Following reports that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is being treated for cancer, her base of supporters have openly worried about the possibility that she may not last until the November election.
In a recent op-ed for The New York Times, Mimi Swartz said that the prospect of the “Notorious RBG” not being on the Supreme Court is just too much to comprehend.
“If illness forces Justice Ginsburg to step down in the next few months and President Trump gets to pick a replacement, it would strengthen the conservative wing of the Supreme Court for as far as the eye can see, despite some recent rulings that might suggest otherwise,” wrote Swartz.
“In real life, she is an 87-year-old woman with a deadly disease and a host of other ailments. A mother and grandmother, a widow with a long and happy marriage behind her,” she continued. “Thanks mainly to her career-long fight for the rights of women, she has achieved icon status, which means that her fragility has become our fragility. Anyone of a certain age — anyone who feels mortality knocking on the door — would respond with a shiver to her latest medical report.”
Beyond just being a fan of RBG’s life accomplishments, Swartz argued that the justice’s health threats are a threat to America itself. Justice Ginsburg, she writes, is “one of the few people standing between us and chaos.”
“One of the few people standing between us and chaos is Justice Ginsburg, the anti-Trump, the benevolent if steely matriarch to his raging father,” argued Swartz.
“She is, in short, the embodiment of all that we believe is good about the country, of all that has been worth fighting for,” she added. “The thought of losing that fight is as tragic as, well, losing a beloved grandmother, the one who holds the family together.”
As The Daily Wire reported last week, Justice Ginsburg has been undergoing chemotherapy treatment since May for a “reoccurrence of cancer.”
“She said that her chemotherapy treatment is ‘yielding positive results’ and has caused a ‘significant reduction’ in lesions found on her liver,” said the report. “She will continue to receive bi-weekly treatments and is able to maintain an ‘active daily routine’ in addition to her normal work for the Supreme Court.”
Ginsburg has faced a variety of health scares in recent years, which often prompts her most loyal of supporters to react in some notable ways. In 2019, when the justice underwent surgery for lung cancer, columnist Roger Simon of Politico said that he would actually sacrifice precious days of his own life to prolong Ginsburg’s.
“If it were possible, would you subtract one day off your life and add it to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life for one extra day of good health? If just 10,000 people did this, it would add 27 productive years to her life,” he said on Twitter.
If it were possible, would you subtract one day off your life and add it to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life for one extra day of good health? If just 10,000 people did this, it would add 27 productive years to her life. pic.twitter.com/RurqFmWZGp
— Roger Simon (@politicoroger) January 8, 2019