The graveyards of indispensable men
By 
I got a rueful laugh from all the speculation that maybe Stephen Breyer wasn’t retiring because he just wanted to give his former clerk Ketanji Brown Jackson some more time on the DC circuit, so that it would be “easier” for her to be confirmed to replace him.
Justice Stephen Breyer has not decided when he will retire and is especially gratified with his new role as the senior liberal on the bench, he told CNN in an exclusive interview — his first public comments amid the incessant speculation of a Supreme Court vacancy.
Far from Washington and the pressures of the recently completed session and chatter over his possible retirement, Breyer, a 27-year veteran of the high court, said Wednesday that two factors will be overriding in his decision.
“Primarily, of course, health,” said Breyer, who will turn 83 in August. “Second, the court.”
What’s really going on here is that the authoritarian ethno-nationalism that the Republican party is attempting to install in this country just isn’t that big a deal for people like Breyer, because they are almost completely insulated from its harsher consequences.
This is also why all the morons who treated Ruth Bader Ginsburg as if she were some sort indispensable icon of feminism, as opposed to what she actually is — whoops, was — that is, an eminently replaceable cog in a machine that is now far more likely to run all of us over, might as well have been Federalist Society saboteurs.
Not that clueless narcissists like Breyer and Ginsburg need much encouragement to put their own interests before that of the country. In that regard they are no different than Donald Trump.