The Washington Post has a lengthy profile on Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, now 80, and the mounting pressure she faces to decide how much longer she should sit on the bench.
We've pulled the best parts.
When she'll quit: “When I can’t do the job, there will be signs,” Ginsburg said. “I know that Justice [John Paul] Stevens [who retired when he was 90] was concerned the last few years about his hearing. I’ve had no loss of hearing yet. But who knows when it could happen?
“So all I can say is what I’ve already said: At my age, you take it year by year.”
She fell asleep during the 2010 State of the Union because she had been drinking beforehand: In Santa Fe, she said she was making do with following the Royal Canadian Air Force calisthenics routine and laughingly told friends that it was not fatigue that caused her to drift off during the president’s address.
There was a big dinner beforehand, she said — “and a very good California wine that [Supreme Court Associate Justice] Tony Kennedy brought.”
She once went parasailing and Justice Antonin Scalia thought it was crazy: Scalia remembers being with her on one of the cushy summer teaching jobs that Supreme Court justices get, this one on the French Riviera. “She went off parasailing!” he said. “This little skinny thing, you’d think she’d never come down. She was sailing off a motor boat in the Mediterranean, way up in the sky, my God. I would never do that.”
She thinks the next president will be a Democrat: “I think it’s going to be another Democratic president” after Obama, Ginsburg said. “The Democrats do fine in presidential elections; their problem is they can’t get out the vote in the midterm elections.”
