Bader Ginsburg on retirement: "Not this year"
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg isn't ready to hang up her robe quite yet.
According to a profile of the 79-year-old justice in this week's New Yorker, Bader Ginsburg, who is serving her 20th year on the bench, plans to hold on to the job for another two years or more, depending on her health.
"It's not this year. You can never tell when you're my age," Ginsburg said. "But, as long as I think I have the candlepower, I will do it. And I figure next year for certain. After that, who knows?"
The long-serving justice, now the senior member of the bench's liberal wing, told the magazine she plans to stay on "as long as I can do the job full steam."
"Sometimes I say, [former Supreme Court Justice Louis] Brandeis was appointed at about the same age I was, when he was sixty. And he stayed 22, 23 years, so I said I expected to stay at least that long," she said.
Of the nine justices currently on the bench, five were appointed by Republican presidents and four by Democratic presidents. And as the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin points out, only one of the Republican-appointed justices - Justice Anthony Kennedy, typically the bench's "swing" vote - supports abortion rights.
Bader Ginsburg acknowledged that the party of the president in power will be a factor in the timing of her eventual retirement.
"I think it is for all of us," she said.
