White House gearing up to replace RBG
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This jibes with some really bad stuff I keep hearing through the grapevine about Ginsburg’s current health:
The White House is reaching out to political allies and conservative activist groups to prepare for an ailing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s possible death or departure from the Supreme Court — an event that would trigger the second bitter confirmation battle of President Donald Trump’s tenure.
The outreach began after Ginsburg, 85, on Monday missed oral arguments at the court for the first time in her 25 years on the bench. The justice, who was nominated to the court by President Bill Clinton in 1993, announced in late December that she underwent a surgical procedure to remove two cancerous growths from her lungs.
(2) Ginsburg is a very talented judge, in purely technical terms, and the SCOTUS needs very talented judges. The apparent calculation here is that the hypothesized difference in jurisprudential abilities between Ginsburg and her successor may be big enough to outweigh the likely damage done by replacing her with a GOP nominee, discounted for the probability of the latter happening. This belief strikes me as being actually more absurd than (1), if that’s possible.
Ginsburg made a horrible decision by not retiring in 2014, as did Breyer, so this has nothing to do with holding women to different standards than men, despite the evidence-free claims people make in that regard. Ginsburg is obviously under more scrutiny in this regard because of the increasingly obvious precariousness of her health.
She has a moral obligation to stay on the Court through the end of next year, even if that means outsourcing most or even all of her work to her clerks.