The current nominee for U.S. Supreme Court justice, Amy Coney Barrett, should be approved. She is intellectually and personally equipped to join that august body.

However, at the same time, the Supreme Court should be expanded from nine justices to 11. This is “reparation” — literally the repairing of a wrong — for the two irregular, precedent-breaking, behaviors of the Republican-majority Senate for refusing to hear and process the nomination of Merrick Garland by the then-president, Barack Obama, and for breaking its own excuse for doing so by rushing to confirm President Donald Trump’s nominee.

To prevent the country’s disillusion with the highest court in the land and the third branch of government, it is necessary to right the wrong. Republicans cannot support a Justice Barrett who believes in originalism and precedent by breaking precedents themselves. It signals hypocrisy and weakens our system of government.

In order to begin the process of healing our nation after four years of political demolition derby led by an irregular charismatic leader who rode a “movement” of a minority of voters to the highest office in the land and then began to smash the furniture of our institutions, we need first to acknowledge the wrongs that must be righted.

Amy Coney Barrett would not be a judge today were it not for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life and achievements. RBG was more than a Supreme Court justice; she was the MLK for all women in the United States. She dedicated herself to breaking down the walls of male prejudice against women and making it possible for women to enter any and all schools, training programs and positions that are open to equally qualified men.

She, herself, went to law school at a time when nearly all women had the doors of graduate professional education closed in their faces.

Case in point: A female student said to Stanford University’s academic dean, circa 1960: “I would like to apply to medical school.”

Stanford dean: “You can’t go to medical school. If you go, then you will just get married, have children, and prevent a man from becoming a doctor. Your son can go to medical school.”

That student — a scholarship student from a blue-collar town — was me. I did marry (a doctor), and my daughter became a doctor, graduating with honors; after age 54, I earned a doctorate — in history.

The stark difference between my generation of gifted women, who were “allowed” to become teachers, nurses and secretaries and my daughter’s generation to whom nearly all doors to workplace aspiration and achievement were opened, was Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Unfortunately, too many curious young women, such as Barrett, never looked back and never appropriately thanked my peers, the groundbreaking women who in the 1970s stood up and marched and shouted and battered down the doors of male oppression.

So, we will thank ourselves, and we have — by raising daughters who have never thought of themselves as inferior beings who must stay in “their place” and who have realized their dreams.

I believe Barrett deserves her place on the Supreme Court and that the Democrats of this country deserve the two nominations to the Supreme Court that they were and are being denied. We cannot move on to repair this country of the horrific radical dualism, inflicted upon it by Donald Trump and his Senate quislings, until the Supreme 11 are in place. That is the first order of business for the Biden-Harris administration.

Honolulu resident Jean E. Rosenfeld, Ph.D., is the author/editor of two academic volumes, one on history and one on political terrorism, as well as of academic articles.