Nina Totenberg On Amy Coney Barrett, Anita Hill And Saying Goodbye To RBG - NPR

NPR legal correspondent Nina Totenberg has spent decades covering major shifts in the Supreme Court and breaking major stories about the Court.

"There was almost nothing she was willing to say about anything," Totenberg says.

Now, as the Senate prepares to vote on Barrett's confirmation next week, Totenberg anticipates a fundamental shift in the Supreme Court's outlook.

"With the ascension of what is likely to be Justice Barrett, I think we're likely to see a Court that is more conservative than any Court since the 1930s.

"I don't think [Biden is] a fan of Court-packing or adding justices, but [Franklin] Roosevelt wasn't a particular fan of it to begin with," Totenberg says.

"It took three years of the Supreme Court striking down essential New Deal legislation at the height of the Depression for him to make his proposal to add justices to the Court.".

At that point it was just a couple of days before she died and she couldn't talk anymore, but [Ginsburg's] daughter said she raised her hand to wave when I [said goodbye.].

I think that she regretted that Trump was president, I think that's patently obvious from some of the impolitic things that she said and shouldn't have said, on one occasion, anyway, but that's just not the way she operated.

I don't think she even acknowledged the possibility of really dying before a new president — whether it would be Trump or Biden — was sworn in.

I don't think she really acknowledged that genuine possibility that she was going to die before then until maybe a couple of weeks before she died.

On covering Judge Clarence Thomas' Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991 and breaking the story that Anita Hill had submitted an affidavit about sexual harassment that the Judiciary Committee had ignored.

It's true that it was ignored, but it's also true that she really didn't want her name to be public.

that she didn't really think I could get the affidavit and that therefore she would not have to come forward.

When I broke that story, I thought that there was a 50/50 chance it would just die, because if she left her house and was unreachable and didn't talk to anybody else in the news media, it would have died, without a human face.

Often, in the beginning, I was the only woman in the newsroom, or one of two women in the newsroom, and that's the way it was for a very long time.

Often, in the beginning, I was the only woman in the newsroom, or one of two women in the newsroom, and that's the way it was for a very long time.

On how NPR had women reporters when other news outlets didn't.

They didn't like us because we were women

The salaries were really unforgivably low, and that's why we were mainly women in the newsroom