The American Spectator
Trump is pushing his luck, even with another Supreme Court pick possibly in the cards."Over the weekend, the media took notice of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s apparently successful treatment for a malignant tumor on the pancreas. “No further treatment is needed at this time,” said Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City — which wasn’t the same thing as saying “Justice Ginsburg’s Supreme Court tenure is locked down and guaranteed.”
"Possibly the least edifying phenomenon you run across in politics — a highly unedifying pursuit these days, full of noise and rancor — is what might be called the death watch, as in how-long-before-we-get-to-replace-old-so-and-so-on-whatever-it-is. Few are the political folk whose disappearances for one reason or another excite public rejoicings. Ginsburg — a smart, snappy and rigorously honest jurist — isn’t among their number. “Long may she wave!” we need to exclaim so as to keep up some pretense of humanity amid all the grossness.
"This is not to deny she’s a major player in the 2020 elections — in one sense, the major player.
"Maybe Donald Trump understands, and maybe he doesn’t, that his widely supported project of tugging the federal judiciary to the right buys him tolerance he might not otherwise be vouchsafed — and well could lose if certain things don’t change.
"The bare, spare, unsentimental fact is that The Notorious RBG’s retirement from the Supreme Court, due to age and health, would allow Trump this year — next year — to strengthen a tenuous conservative majority on the court, made possible by the 2016 election, and possibly the next one up. At the same time, he would continue to staff the lower federal benches with conservatives." . . .
