Ruth Bader Ginsburg Discharged From Hospital Five Days After Cancer Surgery
Justices report back to work on January 4.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg returned home on Tuesday, five days after she underwent surgery to remove two cancerous nodules from her lung. From CNBC:
The court said that after the surgery no further treatment was planned, and that there was no evidence of remaining disease.
The Christmas Day discharge came the same day that a movie chronicling the justice’s early legal career, “On the Basis of Sex,” was released to the public.
The procedure removed two malignant nodules that were discovered incidentally during tests Ginsburg received while being treated for rib fractures sustained in a fall last month. Ginsburg said earlier this month that she has almost fully recovered from the rib injury.
Ezra Klein at Vox whined about the possibility of President Donald Trump having to fill Ginsburg’s seat, which would lead to a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court. He may have a point since Ginsburg has now faced cancer three times and she fell last month that left her with broken ribs.
Klein said the justice is “bearing the weight of American liberalism on her shoulders.” Therefore, Klein wants justices to have term limits.
Here’s the thing. The Supreme Court is about the Constitution, a document that doesn’t hold a conservative or liberal view. The justices have to interpret the Constitution, which is not hard to do. The Bill of Rights has the most plain and simple language.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
and yet so many Justices over the years have found all sorts of things in it that aren’t there… and not seen the things that are.
i’m still rooting for pneumonia in this case.
between her ribs and this surgery, it could be just the thing.
I’m certainly not one to criticize, but I don’t think it’s seemly to be wishing for her death on the Professor’s forum. It sounds so much like what the hateful liberals always do.
When I read red’s comment hours ago I didn’t take it that he was wishing she would die. Maybe I’m biased and seeing things through my personal prism, but I took it that he was wishing she would just take the hint and retire. And that it’s going to have to be glaringly obvious before she does take the hint.
I don’t know how much time she’ll have to spend in the hospital recovering from one thing after another before she gets a clue that even the minimal amount of work a SCOTUS justice has to put in is still too much for a frail 85 y.o. like her. Apparently a lot. And while I don’t wish death on her, by my cold calculation if she refuses to get a clue and remains terminally stubborn and dies on the job it’s her own damned fault.
Is there some sort of mental acuity requirement for Supreme Court Justices? She has to be on pain medication, and possible other medications that can affect her mental abilities. And how humane and sympathetic is it to push an 85 year old woman into a work schedule that she may not be able to maintain?
And how humane and sympathetic is it to push an 85 year old woman into a work schedule that she may not be able to maintain?
Oh, it’s not all that much work. She can just sleep through the arguments.
She can sleep through the votes and they’ll just log them anyway. It’s not as if she’s inscrutable. As Sotomayor goes, so goes Sleepy.
Being RBG is a snap, sit in session, ask a question or two, vote the democrat party line, have your clerks do all the rest of the work. She can stay home about 355 days a year and still get paid full time.
I Believe there is nothing magical or special about any of these people, they are no more human or brilliant than anyone else of average ability or intelligence.
If anyone knows anyone about cancer it is that it is never really gone and since she’s had lung cancer before, she’ll have it again. She will never ever give up her seat on the SCOTUS. She will be like Ted Kennedy or John McCain and even if she goes into an end-of-life coma never to recover, she’ll be a sitting justice until she takes her last breath.
Last Breath?? As long as Trump is President, Ginsburg, if needed, would be kept on life support, hydrated and fed. She would still be voting even in a Glasgow Coma Scale of 1. Dialysis, LVAD and ECMO are all on the table to keep her “alive”
Yup. Thinking “Weekend at Bernies.” And when it IS discovered (body parts falling off would be the first clue) Trump will be excoriated as “hounding the woman into her grave.”
I’m just looking forward to the fireworks when Trump nominates Amy Coney Barrett.
“…ask a question or two…”
To make it even easier on the old biddie it can be the same question or two all the time, not matter what case is before the SCOTUS. The questions would be completely irrelevant but her cult following wouldn’t care. They’ll think she’s being deep and insightful.
To make it even easier, so she wouldn’t have to try and remember anything, she could just record the questions and wear a speaker under her robe. That way her clerks could listen in and just play the pre-recorded questions when there’s an opening. Ginsburg could be sitting there, chin on her chest, eyes shut, snoozing away and out would pop a question. Which would complete the optical illusion, at least, as her staff can study where her chin rests when she’s asleep and put the speaker right next to it.
Consider the case of Justice Douglas. He refused to retire despite a stroke and other infirmities. It got to the point where the other justices tacitly agreed to postpone cases in which his would be the deciding vote.
She drinks like a fish and that never bothered anyone.
I realize that Ginsburg has a lifetime appointment, but at the same time I see nothing in the Constitution that prevents the other justices from publicly demanding that the “Weekend At Bernie’s” justice step down.
The way it stands now liberals would demand that her law clerks drag her lifeless body, feet dragging on the floor, from her chambers to the bench, strap her into her chair and hook her up to her oxygen bottle, then at the and of the session drag her back into her chambers and reinstall her into her complete life support chamber. Then write her opinion and affix her thumbprint to it in lieu of a signature.
For the next two years.
That’s pretty much what happens now. Here’s an excerpt from the lefty Mother Jones,
When a Supreme Court session adjourns, the public isn’t allowed to depart until all the justices have left the bench. After the arbitration arguments were gaveled to a close, I got up to leave with the rest of the onlookers. But then everyone stopped. All of the justices had left except for Ginsburg, who was having trouble getting out of her chair. There was an embarrassed silence as members of the press, the bar, and the public tried not to gape as Ginsburg mustered the courage to descend a single step off the bench and finally disappeared behind the red curtain. The contrast between the real-world Ginsburg and the comic-book superheroine of social media was striking.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/11/what-cult-ruth-bader-ginsburg-rbg-got-wrong-obama-trump/
But her workout?
Her “workout” now consists of hitting the morphine pump and drooling on herself
She’s training for the MMA.
I’ll admit that I’m only around 2/3 her age, and when I get up after sitting for a long time, I have similar issues. Still, that’s a bit much.
More than a bit
This situation would be high comedy if it wasn’t so tragic. All the pretending that RBG is still a fully functioning human is ridiculous.
The Supreme Court is about the Constitution
Actually, no. The Constitution didn’t set up a Supreme Court to be final arbiter of its meaning. The SC was originally just another layer of a hierarchy of rather pedestrian federal courts, all provided to resolve conflicts between states, resolve conflicting laws, and that’s about it. The innovation of considering the Constitution as a law—rather than an instruction manual written in plain English—didn’t happen until our fourth Chief Justice decided to jazz up an otherwise excruciatingly unimportant case. But based entirely on that concept, actions of the Legislature and Executive can be second-guessed by the Court, and there’s no further recourse. And that innovation is the sole factor which elevated the Court to the same rarefied plane in government as the Legislature and the Executive.
Of course nowadays we worship this Trinity of Legislative/Executive/Judicial branches as something carved by a divine finger in stone, but history reveals that that was never the intent. If those dead white guys had considered any such thing in 1787, they would never have made a seat on the bench a lifetime appointment. The colonial-era concept of the Court was that it had nothing to do with politics, and should be insulated from transient political fads. Lifetime appointments were the way they chose to do that. But once the Court enabled itself to dabble in the details of the political issues of the day, judges who are answerable to no one became a disaster. Even the “tyrants” of classical antiquity, elected or appointed to deal with transient crises, never held the office for life.
Of course John Marshall’s [mostly] useful insight has been debased by later fancies such as “emanations of penumbras” which give federal courts arbitrary power over the elected portions of government, and there doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can do about it.
“This constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made or which shall be made under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land, and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.” John Marshall did not make that up.
They explicitly said and wrote, hundreds of times, that this was their intent. In fact everybody took it for granted that any just government must separate these three functions. “One of the principal objections inculcated by the more respectable adversaries to the Constitution, is its supposed violation of the political maxim, that the legislative, executive, and judiciary departments ought to be separate and distinct.”
“TO WHAT expedient, then, shall we finally resort, for maintaining in practice the necessary partition of power among the several departments, as laid down in the Constitution? […] In the constitution of the judiciary department in particular, it might be inexpedient to insist rigorously on the principle [of direct election by the people]: first, because peculiar qualifications being essential in the members, the primary consideration ought to be to select that mode of choice which best secures these qualifications; secondly, because the permanent tenure by which the appointments are held in that department, must soon destroy all sense of dependence on the authority conferring them. […]
“By a limited Constitution, I understand one which contains certain specified exceptions to the legislative authority; such, for instance, as that it shall pass no bills of attainder, no ex-post-facto laws, and the like. Limitations of this kind can be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void. Without this, all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing. […] There is no position which depends on clearer principles, than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. […]
“the courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority. The interpretation of the laws is the proper and peculiar province of the courts. A constitution is, in fact, and must be regarded by the judges, as a fundamental law. It therefore belongs to them to ascertain its meaning, as well as the meaning of any particular act proceeding from the legislative body. If there should happen to be an irreconcilable variance between the two, that which has the superior obligation and validity ought, of course, to be preferred; or, in other words, the Constitution ought to be preferred to the statute, the intention of the people to the intention of their agents. […] where the will of the legislature, declared in its statutes, stands in opposition to that of the people, declared in the Constitution, the judges ought to be governed by the latter rather than the former. “
She fell allegedly and broke 3 ribs in November. Then she has some cancerous nodules removed. Now we are told that she is okay! I doubt that all is ok and that she is recovering nicely. We may see an opening on SCOTUS soon.
I wonder if she recognizes anything in the movie beyond her name.
Needle in the paw.
I wish her well in her recovery, but it is many years past the time she should have retired. We can’t have justices sleeping through oral arguments, and not being fully alert or cognizant.
Oral arguments are the least important part of the process.
Is that what you tell you boss when you’re sleeping on the job?
He tells them, “Oral arguments are the least important part of the process.”
Then he gets fired.
What makes you think Milhouse actually has a job?
Least important is not the same as unimportant. If she can’t fulfill her duties then she needs to step down. As should any of them.
^^Best Statement of the Thread^^
The left’s useful idiots have gotten their marching orders regarding Ginsburg, and like the good useful idiots they are, they are marching:
Why We Should Worry About the Cult of RBG:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/12/25/on-the-basis-of-sex-review-rbg-223557
Amazing: the more ignorant, the more arrogant.
TFR, this part of the story really ticked me off. It’s called Borking because dems politicized the whole shebang.
By the standard of civic disagreements in the Trump era, this was a high-minded exchange, and a revealing one. No doubt many liberals found themselves essentially agreeing with Trump:
Republicans have politicized the judicial nomination process, so everyone must look for chances to elevate “our kind” of judges.
Trump will be replacing her within 6 months. Lung cancer in your 80’s is as bad as it gets
What’s funny is that Trump talked to her for a couple of minutes and then told everybody she was going to be gone soon.
I wish her a speedy and full recovery that is as pain free as modern medicine can make it. That being said, her prognosis is not good. With her tendency to fall now, her third round of the Big C and her advanced age I can’t imagine that any credible physician would recommend she continue to work in any capacity. I don’t say this with any hope that it happens but her making it another year would surprise me.
Ginsburg’s doctor follows his hypocratic oath.
Ginsburg makes a mockery of her oath.
The irony isnt lost.
I’m not believing the “no further treatment” part. Not with cancer found in the lungs. They’d also want to examine the removed nodules, and that would take more than a day or two.
I read that “no further treatment” part more as “To old and frail to survive the treatment”.
Or it may be her refusing knowing at her age that taking chemo would basically force retirement.
They operated on her lung where 2 separate nodules were cancerous, yet everything else was fine and no further treatment is needed. I agree with you, it sounds like spin. She will be “working” from home
I had that thought also. They continue to minimize the operation. She had a pulmonary lobectomy. That is an extremely serious operation. That means she no longer has the use of her left lung. Given her age, I wouldn’t be surprised to see her on oxygen.
The left lung in humans has two lobes. RBG had one removed. She’s lost 1/2 of her left lung. That’s 20% of what lung capacity she had.
Still yes, very serious surgery and with the court back in session on the 4th of January two weeks after her surgery;
Like the ruling on asylum. She’ll phone her votes in, which, IMO is a pure-D horse$#!+ way to do things.