The question facing Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Stay or go?
Who dreamed up this bit of kismet? How did the stars align to make this spot of New Mexico desert the best place in the world on a late summer evening to be Ruth Bader Ginsburg?
Ginsburg is doing what she always does this time of year. On a respite from one of her passions — the law — she is indulging the others: opera and family. Ginsburg considers the Santa Fe Opera the finest summer opera company in the world. For years, first with her late husband, Marty, and now with her children and grandchildren, she spends a week in Santa Fe, in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and when she returns east she says to herself: “What happened to my sky?”
There are tours of the countryside and hikes in the hills. There is VIP access to the works of Georgia O’Keeffe. There are sumptuous dinners prepared by her daughter, Jane, that last until 2:30 in the morning.
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There are no set rules for when a justice leaves her lifetime appointment, although for Ginsburg there is no shortage of advice. The first justice nominated by a Democratic president in 26 years when President Bill Clinton chose her, she has been nudged to leave ever since the election of another Democratic president who could choose her replacement.
The court has four consistent liberals, including Ginsburg, and four consistent conservatives, and the justice in the middle, Anthony M. Kennedy, is a Ronald Reagan-nominee who more often than not sides with conservatives. If the court’s membership does not change before the 2016 election, the new president would see a Supreme Court with four of its nine members older than 77, including half of the liberal bloc.
“The reality of the court, and the parties, these days is that Ginsburg ... should know that a justice selected by President Rubio or President Jindal or President Cruz is going to produce a very different nation than one selected by Barack Obama,” wrote political scientist Jonathan Bernstein in The Washington Post. He was not the first.
Every Supreme Court justice, of course, is an expert in how presidential politics and timing and ambition and luck combine to produce a nomination. Ginsburg, for instance, never would have made history as the second woman to serve on the high court if George H.W. Bush had won reelection in 1992.
full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/the-question-facing-ruth-bader-ginsburg-stay-or-go/2013/10/04/4d789e28-1574-11e3-a2ec-b47e45e6f8ef_story.html
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That's the article I read.
