RBG

Michael Savage: This witch. This evildoer. This monster.

Mark Levin: She has no respect for the traditions

of our Constitution, none.

Donald Trump: An absolute disgrace to the Supreme Court.

Rick Wiles: She's one of the most vile human beings.

Scott Lively: She's very wicked, yeah.

Michael Savage: She's anti-American.

Bill O'Reilly: She's a zombie.

The woman's a zombie, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

I ask no favor for my sex.

All I ask of our brethren...

is that they take their feet off our necks.

Twenty-six, 25, 24, 23, 21, 20, 19

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

- How's your health? - Uh, I'm feeling just fine.

Here now to comment is Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

It's an amazing thing to see somebody in her 80s

- become such an icon. - Do you mind signing this copy?

I am 84 years old and everyone wants to take a picture with me.

She is really when you come right down to it,

the closest thing to a superhero, I know.

They call her Notorious RBG, that's her rap name.

- Notorious R... - RBG.

Yeah, no, no, RGB... RBG right.

Supreme Court Justice,

Ruth Bader Ginsburg getting a lot of attention

after she delivered a scathing dissent.

Whether you agree with her or not, you got to acknowledge

she's been a force on that Court.

Liberal hero, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

As much as people admire her,

they don't even know the half of it.

She was the queen.

Ruth knew what she was doing

in laying the foundation.

To put women on exactly the same plane as men.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

quite literally changed the way the world is for American women.

Twelve, 11, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five...

Today the Senate judiciary committee welcomes

judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg,

the president's nominee to be associate justice

of the 'United States Supreme Court'.

Judge do you swear the testimony you are about to give

will be the whole truth and nothing but the truth,

so help you God?

- I do, Mr. Chairman. - Thank you.

I am a Brooklynite, born and bred...

a first-generation American on my father's side...

barely second-generation on my mother's.

What has become of me could happen...

only in America.

Neither of my parents had the means to attend college,

but both taught me to love learning...

to care about people...

and to work hard for whatever I wanted or believed in.

My father was from Odessa

and during his growing up years,

Jews were no longer admitted to the Russian schools.

Education was terribly important.

My mother was loving but also very strict,

making sure I that I did my... homework, practice the piano,

didn't stay out jumping rope too long.

I loved to do the things that boys did,

when I was growing up.

One of our favorite things was climbing garage roofs

from one roof to another, leaping...

leaping over.

Justice Ginsburg, we cannot call Ruth.

- Right. - We call her Kiki.

She was beautiful.

Big beautiful blue eyes, which you really can't see

very well behind her glasses, very soft brown hair.

She had this kind of quiet magnetism

even though she was not effusive.

You always thought that she wasn't listening

and that she didn't know what was going on

but she knew what was going on.

- She didn't do small talk. - No, no small talk.

And she didn't do girl chat and she didn't get on the phone

and talk with us about what happened on the weekend.

She's a deep thinker.

- She's an only child. - No...

She had a sister, I didn't know her sister.

- Her sister passed away. - Right.

But she and her mom were very close,

very, very close.

My mother died when I was 17.

I wish I could've had her... longer.

Well, her mother must have been a very steely person

because she had cancer a long time

and... and lived

trying to get her child through high school.

We were supposed to be at graduation.

And then the night before we got a message

that she would not be able to be part of this.

We knew then that her mother had passed away.

She had two... lessons that she repeated over and over.

"Be a lady..."

and "be independent."

"Be a lady" meant don't allow yourself to be overcome

by useless emotions like anger.

And by "independent," she meant...

it would be fine if you met prince charming

and lived happily ever after. But...

be able to fend for yourself.

In my lifetime, I expect to see three, four,

perhaps even more women on theHigh Court bench.

Women not shaped from the same mold,

but of different complexions.

I surely would not be in this room today...

without the determined efforts

of men and women who kept dreams of equal citizenship alive.

I have had the great good fortune to share life...

with a partner.

Truly extraordinary for his generation...

a man who believed at age 18, when we met,

that a woman's work,

whether at home or on the job...

is as important as a man's.

I became a lawyer... in days...

when women were not wanted

by most members of the legal profession.

I became a lawyer because Marty supported that choice...

unreservedly.

So what was it about Marty?

Marty and I met when I was 17, he was 18.

I was in college.

Cornell was a preferred school for...

for daughters.

In those days, there was a strict quota for women.

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.

My first semester at Cornell, I never did a repeat date.

But then I met Marty, and there was something

amazingly wonderful about this man.

He was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain.

Most guys in the '50s didn't.

One of the sadnesses about the brilliant girls

who attended Cornell is that they kind of suppressed

how smart they were.

But Marty was so confident of his own ability...

so comfortable with himself,

that he never regarded me as any kind of a threat.

We all were struck by the tremendous difference

between Marty... and Ruth.

Marty was the most gregarious, outgoing, life-of-the-party.

Ruth was a really quite...

recessive in a way...

shy, quiet, soft voice but they worked, they worked.

Oh, he's so young.

Meeting Marty...

was by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me.

Marty was a man blessed with a wonderful sense of humor.

I tend to be rather sober.

In those days, it was not a great time for our country.

There was a red scare abroad in the land.

Are you a member of the communist party

or have you ever been a member of the communist party?

It's unfortunate and tragic that I have to teach

this committee the principles of Americanism.

That's not the question.

I had a government professor

and he wanted me to see that our country was straying

from its most basic values

by some of our politicians

who were seeing a communist in every closet.

But that there were lawyers,

who were defending the rights of these people to think,

to speak, to write freely.

Stand away from the stand!

Fight for the bill of rights you're trying to destroy.

Officer, take this man away from the stand.

And then I got the idea that you could do something

that would make your society a little better.

My family had some reservations about this...

but then when I married at the end of college,

my family said, if she wants to be a lawyer let her try.

If she can't succeed...

she will have a husband to support her.

That's me waiting to get my diploma, very happy.

- Yeah, see? That's a nice one. - That's cute. Yeah.

So, we have a whole slew of pictures.

They took them from every possible angle.

You know who that is?

No.

- It's Dean Minow. - Oh. Dean Minow is so small.

We're the same height!

She's not that small, she's probably taller than you.

There's somebody in there.

My brother and cousins and I all call her bubbe.

It's the Yiddish word for grandmother.

It's what we've always called bubbe.

- Bubbe! - Yes?

Do you know if you have fake sugar like Splenda

- or sweet and low? - Yes, it should be someplace...

That's helpful.

I feel like I have

my grandmotherly relationship with her but also somewhat