Will Ginsburg retire if Clinton wins? She would have powerful position on liberal court
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who at 83 is the oldest justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, would have an incentive to stay on the court if Hillary Clinton becomes president.
Ginsburg and four other justices would be appointed by Democratic presidents. As the most senior justice among those five justices, Ginsburg would have the authority to decide who writes the opinions when those five represent the majority in a 5-4 decision, the Washington Post reports.
That position of power would be “unlike any she has experienced in her more than two decades on the court,” the Post article says.
When the court’s liberals have been on the winning side in 5-4 decisions, they often succeeded in getting Justice Anthony M. Kennedy to join them. Kennedy joined the court five years before Ginsburg, and he has been able to assign the opinion in those split cases.
The Post offers one example: In a case striking down abortion clinic restrictions, Kennedy assigned the opinion to Justice Stephen G. Breyer.
Ginsburg recently told Duke University students that Breyer’s opinion was comprehensive, painstaking and long, according to the Post account of the speech. Ginsburg said she wrote a separate concurrence “so that the public and the press could get it all in a nutshell.”
