senators are now called to apply that standard. obviously, nicolle, that was the part of the former president's statement not dealing personally with the loss of justice ginsburg, which every american feels tonight. but dealing with the natural questions of law and process that comes up. may i take this moment to thank you so much for being my wing person on our coverage tonight >> thank you. >> this was really important, and it was really important for you to be here and a partner in it and a part of it. for the two of us, that's going to do it for this hour, for this broadcast, for tonight, and for this week. as we mentioned, stay tuned. katy tur hosts a special hour on the life and legacy of justice ruth bader ginsburg, gone tonight at the age of 87 on behalf of all of our colleagues at the networks of nbc news, for us, good night

>> announcer: this is an msnbc special presentation >> it's amazing that at the advanced age of 86, everyone wants to take a picture with me. >> she became a pop culture legend as an octogenarian. >> ruth bader ginsburg [ applause ] also known as the notorious rbg. >> laws of this quality help to keep women not on a pedestal but in a cage. >> she is, in my view, one of the most important americans ever to live. >> now justice ginsburg's law clerks, a select group of her confidants who helped her shape the law on the supreme court for a quarter century, tell us how she changed thei

>> i feel so lucky to have had her as a model. her even temperament, her careful attention to language, her fair dealing with others. >> i would never call her the "r" word. it is always justice, and that will never change. >> away from the court, ruth bader ginsburg has of course become a pop culture icon known as notorious rbg. some die-hard fans have even

gotten "rbg" tattoos. >> why would you make something that can't be removed on yourself? >> notorious rbg is a nickname that i coined. it is sort of an encapsulation of justice ginsburg's larger than life force that she brings to the supreme court. it's a reference to the notorious b.i.g., the late great rapper from '90s brooklyn, one who also spoke truth to power and used words to do so. >> to her clerks, rbg's quiet power was apparent the moment they arrived for their job interview. >> i walked into her office for the first time, and there is justice ginsburg, and she's standing there. she works standing up though she does not have a standing desk. but i remember being struck by how small she was and then just how giant she was because she is an absolute icon. and the thing about justice ginsburg is she talks very

slowly and deliberately. every single word that she says is carefully chosen, and there are often a number of pauses during the conversation as she formulates precise words for her next sentence. >> i was very careful to not step over her words. i would let, you know, three seconds elapse just to kind of look at her and make sure she was done before responding to any question. >> at public events like this one at the national museum of american jewish history in philadelphia, admirers rallied around the legendary justice. >> that one my daughter calls mother as scarlett o'hara. >> this visit included a tour of a traveling exhibit that chronicles rbg's own life. >> we talk about your mother here and opera and the role brooklyn had on your life. >> justice ginsburg was born in

1933 in flatbush, brooklyn, to nathan and celia bader. >> nathan bader had immigrated to new york partially to escape anti-semitism in his native odessa. >> i am the beneficiary myself, of my father being able to leave the old world where conditions were not good to come here and make a living and raise a family. that is america to me. [ applause ] >> well jews in the u.s. didn't face the peril of those being rounded up by the nazis during world war ii, the bader family wasn't protected from prejudice. >> she recalled seeing no jews allowed signs and not being allowed to go to some of her classmates' homes because she was jewish. justice ginsburg's experience being discriminated against absolutely influenced her decision to work on behalf of others who were marginalized in

this country. >> that included women like her mother, celia. >> she graduated from high school at the age of 15, but she never had the chance to go to college because all of the family's money went to her oldest brother's tuition at cornell. >> it was celia who encouraged her daughter's education, regularly taking ruth to a neighborhood library. >> i learned to love the smell of chinese food in those days because the library was one floor above chinese restaurants. >> growing up, ruth bader faced a series of emotional hardships. >> their older sister marilyn was 4 years old when ruth was born, but very sadly, ruth has no memories of marilyn, because she died of meningitis as the age of 6. >> this was something that her parents never got over. my mother says that every night when her father came home from

work, there was a picture of marilyn, and he would come and look at the picture and break down crying pretty much every night. so essentially there was a ghost in the family. >> as ruth entered high school, her mother was diagnosed with cervical cancer. >> it's something that she hid at the time. she didn't want people to feel sorry for her. >> but two days before ruth's high school graduation, her mother died. >> as a result of her mother's death, she was unable to speak at her high school graduation even though she was at the top of her class. it's something that really stuck with her. >> the future justice honored her mother's memory by getting the education that celia could not, and then would go on to transform america for all families. for people living with h-i-v, keep being you.

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ruth bader entered cornell university in the fall of 1950. >> there were four men to every woman. so for parents, cornell was the ideal place to send a girl. if she couldn't find her man there, she was hopeless. >> the ratio appeared to work in her favor. she was just 17 when she met a student from long island named marty ginsburg. >> there was something amazingly wonderful about this man. he cared that i had a brain. [ applause ] >> nine days after she graduated from cornell with a bachelor's degree in government, ruth and marty married. >> justice ginsburg loves to tell the story of the advice that she received from her mother-in-law on her wedding day. according to justice ginsburg, her mother-in-law handed her a pair of earplugs and said the secret to a good marriage is always to be a little deaf.

>> that turned out to be very good advice not only in dealing with marty but even to this day in dealing with my current colleagues. >> to justice ginsburg's clerks, marty provided a counterbalance to his sometimes serious spouse. >> there was one episode at one of her clerk reunions when in the process of putting his arm around her, marty had taped a sign to the justice's back. and the sign said "her highness" and when she realized it, she chuckled. but i love that story because it's a window into the banter that was at the heart of their wonderful love affair. >> she followed him to oklahoma where he was in reserve officer's training. she got as a job as a civil service officer at a social security administration office. when they noticed she was pregnant, she actually got

demoted. >> discrimination wasn't something that was abstract in her life. it was something that was real and present and that made her, i think, sensitive to the experience that so many people have. >> from oklahoma, the couple moved to boston in 1956 to attend harvard law school. ruth ginsburg was one of just nine women in the program. >> the dean had a practice of each year having only the female students come to a dinner at his home, and the dean asked each woman there to say why were they taking the place of a male law student at harvard. >> there are so many possible responses to that question, and justice ginsburg tells us that she responded, so i'll something to talk to my husband about. well, of course she couldn't have meant that. was she possibly put on the spot and didn't know what to say? that's possible. >> at home, there were more serious challenges. in 1957 when their daughter, jane, was 2, marty was diagnosed

with test tick yew lar cancer. >> it was my second year in law school, marty's third year, and there was massive surgery followed by massive radiation. there was no chemotherapy in those days. we just took each day as it came. my routine was i would attend my classes. i would then go to mass general, the hospital where he was, in the afternoon. and then i started typing the notes that his classmates had given me from his classes, reading whatever cases i would read for the next day, and maybe i got two hours' sleep. >> law school alone as a single person is incredibly challenging. but to do all of that is incredible, and i think she developed the habits that allowed her to manage all of these different parts of her life successfully. and she's carried those habits throughout her career.

>> marty recovered and graduated harvard law school on schedule, a year before his wife. >> given what he wanted to do and given that he was jewish, there were very few firms that he could possibly have worked at in boston. and so he needed to take a job in new york. now, they had a young child, and he was newly recovered from cancer. and so the idea that she would stay in boston was not really in the realm of the possible. so she left harvard and went to columbia without having any assurance that she'd end up with a degree. >> ginsburg graduated number one in her class, yet didn't receive a single job offer from a new york law firm. >> she was essentially discriminated against for three reasons. she was a woman. she was a mother. and she was a jew. and that experience really helped her realize what feminism was all about. >> it was only through the

intervention of her columbia law school professor, gerald gunther, that a judge for the southern district of new york, edmund palmieri, took her on as a clerk. >> palmieri said, look, i'm not concerned that she's a woman. i've had a woman clerk. but she's got a 4-year-old daughter. how can i risk it? i might need her even on a sunday. so gunther's proposal was, if you don't give her a chance, i will never recommend another columbia student to you. [ applause ] >> a lot of highly successful women of her generation understood they had to do everything a little better and a little cleaner and more flawlessly than the men around them if they were going to be taken seriously. and she has never stopped working that way. working that wy ♪ copd tries to say, "go this way."

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even after graduating at the top of her law school class, ruth bader ginsburg struggled to find a job. it was the 1960s. gender discrimination was

practically the law of the land. >> if you watch "mad men," you will see that portrayal of how it was for working women. courts actually said if your boss grabs your ass, it's just a peccadillo. it's nothing the law needs to be concerned with. and that was a pretty mainstream view. >> in 1963, ginsburg began teaching at rutgers law school. when she became pregnant with her second child, she told no one outside the family. >> she made the decision, i'm not going to make the same mistake that i made when we were in oklahoma. i'm not going to tell anyone i'm pregnant. and the way she got away with that was her mother-in-law was one size larger than ruth, and so her mother-in-law lent her her clothes to finish out the semester. >> when she started as a law professor at rutgers, it was no longer legal to pay women differently than men.

however, when she went to her dean to ask him about this, the response was, well, you have a husband in a high-paying good job. you don't need the money. >> marty ginsburg rejected such traditional notions about men and women. at home, he was in charge of the family's kitchen. their daughter, jane, once joked that in their house, daddy did the cooking, and mommy did the thinking. >> there was a certain repertoire of not particularly good dishes that my mother could put together, but over time my father took over even more of that role. >> i remember in particular being invited over to their house for dinner one night, and marty serving an amazing homemade baguette that my husband, who had grown up in france, said was one of the best baguettes he had ever tasted. >> in addition to marty ginsburg's culinary tlentd, he brought a powerful legal mind to the table. >> marty ginsburg was almost certainly the best tax lawyer of his generation, one of the

leading figures in mergers and acquisitions law. >> in 1972, the married lawyers teamed up on a project, a case that marty had found and one that ruth thought might shake up america's deeply rooted gender bias. >> our goal in the '70s was to end the closed-door era. there were so many things that were off limits to women -- policing, firefighting, mining, piloting planes. >> but the victim of the discrimination case the ginsburgs took on wasn't a woman. >> it was this guy named charles moritz, and he took care of his mother, and he wanted to get a tax benefit for the caretaker who he hired to take care of his mother when he was away or unable to be there. >> the tax code did not recognize males as primary

caregivers. so combining the forces of marty ginsburg and rbg, rbg argued that that was sex discrimination. >> the united states court of appeals for the 10th circuit eventually agreed. >> they used that case as a vehicle, and it was the first of many that she used to explain how gender stereotypes actually work in two directions. they don't just hold women back. they actually hold men back. >> at 39 years old, ruth bader ginsburg's reputation as a legal dynamo was growing. she co-founded the aclu's women's rights project and would soon be tested in the highest court of the land. between 1973 and 1978, ginsburg argued six gender discrimination cases before the supreme court's all-male bench. >> i regarded myself as a kind of a teacher. i knew that i was speaking to

men who didn't think there was any such thing as gender-based discrimination, and my job was to tell them it really exists, and you wouldn't want the world to be that way for your granddaughters. >> in at least two cases, she talked for over ten minutes without ever being interrupted. >> sex like race is a visible, immutable characteristic bearing no necessary relationship to ability. sex like race has been made the basis for unjustified or at least unproved assumptions concerning on individual's potential to perform or to contribute to society. >> i think what that tells you is that she was educating the court and opening their eyes to seeing an issue through an entirely different lens. >> in her quest to change the country's perceptions on gender, she found a case with another male plaintiff, stephen

wiesenfeld, who had been barred from receiving his late wife's work benefits. >> you have a father whose wife has died. he wants to stay home and care for his young son, but the laws are set up in a way to make it disadvantageous for him to do that, and he wanted to challenge those laws so that he would get the equal amount of benefits that his wife would have gotten. >> he wants to be a stay-at-home father after his wife has died. so that's justice ginsburg's vision of an ideal world, one in which men and women are equal partners. >> paula wiesenfeld, in fact the principal wage earner, is treated as though her years of work were of only secondary value to her family. in practical effect, laws of this quality help to keep women not on a pedestal but in a cage. >> ginsburg was victorious in the wiesenfeld case. in the 1970s, she won five of the six cases she argued before

the supreme court. >> what is most striking to me when i look back and read those cases was how carefully they were chosen and litigated so that each one built on the last in a way that the justices could understand why laws that discriminate against women were unconstitutional and why they should be struck down. >> but as a new decade dawned, she was ready for a change and a move to the other side of the bench. >> she was largely done with doing the big things that she wanted to do for women. i think she was ready to do something different and what she wanted to be was a judge. >> she was nominated by president carter in 1980 to be on the d.c. circuit. one of the things he felt very strongly about was changing the face of the u.s. judiciary. >> for the next 13 years, ginsburg became known for

consensus building with more conservative colleagues and the thoughtful judgment that would lead her from the d.c. circuit to the supreme court. >> what's funny is that her law clerks always called her rbg. when she was on the d.c. circuit, there was another judge ginsburg, and so it was never clear who you were talking about, so people got in the habit of just saying rbg instead. >> at the time, no one could have imagined how those three initials would become a permanent part of the american vernacular. it's hard. eliminate who you are not first, and you're going to find yourself where you need to be. ♪

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when supreme court justice byron white announced he would retire in 1993, president bill clinton launched a nationwide search for his replacement. ruth bader ginsburg made the list of candidates, but she wasn't at the top. behind the scenes, her husband marty worked hard to change that. >> he was really the campaign manager for her to get on the supreme court. >> marty started a well-worn path of gathering forces to support ruth to be considered. >> he knew the constituencies that he wanted to weigh in and the women's movement was one of them. >> there was some discussion among the progressive women's rights organizations about whether or not she was their justice, but it's absurd thinking about that now.

>> i remember where i was standing when marty called me to say, we won. i said, what are you talking about? he said, we won. he's chosen ruth. >> after careful reflection, i am proud to nominate for associate justice of the supreme court judge ruth bader ginsburg of the united states court of appeals for the district of columbia. >> after clinton introduced her to the nation, judge ginsburg made an emotional tribute to her late mother, who had been denied a college education so many years earlier. >> i pray that i may be all that she would have been had she lived in an age when daughters are cherished as much as sons. >> but she still had to be confirmed by the senate. >> the degree of drama was much smaller than it is in the more recent nominations. it was all very civil.

>> even on hot-button issues like abortion. >> i appreciate that i am never going to please all of the people all of the time on this issue. i can only try to say what is my position and be as open about it as gl-- >> and you have been and i agree with that. and as i know, i admire you personally. but this is more important. >> it seems so foreign today, but probably her biggest advocate during the senate confirmation hearings was orrin hatch, this very conservative senator from utah. >> you have to say that she's qualified, she's a person of great judicial temperament. >> she's become only the second female supreme court justice in the nation's history after sandra day o'connor. >> the senate today overwhelmingly confirmed ruth bader ginsburg for the supreme court. the vote, 96-3. >> my hope is i will live to see the day when the senate operates that way again instead of having

this fierce partisan divide. >> that far more bipartisan spirit of the 1990s was embodied in justice ginsburg's friendship with one of the court's most conservative justices. >> justice antonin scalia, known in the d.c. circuit as nino the great. >> they were old friends from sitting on the d.c. circuit together, and justice scalia, very much like marty, had a very hysterical sense of humor, and he loved to poke fun at his friend. >> it was a three-judge bench. sometimes he would whisper something to me that was so funny, i had everything i could do to contain myself from bursting out into hysterical laughter. >> this is one of the strange couples of all time in american law. >> scalia has said that if he were on a desert island and could pick only one person, excluding family of course, it would be my mother.

>> the two shared a particular passion, the opera. >> i would read these opinions that justice scalia would write that were kind of nasty about her opinions, and she'd be nasty going back. and i would think, how did they stay friends? maybe this is the end. maybe they're not friends anymore. >> i have never gotten angry at ruth or at any of my colleagues because of the way they voted in an opinion. i mean if you cannot disagree with your colleagues on the law without taking it personally, you ought to get another day job. i mean it's -- >> just three years into her time on the court, ginsburg took part in one of the most significant cases of her career. in 1990, the united states government had sued the state of virginia over its policy that barred women from attending the prestigious virginia military institute, vmi. >> what vmi had done was to set up a separate but equal school

for women, which was separate but of course was not equal at all. vmi supporters were worried that women were going to somehow ruin the school. >> that's exactly what people said when women wanted to go to law school and become lawyers. >> six years later, the case came before the supreme court, and vmi's future was left in the hands of the justices. and when the majority voted to allow female cadets into the school, justice sandra day o'connor, who as the senior female justice was in line to write the court's opinion, insisted that privilege go to her good friend and women's rights champion ruth bader ginsburg. >> from day one, the state supported virginia military institute only admitted males. but tonight times are about to change. >> ginsburg's friend, justice scalia, was the lone dissenter. >> you had a stirring dissent. >> it was a great dissent. >> yeah, you were the only

dissenter. >> four years later in 2000, scalia and ginsburg were again at odds, this time over a case that would decide the nation's next president. >> good evening. somewhat unbelievably here we are now three nights after election night, and there still is no president-elect, not even close. >> although al gore had won the popular vote, the question of who would be president all came down to the electoral college and who had won florida. >> at issue, did the florida state supreme court go beyond its authority when it ordered a statewide recount of the so-called undervotes, ballots on which no choice for president was detected? >> in a 5-4 vote, the supreme court stopped florida's recount, effectively declaring george w. bush the 43rd president of the united states. ginsburg issued a powerful dissent, saying the supreme court should not have interfered. >> the other dissenters at the end said, i respectfully

dissent. justice ginsburg said, i dissent. a great deal was made of this. >> for democrats, "i dissent" became a rallying cry. >> not long after bush v. gore was decided, the justice and marty were in new york, and they went to the theater. she was noticed as she was walking to her seats, and lots of people in the crowd started to stand and applaud. and marty turned to her, and he said, i bet you didn't know there was a tax convention in town. >> it was just the beginning of ginsburg's transition from a stoic justice to a pop culture icon. >> thank you. thank you. thank you. introducing the all-new 2021 gla suv. starting at just $36,230. it's the biggest thing that ever happened to small.

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>> thank you very much. please, everyone sit down. >> i knew ruth bader ginsburg before she was famous, by which i mean when she was merely a justice of the supreme court of the united states, but not the notorious rbg. >> this is not what i would have expected growing up. my father was really the life of the party. but i think she's really grown into that role. >> it's like clerking for madonna. you know, my clerkship stock has risen dramatically over the past 20 years. somehow the world has just learned so much more about her and come to admire her so much more. >> across nearly 30 years, her many clerks have witnessed her deftly worded opinions and scathing dissents on history-making cases. many have also shared profound private moments with the justice. >> in our country when there's an execution, there will be a last-minute appeal of that

execution to the supreme court. there's usually one clerk from each chambers assigned to that death case. >> justice ginsburg was at the opera, but i needed to be in touch with her about a particular death case on which her vote was needed. so the u.s. marshals drove me in a black suv to the kennedy center to catch justice ginsburg in the intermission of the opera, and she said, keep him alive, which was beyond my power as a clerk to do, but of course i duly registered her vote. >> in 2006, sandra day o'connor announced her retirement from the supreme court, leaving ginsburg as the sole female justice for the next three years. without this important ally, ginsburg was on the losing side in 2007 when, in the highly charged gonzalez v. carhart case, the court upheld a partial

birth abortion ban. >> justice ginsburg was especially offended at the language in the majority opinion written by justice kennedy when he said that women who receive abortions often suffer depression, lower self-esteem. >> a lot of the reasoning was about women regretting their decisions as a reason for why the court should intervene, and i think we see ruth bader ginsburg at that time thinking, i'm the only woman here, and how could he be saying these things? and her dissent really takes issue with that and says, thank you, but no thank you. we're capable of making our own decisions. >> i don't think anybody sets out to be a great dissenter as the court became more conservative, she found it necessary to use her dissending voice. >> for the last number of years, she carries a bag around that says "i dissent." she's embraced this perspective.

>> actually, some of her most important opinions as a justice have been her dissenting opinions that are really calls to history. >> and few of those calls were as loud as the dissent she wrote on behalf of lilly ledbetter in 2007. >> this was a woman who had been discriminated against by goodyear tire for years and years and years but didn't really realize that she'd been paid less than men doing the same job until very late in her career. and the question was, could she sue for all of the discrimination? >> the supreme court ruled that she could not since the statute of limitations for holding her employer accountable had expired. >> justice ginsburg believed the majority did not fully appreciate how hard it is to uncover when you are being paid less than your male peers. >> as part of her dissent, she urged congress to rectify this injustice. >> i ended my dissent with the

line "the ball is now in congress' court to correct the error into which my colleagues have fallen." >> and shortly after his inauguration in 2009, with lilly ledbetter looking on, president barack obama signed the lilly ledbetter fair pay act into law. [ applause ] yet ginsburg knew there were other injustices that still needed to be corrected. >> i think what has pushed her, if anything, to be more liberal in her old age is the idea that a lot of the things that she fought for, she thinks are not being carried through on. >> and there was no better example of this than the case known as shelby county v. holder. in 2013, shelby county, alabama, a place with a history of voter

suppression, argued to the supreme court that the federal rules imposed on them by the 1965 voting rights act were no longer needed. to the disappointment of many liberals, a majority of justices agreed. >> the supreme court basically said, look, we've got an african-american in the white house. things have changed in the south, and the voting rights act has basically outlived its usefulness. we don't need it anymore, and they voted to essentially gut the voting rights act. >> she read her dissent from the bench, which is something that justices very infrequently do. it's only for the cases that they feel most strongly about that they'll read a dissent allow aloud from the bench. >> serving effectively to diminish a minority community's ability to exercise clout in the electoral process. >> in this particular dissent, rbg compared eliminating voter protections to discarding an umbrella in a rainstorm. >> that's what we did. we threw away the umbrella even

though it's still raining. that dismantling of the voting rights act led in a straight line to this day to voter suppression, to voter manipulation, to all of the things so undermining of democracy. >> for all the setbacks, though, there were giant leaps forward. in 2015, two years after rbg officiated her first gay wedding, the supreme court required all 50 states to grant and recognize same-sex marriage. >> there was sort of an impromptu celebration of marriage equality on the steps of the supreme court. ♪ 0 say can you see by the dawn's early light ♪ >> i think one of the most beautiful moments that i've ever witnessed in my life was the gay men's chorus standing out there. ♪ whose broad stripes and bright stars ♪ >> it just struck me that they were singing that in celebration

in front of an institution that, you know, just a couple of decades earlier had criminalized them. ♪ and the rockets red glare >> i just felt such hope and optimism and thought about martin luther king's quote, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. >> it was a saying the notorious rbg would invoke as she entered her mid-80s determined to fend off both reactionary forces and a series of health challenges that would alarm her supporters. it works naturally with the water in your body to unblock your gut. free your gut, and your mood will follow. makes it beautiful. state-of-the-art technology makes it brilliant. the visionary lexus nx. lease the 2020 nx 300 for $339 a month for 36 months. experience amazing at your lexus dealer.

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for 56 years, ruth bader ginsburg and her husband marty had a marriage observers envied and admired. >> my best friend was my dear spouse. >> former clerks margo and sam were one of several couples who credited the justice with bringing them together.

>> at some point justice ginsburg and marty took us and two other couples of her former law clerks out to dinner at a fancy restaurant in d.c. >> she arranged for us all to have fortune cookies with a little line from a love poem inside the fortune cookie. >> ruth and marty's love story came to an end in 2010 when he died of metastatic cancer. >> towards the end of his life he came home from the hospital and he couldn't stand up. but he really wanted to cook, and ruth managed to help him stand up at the counter and wedged her own body behind his, and that image is symbolic of their relationship, that even at the very end, they were together. >> by this point, ginsburg had been battling her own health issues for more than a decade. >> i started at the court in the summer of 1999, and it was early in the fall that justice

ginsburg was first diagnosed with colon cancer. and it was very touch and go in chambers for a while. no one knew how bad her condition was or what we could expect, and we went down to the courtroom that morning for the first day of argument. and there she was. >> i was fine for ten years, and then in 2009, a tiny tumor in my pancreas was detected very early, and i had surgery for that. >> the thing to remember is that she's very careful about her own health. where other people might not find out that they have "x" thing until it's too late to treat it, she always finds out. >> arguably the toughest justice on the supreme court is the oldest, ruth bader ginsburg. [ applause ]

also known as the notorious rbg. >> it was president barack obama who nominated two other women, sonia sotomayor and elena kagan to join ginsburg on the bench. >> during the obama administration, some of her supporters were saying, okay, justice ginsburg. you've done a great job. you need to retire now so that your successor can be nominated by a democratic president. i think she really resented that, and she would often say, who are you going to find that's better than me? >> but in the midst of the 2016 presidential campaign, rbg made a statement that led many to question her impartiality. >> recent comments by justice ruth bader ginsburg about donald trump have even some of her supporters wondering if she went too far. >> ginz bierg said this, he's a faker. he has no consistency about him. he says whatever comes to his head at the moment. he really has an ego. how has he gotten away with not

turning over his tax returns. >> she even said at one point i think if he gets elected, i'm moving to new zealand. that raised a lot of hackles. >> something happened recently where justice ginsburg made some very, very inappropriate statements toward me and toward a tremendous number of people, many, many millions of people that i represent. and she was forced to apologize, and apologize she did. >> so help me god. >> so help me god. >> congratulations, mr. president. >> with the inauguration of donald j. trump, ginsburg's health seemed to take on greater urgency. >> it's no secret that with the recent appointments, the court has shifted dramatically to the right. people on the left, those in the middle are concerned what that means for basic rights, for reproductive choice, for matters of national importance from health care to gun violence. >> what do we want? >> in august 2019, ginsburg's

friends and supporters worried while she underwent a three-week course of radiation for another tumor found on her pancreas. [ cheers and applause ] when she appeared at the library of congress book festival later in the summer -- >> please be seated. >> -- she made light of her predicament. >> how am i feeling? well, first this audience can see that i am alive. >> if she had any inkling that she couldn't do the job, she would immediately stop. i've seen no evidence of it. >> i love my job. it has kept me going through four cancer bouts. instead of concentrating on my aches and pains, i concentrate on the court's work. >> as she savors the celebrity of being the notorious rbg, ginsburg has never strayed from her mission of making america the sanctuary it had been for

her late father. >> the founders of the usa proclaim that the heart of america would be its citizens, not its rulers. >> history has a memory. and the simple way to remember her will be that she was in the forefront of a successful movement for human libberation. >> people will look back and remember justice ginsburg as someone who impacted law in a way that made countless lives better. >> true, we have not reached nirvana, but the progress i have seen in my lifetime makes me optimistic for the future. the challenge is to make or keep our communities, places where we can tolerate even celebrate our differencesle