went to Justice Brett Kavanaugh. A devout Catholic mother of seven, she is a favorite of religious conservatives and considered a strong opponent of abortion.

"She has a long history in conservative circles. She was a clerk at one point to Justice Scalia when he was on the Supreme Court," Sherman said. "We do know from her record that she has raised questions about abortion rights and also suggested that there are many more abortion restrictions that she would find allowable under the law than, say, Justice Ginsburg did."

Lagoa, 52, is a Cuban American judge from Florida who was nominated by Trump to serve on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2019. Her name was on the White House's list of potential high court contenders released earlier this month.

Raised in the heavily Latino Miami suburb of Hialeah, Lagoa is the daughter of Cuban exiles who fled the communist regime of Fidel Castro. She speaks fluent Spanish and has a solidly conservative judicial record.

"Picking Lagoa could perhaps help him win more of the Cuban vote, which is an important constituent part of the Hispanic vote in Florida," Sherman said. "And if the vote in Florida is close... any little edge could be decisive."

Larsen, 51, was a little-known University of Michigan legal scholar until 2015, when then- Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, tapped her to fill a vacant seat on the Michigan Supreme Court.

After Trump won the presidency and the Michigan electoral college in 2016, he quickly sought to elevate Larsen to the federal bench, tapping her in May 2017 to fill a vacant seat on the Cincinnati-based 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Rushing, 38, was confirmed just 18 months ago to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond. If elevated to the Supreme Court, she would be the youngest justice confirmed since the early 1800s.

She is a native of Hendersonville, North Carolina. Her potential selection is being championed within the White House by chief of staff Mark Meadows, who also hails from the mountains of the Tarheel State.

Todd, 45, is the only lawyer on Trump's potential shortlist for the Supreme Court who has never served as a judge.

A deputy White House counsel, her close connection to the Trump administration could give an opening to Democrats to attack her independence and relative lack of experience. However, her lack of a judicial record also leaves little paper trail for opponents to sort through for material to attack.

"The president has said he will make a nomination public on September 19th," Sherman said. "And there is the at least the possibility that Republicans, with their majority in the Senate and no procedural hurdles, really could perhaps confirm a new justice before the election. Remains to be seen if they will, but that's certainly a possibility."

***

Democratic Presidential Nominee Joe Biden and his wife Dr. Jill Biden were in Washington on September 25th to pay their respects to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

They were invited to attend the special ceremony at the Capitol to commemorate Ginsburg lying in state.

Biden said he met Ginsburg for the first time when he was chairman of the committee that oversaw her confirmation hearing.

Services were brief, with the rabbi’s reflections and prayer, before guests lined up to pass by the casket and pay their respects.

Members of the House and Senate who were not invited to the ceremony because of space limitations imposed by the coronavirus pandemic will be able to pay their respects before a motorcade carrying Ginsburg’s casket departs the Capitol in the early afternoon.

The honor of lying in state has been accorded fewer than three dozen times, mostly to presidents, vice presidents, and members of Congress.

Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights icon, was the most recent person to lie in state following his death in July. Henry Clay, the Kentucky lawmaker who served as Speaker of the House and also was a senator, was the first in 1852.

Rosa Parks - a private citizen, not a government official - is the only woman who has lain in honor, a separate commemoration, at the Capitol.

Ginsburg had lain in repose for two days at the Supreme Court, where thousands of people paid their respects outside, including President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump on September 24th. Spectators booed and chanted “vote him out” as the president, who wore a mask, stood silently near Ginsburg’s casket at the top of the court’s front steps.

Trump plans to announce his nomination September 19th of a woman to take Ginsburg’s place on the high court, where she served for 27 years and was the leader of the liberal justices.

Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court, will be buried next week in Arlington National Cemetery beside her husband, Martin, who died in 2010.

02:03:17