A new super PAC named for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sprung up on October 16, the last day of the last financial disclosure filing period before the November 2024 election. This timing allows the RBG PAC to keep the identities of its donors a secret until after the election. Until then, it is spending nearly $20 million dollars in support of Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed “protector” of women. The RBG PAC’s website features huge side-by-side photos of Trump and Ginsburg, and a caps-locked caption: GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE.
The PAC’s central claim is that Ginsburg, a feminist legal icon, and Trump, an adjudicated rapist who brags about appointing the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, were actually of one mind on abortion. Its Twitter bio declares that “RBG believed abortion laws should be decided by the states, not the federal gov’t,” and that “Trump also doesn’t support a federal abortion ban.” The PAC has also posted two 30-second ad spots echoing these statements. Both ads include footage of Trump during the presidential debate, saying, “I’m not signing a ban, and there’s no reason to sign a ban.”
President Trump has been clear: He does not support a federal abortion ban.
“His position is my position. And that’s why I’m with Trump.” pic.twitter.com/Vaxrpz3Md2
— RBG PAC (@RBG_PAC) October 25, 2024
This argument has proved astonishing to basically everyone with a passing knowledge of the fight for women’s rights. Ginsburg’s granddaughter, an abortion rights attorney, characterized the PAC as “an affront” to her grandmother’s legacy in a statement to the New York Times. “The use of her name and image to support Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, and specifically to suggest that she would approve of his position on abortion, is nothing short of appalling,” she said.
On its website, the RBG PAC justifies its claims about Trump and RBG’s common ground with screenshots of two headlines—a 2020 New York Times piece titled “Why Ruth Bader Ginsburg Wasn’t Fond of Roe v. Wade” and a 2013 NBC article titled “Liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says Roe v. Wade Went Too Far.” But these headlines are conveniently divorced from all relevant context. Ginsburg recognized that the Constitution protects the right to abortion. Her “disagreement” was not about substance, but about strategy: Roe, Ginsburg said in 1984, “presented an incomplete justification for its action” because its reasoning centered the physician rather than the patient, thus failing to fully recognize that “a woman’s autonomous charge of her full life’s course” hangs in the balance.
For Ginsburg, abortion was a matter of equal protection and freedom from sex-based discrimination. By relying instead on privacy, she believed, Roe’s protections were weaker than they should have been.
Ginsburg was also concerned about the galvanizing effect Roe had on the right. At the time of the decision, state laws had been liberalizing to protect abortion. But this trend reversed during the backlash to Roe, and Ginsburg wondered if this outcome could have been avoided if the Court didn’t get involved. “The sweep and detail of the opinion stimulated the mobilization of a right-to-life movement and an attendant reaction in Congress and state legislatures,” she said.
Ginsburg’s skepticism about what would have best protected abortion—privacy or equal protection, state lawmakers or the Supreme Court—does not mean she thought the Constitution did not protect abortion. Ginsburg did not support and would not have supported overturning Roe v. Wade. The RBG PAC is misrepresenting the late justice’s views because it is run by Republicans who want to get Donald Trump elected. According to Federal Election Commission paperwork, the organization’s treasurer is May Mailman, a former legal adviser to Trump and current director of the conservative Independent Women’s Law Center. None of its ads mention that a newly-elected President Trump would not need to sign new legislation to ban abortion, since Republicans have been laying the groundwork to use a 151-year-old law already on the books—the Comstock Act—to limit reproductive autonomy nationwide.
Republicans are responsible for women losing their rights, and know that as a result, Republicans may lose women’s votes. So they are shamelessly twisting the words of perhaps the most prominent American legal feminist to launder the reputation of a candidate who uniquely endangers American women. The RBG PAC is insulting to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s legacy. It is even more insulting to voters’ intelligence.