By MARSHA MERCER
News that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg may
become America’s next fitness star takes some getting used to.
Yes, she’s a lifelong champion of gender equality and
civil rights.
She wrote the majority opinion in the landmark sex
discrimination case United States v. Virginia. The ruling 21 years ago this
week -- June 27, 1996 -- required Virginia Military Institute, after 150 years of
male-only admissions, to accept women.
Yes, she’s a cultural icon and a hero to millennials,
thanks to “Notorious R.B.G.,” a Tumblr blog that went viral in 2013.
A book by that title became a New York Times
bestseller in 2015. Her picture is on T-shirts, mugs, shot glasses and hoodies.
She’s been making a fashion statement with her signature fishnet gloves for
nearly two decades.
Her consequential life is even the subject of a
children’s picture book, “I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark.”
Yes, she’s an author. “My Own Words,” her book published
last October, has brought her $204,000 in royalties, she reported in a recent
financial disclosure.
But a gym rat – at the age of 84? Yes, that too.
Ginsburg has been working out with personal trainer
Bryant Johnson since 1999, after treatment for colon cancer left her weak and
frail. She went back to the gym after surgery for pancreatic cancer in
2009.
Johnson’s pushup-and-tell book is coming out in
October: “The RBG Workout: How She Stays Strong . . . and You Can Too!”
It’s a sign of how much American has changed that an
accomplished jurist and “little old lady in tennis shoes” can also be a model
for pumping iron.
Not everyone will rush out to buy Johnson’s book. The
court’s most reliable liberal excites foes as well as fans.
Last summer, she candidly criticized then-presidential
candidate Donald Trump. “I can’t imagine what the country would be – with
Donald Trump as our president,” she told The New York Times.
Trump responded with a tweet: “Justice
Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court has embarrassed all by making very dumb
political statements about me. Her mind is shot—resign!”
Ginsburg doubled down. “He’s a faker,”
she told journalist Joan Biskupic. “He has no consistency about him. He says
whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego . . .”
After a firestorm of criticism, Ginsburg
said in a statement she regretted the remarks – and both sides retreated to
their corners.
It didn’t have to be that way. In 1987, Justice
Thurgood Marshall ripped President Ronald Reagan on civil rights, saying Reagan
was at “the bottom” among presidents.
Instead of blasting Marshall, Reagan invited
him to the White House and told him his life story. “That night, I think I made
a friend,” Reagan wrote.
Friendship seems a quaint notion in Washington these
days, but Ginsberg’s close friendship with the late Justice Antonin Scalia,
with whom she amicably disagreed on almost every legal issue, is legendary, literally
the inspiration for an opera.
Ginsburg tells an enlightening story about their
collegiality. While she was writing the majority opinion in the VMI case, Scalia,
the sole dissenter, dropped off a draft of his stinging dissent.
“It absolutely ruined my weekend,” she said in an
interview at the Aspen Institute last month but added she was glad to have the
extra days to answer his points.
Asked about the current rancor in Congress, she recalled
the Senate used to be called a gentlemen’s club. In 1986, that less combative
Senate confirmed Scalia, whose conservative views were well known, with no
negative votes. In 1993, it confirmed Ginsburg 96 to 3.
Many think had Hillary Clinton been elected president,
Ginsburg might have retired. Now, though, she shows no sign of giving President
Trump another court pick.
“I will do this job as long as I can do it full
steam,” she said at George Washington University in February. “When I can’t,
that will be the time I will step down.”
Her regimen of pumping iron means her critics may have
to wait a long time for that moment.
©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights
reserved.
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