Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She’s tough. And you do have to admire that, whatever your political persuasion.
But she also is recovering from lung cancer. I read on the AT&T news website that that cancer has only an 18 percent chance of survival. Although they may have caught it early.
She plans on being on the court at least another 5 years. And I don’t mean to be morbid or indelicate. But is chance on her side to do that? It is a perfectly valid question I think.
Oh, and BTW, I dispute the suggestion she is a liberal. I would call her a moderate. But that’s just me;).
IIRC, other Justices have been rumored to have lingered on the bench with various health and personality issues, letting their clerks do most of the heavy lifting of crafting their judicial opinions, so this isn’t unprecedented. And if I’m not mistaken, there’s a great deal of leeway given the Justice’s determination of whether s/he can continue to perform the duties of their office. Short answer, she has as long as she wants, provided she doesn’t actually die.
She’s fought off a lot of diseases that would have killed most of the rest of us. Who survives pancreatic cancer?
An oldie (2005) but a goodie from Con Law professor at GW Law, Jonathan Turley, on previous Supreme Court Justices afflicted with various ailments, who nonetheless continued to serve on the bench.
So, even if Ginsburg right now is hooked up to more machines at home than Steve Austin in the opening sequence of The Six Million Dollar Man, she gets to call it quits when she, and only she, wants to. Unless she dies, of course.
I’m sort of surprised that Turley didn’t mention Justice Fortas as someone who hung onto his seat after he should have stepped down for personal reasons. Thought he was the poster child for this sort of thing, though the story of Justice Frank Murphy trying to score illegal drugs twice a day for his addiction was one I hadn’t heard before.
She could, theoretically, be impeached, but it’s exceedingly rare, and given the current partisan split in the House and Senate almost certainly not a realistic outcome.
I’m sure this is tongue in cheek, but I’d bet anything that the GOP would abandon those “principles” and ram through a nominee on January 19th 2021 if they could.
Wilson was pretty much not able to function for the last year he was in office . His wife shielded him from most everyone. But the 25th amendment was not adopted until 1967 after JFK was killed. There was a fear that Kennedy (or any president) might have survived the gunshots but left unable to function.
I thought her lung cancer nodes were all completely removed, meaning that the lung cancer isn’t an issue; not like it metastasized.
Furthermore, even if she goes into a coma, she can’t be removed from office. Only outright death will do it, and with modern technology, she would most likely last at least until a Democrat becomes president.
RBG reportedly had a prior fight with pancreatic cancer. The lung is one of the most common sites for metastasis of pancreatic cancer. So it is at least possible that the recent cancerous nodes removed from her lung are a spread from her prior pancreatic cancer. Or, after so much time apparently without a recurrence, the recent cancerous nodes could be a new cancer entirely.
I’m inclined to agree with Ditka: it’s the beginning of the end. Ginsburg is of sound mind, but physically frail even before the surgery. And now she’s battling the big C again.
I think the WaPo is whistling past the graveyard with that statement. LOL at the idea of giving an 85 year old systemic chemotherapy. It’s her choice though.
Another possibility, and one that better fits the publicly available evidence, is that the docs cut out what they could, patched her up as well as possible, and discharged her to palliative care in a private, non-hospital setting. IMHO, I’m not a doctor, but I do read guesses from them, and that hypo better fits the data.
OK, my morbid joke: she needs to make out a living will requiring that if she should fall into a coma, she be put on artificial life support if at all possible until January 21, 2021, at which point it may be withdrawn.
