From an Elle interview:
[Elle reporter:] I’m not sure how to ask this, but a lot of people who admire and respect you wonder if you’ll resign while President Obama is in office.
[Justice Ginsburg:] Who do you think President Obama could appoint at this very day, given the boundaries that we have? If I resign any time this year, he could not successfully appoint anyone I would like to see in the court. [The Senate Republicans [sic]] took off the filibuster for lower federal court appointments, but it remains for this court. So anybody who thinks that if I step down, Obama could appoint someone like me, they’re misguided. As long as I can do the job full steam…. I think I’ll recognize when the time comes that I can’t any longer. But now I can.
I won’t argue with Justice Ginsburg on this one.
Note to the crack political team at Elle: It was Senate Democrats, not Republicans, who abolished the filibuster for lower-court (and executive) nominees. [Update: The error has been corrected.]
In more Ginsburg news, the Washington Post political-gossip column reports that opera star Denyce Graves sang “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” at a Supreme Court event yesterday that featured Ginsburg. I’m sorry to have missed the sight of Ginsburg clapping along with this hymn. I do wonder whether she joined in singing the second stanza, “He’s got the itty bitty baby in His hands.”
Addendum: A reader calls to my attention this passage from a Washington Post article on Denyce Graves:
She was dumped by a boyfriend who no longer wished to follow her around the world. She found herself heartbroken and sick and finally went to a doctor who said he had news — at 39, she was with child. Impossible, she replied: Throughout her previous 17-year marriage she tried repeatedly to get pregnant, but was told it could never happen because of fibroids and various other conditions. Besides, her then-lover had told her he’d had a vasectomy, she says.
But she was pregnant. The doctors urged her to abort, she says, because she wouldn’t be able to carry to term. Then, Graves says, she was told the child had Down syndrome.
But in 2004 she delivered a healthy baby girl — “and she’s perfect.”
So one of the most celebrated mezzo-sopranos of her day became a single mother to a daughter named Ella Thomas, ferrying the infant to concert halls around the world.
I wonder if Ginsburg has shared with Graves her ugly thoughts on those “populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”