News broke Friday evening that we'd lost an iconic member of the Supreme Court of the United States. Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020) died at her home in Washington D.C. from complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer. She was 87.

She was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in June, 1993 and confirmed by the United States Senate in August by a vote of 96 to 3 with one abstention, making her only the second female supreme court justice in American history.

Remarking on this later on in her tenure, she once said "When I'm sometimes asked 'When will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court]?' and I say 'When there are nine,' people are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that."

Over the course of her entire legal career and throughout her 27 years on the Supreme Court, Ginsburg forged a legacy as a staunch advocate of women's rights.

Born to an immigrant jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, Ginsburg enrolled at Harvard Law School in 1956, where she was one of only nine women in a class of about 500 men. When she applied to a clerkship position for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter in 1960, she was rejected due to her gender.

When asked at one point how she'd like to be remembered, Ginsburg said, "Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has. To do something, as my colleague David Souter would say, outside myself. ‘Cause I've gotten much more satisfaction for the things that I've done for which I was not paid.'"

The cynicism we see in much of our political discourse today stands in contrast to the idealism that Ginsburg personified throughout her life. During her time on the bench she battled numerous bouts of cancer and faced down several other health emergencies all while continuing to work.

Her death comes at a tumultuous moment in our country's history while Americans have already begun to cast their votes in a consequential election.

In 2016, around nine months before Election Day, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked President Barack Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court until after November. There was never even a confirmation hearing for Judge Garland.

At the time, Sen. McConnell said, “The American people are perfectly capable of having their say on this issue, so let's give them a voice. Let's let the American people decide. The Senate will appropriately revisit the matter when it considers the qualifications of the nominee the next president nominates, whoever that might be."

We believe what occurred in 2016 should serve as precedent for 2020. The Senate should wait until after the election in order to, as Sen. McConnell says, give the American people a say in who will become the next Supreme Court Justice.