Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to her naysayers: ‘I am very much alive’

“There was a senator, I think it was after my pancreatic cancer, who announced with great glee that I was going to be dead within six months,” Ginsburg said in an interview with NPR. “That senator, whose name I have forgotten, is now himself dead, and I am very much alive.”

Bunning later apologized for his comments. He died in 2017.

The anchor of the Supreme Court’s liberal bloc, Ginsburg recently had her third bout with cancer, which was discovered after she fractured three ribs in a fall at her office at the Supreme Court in November. The 86-year-old had surgery in December to remove cancerous nodules found in her lung and returned to the bench in February.

Ginsburg’s cancer diagnosis, however, prompted questions as to her future on the Supreme Court and led to conspiracy theories about her health when she finally made her debut back on the bench. Her health issues also raised alarms among progressives that President Trump may have the opportunity to fill her seat, which would expand the high court’s conservative majority from 5-4 to 6-3.

Recovery from the surgery to treat her lung cancer kept Ginsburg off the bench for several weeks, making the first time she missed oral arguments in her 25 years on the Supreme Court. But the justice reviewed transcripts and briefs in argued cases she was not on the bench to hear. It was her work as a member of the court, Ginsburg said, that “saved” her.

“I had to concentrate on reading the briefs, doing a draft of an opinion, and I knew it had to get done,” she told NPR. “So I had to get past whatever my aches and pains were just to do the job.”

Ginsburg, known to her admirers as “Notorious RBG,” was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Bill Clinton. She was treated for colon cancer in 1999 and pancreatic cancer in 2009.