Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg lives up to her nickname, Notorious RBG, in a New York Times interview in which she derides Donald Trump and the Republican Senate, and looks back on a Supreme Court term that could have gone drastically worse had Antonin Scalia lived through it.
On Trump:
"I can't imagine what this place would be—I can’t imagine what the country would be—with Donald Trump as our president,” she said. “For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be — I don’t even want to contemplate that.”
Speaking of which:
Asked if the Senate had an obligation to assess Judge Garland’s qualifications, her answer was immediate.
“That’s their job,” she said. “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being president in his last year.”
On the upside of deadlocked court, in the instance of President Obama's immigration orders:
“Think what would have happened had Justice Scalia remained with us,” she said. Instead of a single sentence announcing the tie, she suggested, a five-justice majority would have issued a precedent-setting decision dealing a lasting setback to Mr. Obama and the immigrants he had tried to protect.
And on the triumphs of this session, affirmative action and abortion, she applauds rock-solid decisions. “I don’t expect that we’re going to see another affirmative action case, at least in education.” On abortion:
The decision itself, she said, had a message that transcended the particular restrictions before the court.
“It says: ‘No laws that are meant to deny a woman her right to choose,’” she said.
Asked about the future of the court, she said "I’d love to see Citizens United overruled," and is looking forward to a likely Democratic president, because "It means that I’ll be among five more often than among four."
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