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I don’t know as much about the ins-and-outs of the Constitution as the late Justice Ginsburg did, but I could swear the Constitution does not grant Supreme Court Justices their own Dying Wish …
I guess lockdown is over for the duration of the Ruth Bader Ginsburg funeral orgies.
It will be interesting to see how extravagant, prolonged, and shameless they will be:
John McCain-level?
John Lewis-level?
Or thermonuclear George Floyd-level?
Ginsburg, who was 87, had been in bad health for years. She served a little over 27 years on the Supreme Court, which is 50% longer than she would have under a sensible system in which Supreme Court Justices get a single 18-year-term. Under that system, Gisburg would have served from age 60 to 78.
This system would also mean that each presidential administration would get two nominees per four years in office: one in the new President’s first year, another in the third year.
In the long run, this system would create a stable Supreme Court of 9 Justices. Transition would be a problem, but the simplest solution would be to allow the current Justices to finish their life terms if they so choose, while adding new Justices in each odd-numbered year. This would cause the total number of Justices on the Supreme Court to be higher than 9 for a number of years, but so what? It doesn’t violate the Constitution, which doesn’t specify the number of judges on the Supreme Court. The Court has gotten by with only 8 Justices, so having 10 or 13 or whatever for a few years wouldn’t be so bad either, except for a tighter fit for office space.
By the way, here’s the opening of my March 4, 2020 book review of Frank H. Buckley’s American Secession. Buckley predicted Ginsburg’s death, especially combined with Trump’s re-election, might be profoundly destabilizing:
Frank H. Buckley’s highbrow yet quick and lively new book American Secession comes with the foreboding subtitle The Looming Threat of a National Breakup, but the conservative George Mason U. law professor and Trump family adviser is sanguine.
In Buckley’s view, a Trump reelection combined with Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death might trigger a Calexit movement by aggrieved Californians (a state where Hillary won by 4.3 million votes, while she lost by 1.5 million in the other 49 states) enraged at having to share a country with Trump voters.
