NOT GOING ANYWHERE

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Says She’s ‘Very Much Alive’ and Wants to Serve for Years to Come

Supreme Court justice jokes that she’s outlived a senator who wished for her death following cancer diagnosis.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg has jokingly warned anyone wishing for her death that she’s “very much alive” and still intends to serve on the Supreme Court for years to come. Ginsberg has had a string of health scares—she underwent surgery for pancreatic caner in 2009 and most recently late last year when she was treated for lung cancer. She told NPR: “There was a senator, I think it was after my pancreatic cancer, who announced, with great glee, that I was going to be dead within six months... That senator, whose name I have forgotten, is now dead himself, and I... am very much alive.” Ginsburg says she spoke to Justice John Paul Stevens shortly before his death last week at the age of 99. “I said that my dream is that I will stay at the court as long as he did... And his immediate response was, ‘Stay longer!’” The 86-year-old also told NPR that she did not agree with Democratic 2020 candidates’ talk of expanding the number of seats on the Supreme Court, saying “If anything would make the court look partisan... it would be that—one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.’”