Ginsburg Rebuts Retirement

President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nightmare might come true if the GOP can recapture the Senate in 2014.  

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says she has no interest in retiring now so that Obama can pick a younger successor and guarantee her seat will remain liberal. Ginsburg, 80, has already fought cancer twice and even broken her ribs in a fall in May, but she insists she is in excellent health, and she may wish to match the length of the first Jewish justice’s term before she retires (Louis Brandeis served for 23 years, and Ginsburg started serving in 1993).

Harvard University law professor Randall Kennedy has argued that she should step down so Obama can guarantee her seat remain a liberal one. But Ginsburg said: “It really has to be, ‘Am I equipped to do the job?’ I was so pleased that this year I couldn’t see that I was slipping in any respect.” 

She referred to former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s early retirement in 2006 when she was 75 to care for her ailing husband, saying, “I wonder if Sandra regrets stepping down when she did?”