WASHINGTON — (CNN) Like many others, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg might have miscalculated about the election.
Back in 2013, Ginsburg revealed that she did not feel pressure to retire.
“I think it’s going to be another Democratic president,” after Obama, she told The Washington Post. “The Democrats do fine in presidential elections; their problem is they can’t get out the vote in the midterm elections.”
The diminutive justice, a trailblazer in gender discrimination law who enjoys near rockstar status among young fans — has been repeatedly asked over the years about retirement. It’s not that she shows any signs of slowing down — indeed she is as incisive as ever from the bench and boasts about her workout routine.
But she is, after all, 83 years old and has survived two bouts of cancer.
In recent years she’s hinted that part of her retirement calculation depended upon the fact that a Democrat would succeed President Barack Obama.
Elle Magazine asked in 2014 her whether she would resign while Obama is in office.
Ginsburg noted the Senate would be an issue for the President with a GOP filibuster.
“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,” she said. “[Senate Democrats] 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.”
And then last summer she went on a tirade against Donald Trump. She called him a “faker” to CNN’s legal analyst Joan Biskupic. “He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment.”
And to The New York Times’ Adam Liptak she had this to say: “I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president.
She added: “For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be — I don’t even want to contemplate that.”
It reminded her of She told Liptak that it reminded her of something her husband, Martin D. Ginsburg, a prominent tax lawyer who died in 2010, would have said: “‘Now it’s time for us to move to New Zealand.’”
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