Supreme Court press release on Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death “Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died this evening surrounded by her family at her home in Washington, D.C., due to complications of metastatic pancreas cancer. She was 87 years old. Justice Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Clinton in 1993. She was the second woman appointed to the Court and served more than 27 years... Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. said of Justice Ginsburg: “Our Nation has lost a jurist of historic stature. We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her -- a tireless and resolute champion of justice.” Justice Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn, New York, March 15, 1933. She married Martin D. Ginsburg in 1954. She received her B.A. from Cornell University, attended Harvard Law School, and received her LL.B. from Columbia Law School. She served as a law clerk to the Honorable Edmund L. Palmieri, Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, from 1959–1961. From 1961–1963, she was a research associate and then associate director of the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure. She was a Professor of Law at Rutgers University School of Law from 1963–1972, and Columbia Law School from 1972–1980, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California from 1977–1978. In 1971, she was instrumental in launching the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, and served as the ACLU’s General Counsel from 1973–1980, and on the National Board of Directors from 1974–1980. She was appointed a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980. During her more than 40 years as a Judge and a Justice, she was served by 159 law clerks. While on the Court, the Justice authored My Own Words (2016), a compilation of her speeches and writings. A private interment service will be held at Arlington National Cemetery.” Will Trump react on live TV to Ginsberg’s death? Trump is currently speaking to a campaign rally in Minnesota, and has been speaking since just before the news of Ginsberg’s death was made public just minutes ago. It’s not clear what the president might know or not know about Ginsberg’s death, or whether he might react to the news of Ginsberg’s death in real time, while on live television. He’s now talking about his list of potential Supreme Court nominees, including Ted Cruz. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg is dead, court announces Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a beloved justice and a crucial liberal vote on the Supreme Court, died this evening from complications of pancreatic cancer, the Supreme Court just announced in a news release. She was 87 years old. National Public Radio reports that one of Ginsberg’s final messages was a statement dictated to her granddaughter: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.” Trump now has the power to nominate a replacement for Ginsberg, and the Republican-controlled Senate to confirm a replacement. When conservative supreme court justice Antonin Scalia died in the last year of Barack Obama’s last presidential term in 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked Obama from confirming a replacement for months, arguing that the appropriate choice was to wait for the voters to choose a new president. McConnell, who still controls the senate, is not expected to apply that standard now that it would disadvantage Republicans, even though the election is in weeks, rather than months. Trump leads campaign crowd in booing Somali refugees More than 50,000 people in Minnesota report Somali ancestry, the most of any state. The state’s Somali community has been there for thirty years. Trump opened his campaign rally in Bemidji, Minnesota, by talking about Somali refugees as a threat, encouraging the crowd to boo the idea of more Somali Americans in their state, and celebrating the accomplishment that “just today we deported dozens of Somali refugees.” “Sleepy Joe will turn Minnesota into a refugee camp,” Trump said. New York City’s school reopening is a mess. So is the NYC mayor’s leadership. A new report from the New York Times highlights yet another example of the dysfunction of New York City mayor Bill de Blasio. CDC director pulled strings to get a Nevada Trump supporter a scarce COVID test In early March, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention personally called the chief medical officer of Nevada to arrange a Covid-19 test for Adam Laxalt, a prominent Nevada Republican politician, National Rifle Association ally, and Trump supporter, the Reno Gazette-Journal reports. Laxalt “believed he was exposed to the coronavirus while attending the Conservative Political Action Conference”, but he was not showing any symptoms at the time, so he could not get approved for a test through normal channels, the paper reported. Trump’s belated aid to Puerto Rico is a ‘desperate political stunt’ In 2017, Trump tossed rolls of paper towels into the crowd of people at a disaster relief distribution center in Puerto Rico, which was still reeling from the devastation of Hurricane Maria. In 2019, he told Republican lawmakers that he thought Puerto Rico had already received too much aid compared with Texas and Florida, and he did not want to give any more. Earlier today, just weeks before election day, Trump announced a $13bn aid package to help Puerto Rico rebuild, in what is being widely reported as a transparent bid to pick up more support in Florida, where hurricane refugees are now considered a vital voting bloc in a state where just tens of thousands of voters could make a crucial difference. Trump himself said as much today. So did Biden’s Latino adviser, who called the aid package a “desperate political stunt”. For a Democratic candidate, Biden is getting record support from white voters A new poll finds that Joe Biden has support from 49% of white voters. That would be a record: the majority of white voters vote Republican, and exit poll data shows that going back to 1972, Democrats have , and it’s sometimes dropped into the 30s. But the poll, from NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist, also has what NPR reporter Domenico Montanaro calls a “warning sign” for Biden: his support among voters of color in the poll is much lower than the support Hillary Clinton received in 2016. Biden leads Trump only 60% to 34% with nonwhite voters, “a smaller margin than the 74% to 21% Democrat Hillary Clinton won with them in 2016”, Montanaro notes. Read the full NPR story here. Poll finds Biden has lead over Trump among both registered and likely voters This is Lois Beckett in the Guardian’s Los Angeles bureau picking up live political coverage for this evening. A new poll finds that Biden has a 52% to 43% lead over Trump among likely voters, as well as a substantial lead among registered voters. (The poll’s margin of error among likely voters is +/- 4.3 percentage points.) The NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll focused for the first time on a subset of “likely voters,” those actually most likely to cast a ballot, as well as surveying a sample of people registered to vote. Today so far That’s it from me today. The Guardian’s west coast team will take over the blog for the next few hours. Here’s where the day stands so far: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reversed its widely criticized recommendation on coronavirus testing. The CDC said today that anyone who has had contact with someone who tested positive for the virus should receive a test, virtually reinstating the agency’s previous recommendation. The announcement came one day after after the New York Times reported that CDC scientists did not write the altered August guideline and actively raised objections to it. The Trump administration will ban downloads of TikTok and WeChat starting Sunday. US intelligence officials have warned the Chinese apps pose a national security threat. Normal use of the TikTok app is expected to be blocked starting 12 November. Trump and Biden are both campaigning today in Minnesota, as early voting begins in the state. Biden delivered a speech at a union training center in Duluth, once again criticizing Trump by characterizing the presidential election as a race of “Park Avenue versus Scranton”. Trump will speak at a campaign rally in Bemidji this evening. Trump announced his administration would send $13bn in aid to Puerto Rico, as the island continues to recover from Hurricane Maria. A reporter asked the president at his press conference why the administration was sending the aid now, when the hurricane struck in 2017. Trump insisted it was because his administration had been working on the plan for a while, dodging a question about whether it was related to Puerto Rican voters in the crucial swing state of Florida. A firefighter died battling the wildfire in California’s San Bernardino national forest, the US Forest Service said today. The devastating wildfires have already killed at least three dozen people and destroyed thousands of homes. The blog will have more coming up, so stay tuned.