Supreme Court Justice and liberal lioness Ruth Bader Ginsburg granted press interviews in her chambers last Friday, a rare-ish event that’s been making waves because the 83-year-old jurist twice said she would basically prefer to imagine a world without Donald Trump as president. And I dig that too, for I also would not like to imagine a world where a golf course-building xenophobe—who has “forced his pathetic assemblage of voters, political enablers, and media hangers-on to debase themselves,”—is the one making big, American decisions.
“For the country, it could be four years,” she told The New York Times. “For the court, it could be—I don’t even want to contemplate that.”
“I don’t want to think about that possibility,” she told the AP, “but if it should be, then everything is up for grabs.”
Later in the AP interview, Ginsburg suggested the next president, “whomever she will be”—perhaps a nod to Hillary Clinton, or Jill Stein, or an umbrage to male-dominated pronouns—”will have a few appointments to make,” a reference to a number of aging SCOTUS Justices, including Anthony M. Kennedy (79) and Stephen G. Breyer (77), and maybe even RBG herself, who is now 83. Ginburg told the Times she remains in her role “as long as I can do it full steam.”
Ginsburg also said that Merrick Garland, President Obama’s pick to replace Antonin Scalia, who died in February, is “about as well qualified as any nominee to this court.”
“He would be a great colleague,” she added.
Ginsburg also spoke out against Citizens United (“I want to see [it] overruled”) while also adding her take on a number of decisions throughout her career,
Not everybody was pleased with Ginsburg’s comments, however, as The Washington Post ‘s, Aaron Blake pointed out.
“I find it baffling actually that she says these things,” said Arthur Hellman, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “She must know that she shouldn’t be. However tempted she might be, she shouldn’t be doing it.”
Similarly, Howard Wolfson, a former top aide to Hillary Clinton and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, said Ginsburg shouldn’t have said it.
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Jonathan Zalman is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn.
