A Week After Achieving Hero Status, Liberals Repeat Calls for Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Retire

It’s no secret that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s blistering Hobby Lobby dissent earned her hero status on the left. Planned Parenthood tweeted about her. RBG memes exploded on the Internet. Someone even turned her 35-page dissent into a music video.

But now some of her biggest fans want to give her the boot.

Pundits on the left are calling for Ginsburg, 81, to retire before November’s midterm elections, so that President Obama can nominate Ginsburg’s successor while the Democrats still control the senate, The Hill reports.  If Ginsburg retires after the midterm elections and Republicans do take back control of the Senate, Obama will have a much harder time nominating a successor who is as liberal as Ginsburg, they claim.

Supreme Court Justices are appointed for life, but they can choose to either retire or resign.  Once they do, the president nominates a successor, but the successor must then be confirmed by the Senate. If the Senate and the President belong to the same party, the confirmation process is much smoother and “the president virtually always gets who the president wants confirmed,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine, told The Hill.

That’s why some liberals think that now is an opportune time for Ginsburg to step down.

Let Ginsburg’s Hobby Lobby dissent to be the crowning, concluding moment of her career, posited Elias Isquith, assistant editor of Salon. “Namely, the celebrations of her brilliance fail to recognize that the best thing Ruth Bader Ginsburg could do for the liberal movement right now is, arguably, to call an end to a sterling and trailblazing legal career and step down from the court,” he wrote.

Others say that it is already too late for Ginsburg to step down, because confirming a nominee is a lengthy process and the Senate will soon shift into campaign mode.

Still others believe that Ginsburg should sit tight, because she is the left’s counterweight to the conservative bloc of the court, led boldly by Justice Antonin Scalia.

An even worse case scenario for liberals would be if Ginsburg retired after a Republican took the White House in 2016.  But Ginsburg told The Washington Post that she doesn’t think this scenario will play out, apparently confident that 2016 will usher in another Democratic president.

At 81, Ginsburg is the oldest member of the Supreme Court. She has battled cancer twice and has ended two court terms with broken ribs. However, she insists that when she is no longer physically able to do her job, “there will be signs,” citing the hearing loss of a fellow justice as an example.

Ultimately, Ginsburg’s message for liberals clamoring for her retirement is likely akin to what she told The Washington Post in 2013: “So all I can say is what I’ve already said: At my age, you take it year by year.”