The One Decision Breyer Can’t Make
In 2013, Barack Obama hosted Ruth Bader Ginsburg for lunch in his private dining room, hoping to gingerly raise the possibility of her retirement while he still occupied the White House and Democrats still controlled the Senate.
She got the message. She also ignored it. Ginsburg didn’t suffer much of a reputational hit for her defiance, at least not at the time. The woman who’d been barred from one of the reading rooms at Harvard Law when she was a student, the woman who’d been denied a clerkship with Felix Frankfurter partly because she was a mother—of course she wasn’t going to daintily hang up her jabot just because the boys were telling her to. For years, she’d stood outside the doors of their institutions with an ice pick, chip-chip-chipping her way in. She’d bested three types of cancer. She did daily sets of planks. And now they were telling her it was time to go? Really?
In hindsight, we know that this decision had for the causes to which she devoted her career. RBG—Washington’s least likely crossover star, a super-signifier of all things fabulously feminist appended to her name, in spite of her extraordinary accomplishments.
