The press release from the Supreme Court yesterday about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s hospitalization was terse:
Justice Ginsburg was admitted to The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland early this morning for treatment of a possible infection. She was initially evaluated at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C. last night after experiencing fever and chills.
She underwent an endoscopic procedure at Johns Hopkins this afternoon to clean out a bile duct stent that was placed last August.
The Justice is resting comfortably and will stay in the hospital for a few days to receive intravenous antibiotic treatment.
This comes just two months after she underwent treatment for a gallstone that had blocked her cystic duct and was causing her pain from an infection.
She has a long and accelerating history of health issues. The first six years after being appointed to the high court by then-President Bill Clinton in 1993, she was diagnosed with colon cancer and underwent surgery, which was followed by both chemotherapy and radiation therapy.
A decade later she underwent surgery to remove an early stage cancerous tumor from her pancreas.
After experiencing pain while exercising at the Supreme Court gym in November 2014, she had a stent placed in her right coronary artery.
Four years later she fell in her office, fracturing three ribs. A month later, in December 2018 she underwent a left-lung lobectomy to remove some cancerous nodules.
In August 2019, another cancerous tumor was found on her pancreas, which was treated with radiation therapy — after which she was declared to be cancer free.
Ginsburg’s record as a liberal on the high court is unblemished. After attending Cornell, Harvard, and Columbia where she received her law degree, she advocated as a volunteer for the ACLU. She advocated for women’s empowerment, joining feminist Brenda Feigen-Fasteau in supporting the then-pending Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S Constitution in 1977, which would have, ironically enough, taken away many legislated advantages for women, such as being free from being drafted for military service, for little in return.
Perhaps most egregious of her positions was that of disparaging the very Constitution that she took an oath to uphold and defend. Supreme Court justices must take two oaths — the Constitution oath and the Judicial oath — which are ordinarily combined into one:
I, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, do solemnly swear that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States under the Constitution and laws of the United States; and that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
In January 2012 she was interviewed on Egypt’s Al-Hayat TV during the time when that country was writing its own constitution. Said Ginsburg:
It is a very inspiring time — that you have overthrown a dictator, and that you are striving to achieve a genuine democracy. So I think people of the United States are hoping that this transition will work, and that there will genuinely be a government of, by, and for the people….
I can’t speak about what the Egyptian experience should be, because I’m operating under a rather old constitution. The United States, in comparison to Egypt, is a very new nation, and yet we have the oldest written constitution still in force in the world.
And then she demeened the U.S. Constitution:
You should certainly be aided by all the constitution-writing that has gone on since the end of World War II.
I would not look to the US constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012.
I might look at the constitution of South Africa. That was a deliberate attempt to have a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights, had an independent judiciary… It really is, I think, a great piece of work that was done.
Much more recent than the US constitution — Canada has a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It dates from 1982. You would almost certainly look at the European Convention on Human Rights.
Yes, why not take advantage of what there is elsewhere in the world?
Since 2012, Ginsburg has disqualified herself as a justice of the Supreme Court. Her accelerating health issues might just remove her from the high court so that she can be replaced by someone who takes his or her oath seriously.
Photo of Ruth Bader Ginsburg: White House Photograph Office via Wikimedia
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
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