Jehovah Jehovah Jehovah!

You’re only making it worse for yourself:

For years, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg batted away pleas for her to retire from the nation’s highest court while Democrats controlled the White House and the Senate, saying that concerns about her health and age were much ado about nothing.

“Tell me who the president could have nominated this spring,” she told a reporter in 2014, “that you would rather see on the court than me?”

That Cult of RBG thing sure worked out great didn’t it?

Now, with a razor-thin Senate majority and President Joe Biden in the White House, progressives are becoming concerned that history is repeating itself yet again with Justice Stephen Breyer, the eldest member of the nine-person court and the senior-most justice of the court’s liberal wing.

“Law professors are supposed to speak respectfully of these people and in hushed tones about Justice Breyer and all that, but he’s being an idiot,” said Professor Paul Campos of the University of Colorado in Boulder. “And a selfish idiot, to boot.”

Well there goes my Supreme Court nomination.

I see no point in being polite about this any more. 43% of the problem here is that people like Breyer and Ginsburg spend literally decades having an endless parade of their political and legal allies suck up to them, in the hope of placing a former student in a clerkship or getting a cite to an article in a SCOTUS opinion (via that same student naturally), or maybe even snagging a federal judgeship for themselves some day.

Since I don’t care about any of that stuff I figure I might as well keep them hopping till my ammunition’s gone.

“He’s behaving abominably,” said Campos. “I’m hoping that Joe Biden or whoever can call upon, you know, the better angels of our nature to the extent that they exist, to get him to do the right thing.”

Something else I said that didn’t get into the article, which needs to be pointed out again and again in various contexts, is that these people are always inventing absurd supposedly public-regarding justifications for intensely selfish decisions. So Breyer cooks up a bunch of nonsense about how if he quits that will cast doubt on the non-partisan and non-political nature of the Supreme Court, which means he just has to keep the job he just happens to want to keep more than anything else in the world.

A similar dynamic has played out in big time college sports for decades, where the most stalwart defenders of the Noble Ideal of Amateur Athletics were the very same people hauling down multi-million dollar salaries from all the surplus revenue that wasn’t going to the “amateur” athletes who were generating it. How very convenient.

. . . Another point I meant to add was that, leaving aside everything else, it’s just ridiculous that people hold onto SCOTUS seats for 20 or 30 or more years. There’s no justification for that, even without regard to the dysfunctions of the current replacement process.