Originally published by The 19th.
Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg — the first women to sit on the highest court in the country — are joining the relatively short list of women memorialized as sculptures at the U.S. Capitol. Bipartisan legislation to add statues of the two Supreme Court justices to the Capitol was spearheaded by women lawmakers, passed the Senate last December, passed the House at the end of March and signed by President Joe Biden on Wednesday.
“Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor were trailblazers long before reaching the Supreme Court, opening doors for women at a time when so many insisted on keeping them closed,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democrat who introduced the legislation, told The 19th, after the bill was signed. “The Capitol is our most recognizable symbol of democracy, a place where people from across our country have their voices represented and heard. It is only fitting that we honor their remarkable lives and service to our country by establishing statues in the Capitol.”
Klobuchar said she was able to pass the news on to O’Connor’s son and Ginsburg’s daughter and looks forward to “welcoming them to the Capitol” to see their mothers’ lives commemorated. As it stands, only 14 of the more than 200 statues on the Capitol grounds are women, she added.
Born three years apart, O’Connor in 1930 and Ginsburg in 1933, the two women grew up on different sides of the country but went on to serve together on the Supreme Court for more than a decade. While the former was a lifelong Republican raised on a ranch in Arizona and the latter a liberal Democrat born and raised in Brooklyn, by the end of the 1950s, both women had earned law degrees from prestigious schools, ahead of the second-wave feminism movement that later swept the nation. O’Connor enrolled at Stanford University when she was only 16 and graduated six years later with an economics degree and a law degree. Ginsburg attended Cornell University, Harvard Law School and Columbia Law School, where she graduated first in her class.
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Rep. Lois Frankel of Florida, co-chair of the Democratic women’s caucus, said Ginsburg and O’Connor do not deserve this honor “just because they’re women … The fact that they are the first two women to get to the Supreme Court is so significant because of what they had to do to get there.”
Early in her career, O’Connor was unable to find work as an attorney and ended up working in the San Mateo County District Attorney’s office in an unpaid position. She later served as an assistant attorney general for Arizona, a state senator and a trial court judge in the Arizona Court of Appeals. Ginsburg also struggled to find a law firm job after law school despite graduating top of her class. She went on to teach at Rutgers University Law School and later became the first woman tenured professor at her alma mater, Columbia Law School. She went on to serve as the director of the Women’s Rights Project of the ACLU, where she successfully argued six gender discrimination landmark cases before the Supreme Court, and later served as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
In her 2015 dual biography of the two women, Linda Hirshman described O’Connor and Ginsburg not as “soul sisters” but as “sisters in law.” Despite their differences, the two often found common ground when it came to advocating for women’s rights.
“Their presence in our Capitol is a reminder that a woman’s place is everywhere, something a Republican President saw in 1981 and a Democrat President saw in 1993,” bipartisan women’s caucus leadership said in a statement. “And we owe both Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg a huge debt of gratitude.”
The last statue of a woman to find a permanent place in the Capitol building was Rosa Parks in 2013.
O’Connor would be the first person to have a statue built and placed in the Capitol in her honor in her lifetime. The Joint Committee of Congress on the Library will decide where the statues are placed, prioritizing areas near the Old Supreme Court Chamber. The cost of each cannot exceed $500,000, according to the legislation text. Frankel said the committee has two years to obtain the statues, in an artist selection process that includes candidates from underrepresented demographic groups.
The art collection in the Capitol — which includes 162 sculptures, some of which include multiple figures, according to the Architect of the Capitol — has sparked controversy in recent years. In 2020, the House voted 305 to 113 to pass legislation removing statues of Confederate figures and leaders from the building. The dissenters, all Republicans, argued that states should retain the right to decide which statues to contribute to the National Statuary Hall. The bill failed to receive enough Republican support in the Senate and some of the contested statues remain, including known slavery defenders and segregationists. Some states decided on their own accord to replace their contributions to Statuary Hall, which contains 100 statues, two from each state. Mississippi, for example, opted to remove the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and replace it with one of Barbara Johns, a civil rights activist.
Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska praised the new legislation. Murkowski said the two Supreme Court justices each “made a mark on American history,” and Collins added that the women deserve “fitting tributes to their invaluable contributions to our country.”
“There’s literally thousands of visitors that come into this Capitol — billions over the years — both from our country and across the world … I was a child a lot of years ago when I first came,” Frankel said. “But you think about children coming to Washington. It’s really a highlight, and just think about going through the Capitol and hardly seeing any women represented as people you admire, heroes and heroines. It’s pretty shocking.”
Klobuchar introduced similar legislation to erect a monument to honor Ginsburg several times — once in September 2020, again in March 2021 and most recently in December 2021 with the inclusion of O’Connor. But the bill did not successfully pass the House and Senate until this year. Frankel said hopes visitors and future generations will see the statues and continue to be inspired by the Supreme Court Justices.
“It’s about time,” Frankel said.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.