It’s the weirdest feeding frenzy of the week that doesn’t include the words “Sergey Kislyak.” It’s Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s twice-a-week workout.
I stopped my Google count on “Ruth Bader Ginsburg workout” after I hit 85 different media stories—all posted within the last few days. Among the outlets: ESPN, Cosmopolitan, Health, Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Travel and Leisure, Mashable, the Forward, and Tablet.
The 83-year-old Ginsburg’s fitness regimen has been a staple for otherwise bored reporters for years. In 1999, as she was recovering from colon cancer, her husband, Martin, who died in 2010, insisted that she hire a personal trainer to help her regain her fitness and strength (she has since survived a bout with pancreatic cancer). “When I started, I looked like a survivor of Auschwitz,” is one of Ginsburg’s oft-quoted lines. “Now I’m up to 20 push-ups.”
But the Ginsburg Workout got its recent burst of mo when 27-year-old Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger filed a February 27 story detailing his efforts to duplicate her twice-a-week routine in the Supreme Court gym under the supervision of her fitness trainer, 52-year-old Bryant Johnson. Schreckinger duly hauled his body through more than an hour’s worth of squats, leg curls, dumbbell curls, lat pull-downs, planks, bench-presses, and push-ups. He wrote:
Once Schreckinger’s story went online, the rest of the media went crazy. Ginsburg is already a liberal pet as “the notorious RBG,” the Supreme Court’s most ultra-liberal justice, beloved for her consistent votes in favor of whatever progressive position happens to be in style at the moment—gay marriage, gun control, abortion rights, you name it. Here’s a sample of the gush, from Teen Vogue:
Only here and there in the conservative media did anyone consider it odd that a 27-year-old man described himself as struggling through the fitness regimen of an 83-year-old woman. This from the Daily Caller:
Of course there’s a reason for that fetish. Ginsburg, besides being the most liberal justice on the Court, is also its oldest justice. It’s crucial to liberals that she not retire during the Trump presidency, which could endure until 2025, when Ginsburg would be 91. President Trump’s current Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, would merely be a conservative-to-conservative swap, filling the vacancy left by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in 2016. If Ginsburg—or one of the other high court liberals—can’t make it to a post-Trump presidency, the Supreme Court could make an ideological shift to a solid conservative majority, a scary prospect for liberals.
No wonder they’re pinning their hopes on those bench presses in the Supreme Court gym.
