In what we can assume was a joke, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that if Donald Trump wins the presidential election, she’ll consider moving. In an interview with The New York Times published Sunday, the Supreme Court justice, whose peers traditionally avoid political topics like the plague, said her husband, who died in 2010, would have said, “Now it’s time for us to move to New Zealand.”
“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.”
As The Hill adds, Ginsburg, 83, said she will not leave her job “as long as I can do it full steam.” But she mentioned that that Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen G. Breyer are no longer young, alluding to the effect the presidential election will have on the court.
As the NYT adds, her colleagues have said nothing in public about the presidential campaign or about Mr. Obama’s stalled nomination of Judge Merrick B. Garland to the Supreme Court. But Justice Ginsburg was characteristically forthright, offering an unequivocal endorsement of Judge Garland to fill the vacancy left by the death of Antonin Scalia.
“I think he is about as well qualified as any nominee to this court,” she said. “Super bright and very nice, very easy to deal with. And super prepared. He would be a great colleague.”
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.”
We now await Trump’s tweeted response, together with Bader Ginsburg’s one-way ticket to Wellington fedexed courtesy of the Trump campaign.
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