Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the long time democratic Supreme Court justice, passed away Sept. 18 at the age of 87 due to complications from pancreatic lung cancer. Bader-Ginsburg  served on the Supreme Court for over 27 years, first appointed in the summer of 1993 by then-president Bill Clinton. She was also an active gender equality activist, as well as a women’s rights activist, having won many arguments on the Supreme Court. She also advocated as a volunteer attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and was a member of its board of directors in the 1970’s. With such a prominent justice no longer in the picture just mere months before the 2020 presidential election, what does this mean for the American government, and for the Democratic Party, who now could be in the minority in the supreme court?

Over the weekend of Sept. 26, President Donald Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative legal scholar, to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court left by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. If approved by the Senate, Barrett would tilt the already conservative majority bench further to the right.

Barrett, a 48-year old lawyer and jurist from New Orleans, Louisiana, is known to have very different political beliefs in contrast to the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, including on the environment and climate change. Ginsburg, a climate change activist, voted to deem greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide a pollutant in