Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono told Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to “live forever” shortly after Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court.
Hirono, who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, recalled in her forthcoming memoir, Heart of Fire, how a month after Senate Republicans confirmed Kavanaugh to the high court, the “troubled” Hirono sat herself next to Ginsburg at a dinner party and offered her regrets.
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“You have to live forever,” Hirono whispered to Ginsburg, noting that she felt “some small comfort” as long as the octogenarian justice sat on the court.
Ginsburg did not respond to Hirono’s entreaty directly, only replying that with Kavanaugh on the court, there would be more 5-4 decisions than before. The two women agreed that that was a bleak prospect, Hirono wrote.
When Ginsburg died, Hirono was among the Democrats in the Senate who put up the most vocal resistance to then-President Donald Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, to succeed her. Hirono wore a mask featuring cartoons of Ginsburg during Barrett’s confirmation hearings. Hirono also grilled Barrett for using the phrase “sexual preference” in the past, which the senator declared was “offensive and outdated.”
When the Senate held the final vote to confirm Barrett, Hirono walked to the Senate floor, put her thumb down, and said, “Hell, no.”
The gesture at the time was widely criticized, but Hirono defended her bravado in Heart of Fire, writing that Barrett was an “ideologue” who would “fall right in line with the ideological agenda of chipping away at LGBTQ rights, workers’ rights, voting rights, reproductive rights, and the right to affordable health care.”
Hirono has made a name for herself since the Kavanaugh confirmation as a voice in the national reckoning over sexual harassment. She ripped into Kavanaugh in her memoir, accusing the justice of “arrogance, volatility, and an utter lack of judicial temperament,” while reaffirming her own belief that Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault allegation against him was credible.
During the Kavanaugh hearings, Hirono entered the national spotlight by questioning him about sexual harassment, even before Ford made her allegations. Hirono also became notable among her colleagues for frequent, impassioned outbursts during the Kavanaugh hearings, at one point jabbing her finger at then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell during a press conference to tell him to “do the right thing.”
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After the death of Ginsburg and the confirmation of Barrett, Hirono lamented that the Supreme Court has swerved “ideologically far to the right.”
“You’re going to see 6-3 decisions along ideological lines, and that is not good for our country,” she told the New York Times.
