Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on a Donald Trump Presidency: ‘Time to Move to New Zealand’

Notorious RBG Says She Doesn’t ‘Even Want to Contemplate’ What a President Trump Would Do to the US Supreme Court

If Donald Trump becomes president, he may have to fill not just one seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, but two. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, perhaps jokingly, says she would leave the country.

“I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president,” Justice Ginsburg told The New York Times in an interview published Sunday. “For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be — I don’t even want to contemplate that.”

It reminded her of something her husband, Martin D. Ginsburg, a prominent tax lawyer who died in 2010, would have said.

“‘Now it’s time for us to move to New Zealand,’” Justice Ginsburg said, smiling ruefully.

The 83-year old Supreme Court justice widely viewed as the head of the Court’s progressive wing noted she plans to continue in her role  “as long as I can do it full steam.” But she pointed out that two other justices, Anthony M. Kennedy (79) and Stephen G. Breyer (77), as the Times reports, are no longer young.

Justice Ginsburg also said she dreams of overturning Citizens United, the 2010 case that has flooded U.S. campaigns with seemingly unlimited amounts of cash. 

“It won’t happen,” she noted. “It would be an impossible dream. But I’d love to see Citizens United overruled,” Ginsburg says.

She also would like to see the Court revisit the case that gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, and called the 2008 decision in Heller, which found an individual right to owning a gun, “a very bad decision.”

 

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