Her death is deeply unfortunate, not just for her family, but for the polity she served, and on many levels.

To start, it makes clear how perverse "life tenure" on SCOTUS has become when people live so long.  You can protect judges from political influence by giving them term-limited tenures that will extend beyond the terms of political actors:  in the U.S., that would be 15 or 20 years.  Many will complain, not unreasonably, that she should have stepped down during Obama's term.  In retrospect, she should have, but recall the Merrick Garland fiasco.

The real problem, of course, is that SCOTUS is a super-legislature–here is a popular explanation and a more jurisprudential one of this point–and so the prospect that a Democratic member of the super-legislture will be replaced by a Republican one is a serious matter.  The Nazi Senator from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, will surely try to ram one through, notwithstanding his obviously spurious claim last time around that the election should decide Justice Scalia's replacement (his absurd rationale for why Judge Garland of the DC Circuit, whom Obama nominated, should not be even considered).  If the Republicans succeed in appointing a new justice to the super-legislature, then in the next Democratic Administration (assuming there is one), SCOTUS membership will either be vastly expanded to counteract this reactionary court-packing or its jurisdiction will be stripped so that it becomes a less relevant super-legislature.

Even worse, the SCOTUS vacancy will be used by Trump to mobilize the reactionary Christian vote, which understands–albeit through multiple layers of ideological confusion–that SCOTUS is a super-legislature that might overrule the legal provision of abortion, among other issues reactionary Christians dream about in the hovels of America.

Justice Ginsburg has come to look better the more reactionary the court has become.  She was a disappointing appointment by President Clinton 25+ years ago, like Justice Breyer:  a centrist Democrat (before Centrist Democrat meant 1970s Republican), with a strong record on gender equality, but not much else.  She was not nearly as forthright  as Justice Scalia, for example, in the 2004 Hamdi case, one of the benchmark cases for whether this is an authoritarian country or not.

Appointments in Samarra tend not to respect political needs, but this one may have dramatic ramifications into the future, alas.