Her Way of Leaving It Does Not Become Her

When someone of prominence passes, I often think of Malcolm’s remark in Macbeth about the Thane of Cawdor, executed for treason: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.” How did someone depart this mortal coil, and what does it say about him (or her)?

One one level, one could say that Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s leaving became her. She fought a long battle against cancer with courage.

But at a deeper level, there is something deeply disturbing about her last hours, months, and even years. This is captured by her dying wish: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”

This is disturbing for several reasons. For one thing, her seat on the Supreme Court was never hers to bestow or bequeath. The lifetime appointment of judges is problematic enough: to allow them to dictate, or even influence, that seat from the grave is intolerable, and intolerably presumptuous.

With respect to lifetime tenure, Richard Posner had some good insights:

“I believe there should be mandatory retirement for all judges at a fixed age, probably 80,” Posner writes in the online debate with U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff. And that retirement age should include justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, Posner says.

“There are loads of persons capable of distinction as Supreme Court justices; no need for octogenarians,” Posner says.

“While many judges and justices have performed OK in old age, I don’t think any of them improved with age, which means they could readily have been replaced with equally good or better judges,” Posner says.

Even beyond the presumptuousness of believing that one individual’s dying wish should bind the living on a matter of such public import, this wish, and Ginsberg’s insistence on remaining on the court despite suffering a devastating illness, suggests twisted priorities that are all too characteristic of this age, and of the governing class. Priorities that elevate politics above all else.

When confronted with imminent mortality, I would hope to focus on important things. Family. Friends. Enjoying the world to the extent that my health permits. Coming to peace with my fate. Trying to focus on the sacred, rather than on the very profane: and little is more profane than politics.

But Ginsberg was so focused on politics and her power to influence it that she hung onto her Supreme Court seat when she knew her time on earth was limited, and was so loath to surrender that power that she attempted to extend it into the afterlife through her dying wish.

Her death in the midst of an already combustible political environment was destined to add fuel to the raging partisan fires. But her dying words have only intensified the conflagration. Within minutes of her words being reported, Obama intoned that her wishes should be respected. If you want to risk your mental health, you can scroll through Twitter and find example after example of threats to riot–or worse–if those wishes are not granted, and Trump nominates and the Senate moves to confirm a replacement.

Rioting, of course, now being the default leftist threat when they don’t get their way.

Why are we at this juncture? Because Ruth Bader Ginsberg decided to let politics dictate the way of her leaving. Or more exactly, the way of her not leaving the Supreme Court, as health and human considerations should have led her to do long, long ago, when such a departure would have caused some civil strife, but nothing to compare to what we are facing now. Given the malign contribution this will make to our already poisoned body politic, it does not become her at all.