In different circumstances, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg might be on a valedictory tour in her final months on the US Supreme Court.
However, in the era of US President Donald Trump, the 84-year-old Ginsburg is packing her schedule and sending signals she intends to keep her seat on the bench for years.
The oldest Supreme Court justice has produced two of the court’s four signed opinions so far this term. Outside court, she is the subject of a new documentary that includes video of her working out.
Photo: AP
She has also hired law clerks to take her through June 2020, just four months before the next presidential election.
Soaking in her late-in-life emergence as a liberal icon, she is using the court’s month-long break to embark on a speaking tour that is taking her from the Sundance Film Festival in Utah to law schools and synagogues on the east coast.
One talk will have her in Rhode Island tomorrow, meaning she will not attend the president’s State of the Union speech that night in Washington.
She has a standard response for interviewers who ask how long she intends to serve.
She will stay as long as she can go “full steam,” she has said, and she sees as her model John Paul Stevens, who stepped down as a justice in 2010 at age 90.
“I think that Justice Ginsburg has made clear that she has no intention of retiring. I am sure she wants to stay on the court until the end of the Trump presidency if she can,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, and a liberal who called on Ginsburg to retire in 2014, when Barack Obama was US president and Democrats controlled the Senate.
However, “no one can know whether she will be on the court on Jan. 20, 2021, if Trump serves one term, let alone Jan. 20, 2025, if he is re-elected,” he said.
Ginsburg does not talk about Trump in public anymore, not since she criticized him in interviews with The Associated Press and other media outlets before the 2016 election. The comments prompted Trump to tweet that “Her mind is shot - resign!” She later apologized.
Ginsburg, who declined to comment for this story, this year marks the 25th anniversary of her nomination by then-US president Bill Clinton and her confirmation as the second woman on the court.
When her husband, Martin Ginsburg, died in 2010, she said she did not think much about stepping down. If anything, since Stevens’ retirement, she has become more outspoken and visible as the leader of the court’s liberal wing.
Two childhood friends from New York City, say “Kiki,” the nickname they still use for Ginsburg, has kept the same busy schedule for years.
“I don’t think she’s slowing down. That’s for sure,” said Ann Kittner, a friend since their days at James Madison High School.
Harryette Helsel, who has known Ginsburg since kindergarten, said she has joked with Ginsburg: “We’re retired. Why are you working so hard?”
They both laughed.
Helsel pointed to Ginsburg’s workout routine, which has been in the spotlight in recent years. Ginsburg started working out with a trainer in 1999 after being treated for colorectal cancer. She does an hour twice a week.
A book on the workout by her trainer, with a foreword by Ginsburg, came out last year.
RBG, a documentary about the justice that premiered at Sundance, includes video of her doing pushups and throwing a weighted ball, among other exercises.
While pulling on a resistance band, she tells her trainer: “This is light.”
That video might surprise visitors to the court, who can be struck by how slowly Ginsburg moves, her head often bowed, when the court session ends for the day and justices leave the bench in full view of the audience.
Justices Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan have taken to waiting until Ginsburg exits because she otherwise would be left by herself as she makes her way to the justices’ robing room.
However, she has walked at a deliberate pace for years. Once, after remaining seated well after the other justices had departed, she said that she had accidentally kicked off a shoe during the arguments and could not locate it with her feet.
Ginsburg’s friend Ann Claire Williams, a newly retired federal appeals court judge, said sometimes people get the wrong idea from Ginsburg’s small stature and think she is frail.
“She is so spry,” Williams said, adding that Ginsburg’s mind is also sharp and her recall on cases “extraordinary.”
She has been counted out before, wrongly.
When Ginsburg had a second cancer surgery, for pancreatic cancer in 2009, then US-senator Jim Bunning, a Republican, inelegantly forecast that she would die within a year. He later apologized.
In a speech just over a year later, Ginsburg said: “I am pleased to report that, contrary to Sen. Bunning’s prediction, I am alive and in good health.”
Bunning died last year.
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