Pundit: As long as Ruth Bader Ginsburg is alive, she’ll keep her seat on the Supreme Court

As long as Ruth Bader Ginsburg is still alive, she’ll keep her seat on the Supreme Court, says one Washington insider.

After Yahoo News’ Michael Isakoff asked “what happens” if Ginsburg “cannot serve on the Supreme Court in the next year and a half,” New York Times chief Washington correspondent Carl Hulse was quick to say that the only way RBG will be leaving the bench is in a body bag.

“It’s not if she doesn’t serve — she [just] needs to be alive to keep her seat,” Hulse said Thursday. “She doesn’t have to show up there.”

Hulse went on to point to a June remark from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who expressed a similar sentiment. “Mitch McConnell has said that no liberals will leave the court without a ‘significant life-ending event,'” Hulse noted, adding, “There’s only one” of those: death.

“We’re supposed to serve”

According to National Review, Ginsburg has said she intends to remain on the court at least as long as Justice John Paul Stevens, who stepped down when he was 90. She made a public appearance earlier this week after yet another round of treatment for pancreatic cancer, where she said that it was a localized tumor and that the treatment was successful.

Hulse said Ginsburg seemed “very vibrant and healthy” at her Monday talk at the University of Buffalo, adding that Democrats around the world were relieved to see her looking well.

For her part, Ginsburg said Monday that she wants to see the country get back to a more bipartisan way of governing. “Enough of this dysfunctional legislature. We’re supposed to serve the people of the United States,” Ginsburg said.

She also said she did not favor expanding the Supreme Court to more than nine justices, as some Democrats have suggested.

“Oh, we’d fill it”

If Ginsburg would have to leave her position on the court before the 2020 election, McConnell has said he would move to fill the seat with a Republican nominee.

“Oh, we’d fill it,” he said at a GOP event in May.

Democrats have already tried to say that such a move during an election year would be hypocritical after the Republican-run Senate refused to consider Obama appointee Merrick Garland in 2016, but McConnell said it’s now a different situation: in 2016, the presidency and the Senate were held by different parties, whereas in 2020, they would be the same party, the senator explained.

But with Ginsburg on the up-and-up, it looks like McConnell may not have to worry about that any time soon.