Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday of complications from pancreatic cancer. She was 87.

As a law student, Ginsburg graduated first in her class at Columbia Law, but found it difficult to land a position. Her mentor told a judge friend he would no longer send students to him as clerks if he did not give Ginsburg a position. The gambit worked. She eventually taught law at Rutgers and was later the first tenured female faculty member at her alma mater. Largely credited as the intellectual architect of the feminist movement’s legal strategy in the 1970s, Ginsburg persuaded federal courts that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause should apply to discrimination based on gender (she avoided the word sex because it tended to distract from the issue at hand) as well as race. She was wildly successful with the argument. In 1980, she was nominated by President Jimmy Carter to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, a common training ground for Supreme Court justices. In 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated her as the second woman on the Supreme Court. She was confirmed 96-3.*

Ginsburg grew from a reliably liberal vote to rival John Paul Stevens as the intellectual leader of the progressive wing of the Court. Ginsburg consistently applied her principles to a range of issues. There is little political flim-flammery in her opinions, and she was never known to hop-scotch around the Constitution based on the issue or context. She reasoned coldly from her first principles. Her majority opinion in United States v. Virginia (1996), which struck down the Virginia Military Institute’s all male admissions policy, is one of her most famous. Her dissents were often historic as well. In Gonzales v. Carhart (2007), where the majority upheld Congress’s ban on partial-birth abortion, Ginsburg lays out, as clearly as possible, the centrality of abortion to feminist jurisprudence.

Ginsburg, far more than any other progressive member of the modern Court, became a cultural icon, a symbol for what is possible when one applies a fierce intellect to life’s obstacles. Grit defined her professional life and her battle with cancer, but grace, by all accounts, defined her relationships. She was close friends with Antonin Scalia, her polar opposite on the bench. The pair, and their families, attended the opera and vacationed together. One of the most famous photos in the history of American jurisprudence comes from one of those vacations.

The pair provide hope for what could be in a polarized, embittered political culture. Different philosophies of law put them on opposite sides of nearly every culture war issue of the last fifty years, but that chasm, which feels insanely large in today’s world, was bridged by simple, human friendship.

Ginsburg’s life and death have already, in less than 24 hours, been swallowed by the political context. President Trump made a classy, off-the-cuff statement upon hearing of Ginsburg’s death. Social media exploded with joys and obscenities, depending on the perspective.

President Trump finds himself in an unusual situation, with three vacancies to fill in just his first term of office. Not since Nixon, who had four (he replaced Warren, Fortas, Black, and Harlan) over a two-and-one-half year period, has a President been given such a chance to shift the direction of the Court. Gorsuch and Scalia are still viewed as an even trade, while Kavanaugh is thought to be more conservative than Anthony Kennedy. Whoever Trump nominates for Ginsburg’s seat will be more traditional. This is a significant transition that could influence the Court for the next two or three decades.

The nature of constitutional processes has been bent toward partisan politics often in our history, and the same is true here. As in early 2016, when Justice Scalia’s death shifted the presidential election, so to does his close friend’s death here in 2020. The difference, of course, is which party controls the White House and the distance until the election. As in 2016, the President has the power to nominate whoever he pleases and the Senate has the power to handle that nomination however it wishes. Claiming “the people” have some mystical ability to weigh in on the proceeding through an upcoming presidential election is silly now, just as it was in 2016. Republicans used the argument in 2016 because it suited them to delay then, while now they will discard it. Democrats will use the argument now because it suits them to delay, but they wanted a nomination and a vote in 2016, but that will go by the wayside now. Neither party has much principle to stand on here. As a matter of process, the election is irrelevant.

As a matter of party advantage, handling the vacancy is complicated. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the Senate Majority Leader, wants, above all else, to maintain a Republican Senate. President Trump, above all else, wants to win back the White House. Those two goals may diverge. If McConnell wants to protect his vulnerable members (Susan Collins (ME), Cory Gardner (CO), Martha McSally (AZ), Thom Tillis (NC), Joni Ernst (IA), Perdue (GA), Daines (MT) and possibly others), he has to consider if his best bet is to force a relatively quick vote to burnish their credentials, or to delay a vote, to protect them from going on the record. There are also Republican Senators (Graham, Romney, Grassley) who are known to be hesitant about the timing of such a situation. They have been publicly wary of pushing an explosive process through a sharply divided Senate at this particular moment. It is not necessarily clear to me which of these arguments will have the most influence on McConnell.

President Trump also has a decision to make. Most assume, and early news indicates, he will nominate someone quickly. This will provide further evidence to his base that he is willing to do hard, and even unpopular, things to support their cause. Still, Trump could slow down the process to keep the carrot of a Court seat dangling in front of Republican voters, as was the case in 2016. The Supreme Court seems to be the most effective organizing principle for Trump’s candidacies, and it is the best way to counter some small indications of slippage in his evangelical base.

*Her mirror image on the Court, Antonin Scalia, was confirmed 98-0. If either were nominated in today’s environment, they would succeed only on party line votes if “their” party was in the majority. The system no longer works well for a variety of reasons.