The Law is Not Going to Save Us

As the Trump administration continues to dismantle the federal government, we are all wondering if any of this can be reversed or even stopped. Obviously, the supine GOP-led Congress isn’t going to tap the brakes, which leaves the judiciary.  Early rulings seem positive, and institutionalists on both sides are hoping judges save the day. Indeed, this has become the singular political battle of our time. In our conceptual hierarchy of authority, we tend to see capital L law as the sovereign, and grubby politics its embarrassing vassal. That isn’t and has never been the relationship, though, and constitutional law has always been entirely conceptual, provisional, and nonbinding. We should consequently reconsider not just how much hope to invest in the court cases, but how much we invest in the “law” as anything but an instrument of political will. 

The U.S. Constitution is a weird document. As the beta version of a democratic constitution, it rests on entirely untested assumptions the framers held. They got the fundamentals right, recognizing that power concentrates, but misunderstood how that might play out. Today we talk about parties as the fulcrum of power. The founders didn’t foresee that. 

They thought that by establishing co-equal branches of government, those entities would jealously protect their turf—Congress versus the President, not Democrat versus Republican. As James Madison put it in Federalist 51: “But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others.” This is the foundation of the Constitution’s system of “checks and balances.” 

Of course, parties eventually upended the power dynamics the framers intended to undermine, but even by its own logic, the constitution was flawed. The first unintended consequence materialized almost instantly: in a government with three entirely equal branches, who has final say when different branches get in a scrap, as they did in 1801? The answer came in 1803 in the Marbury vs Madison case, which Wikipedia summarizes very nicely:

“Marbury v. Madison was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that established the principle of judicial review, meaning that American courts have the power to strike down laws and statutes they find to violate the Constitution of the United States. Decided in 1803, Marbury is regarded as the single most important decision in American constitutional law. It established that the U.S. Constitution is actual law, not just a statement of political principles and ideals. It also helped define the boundary between the constitutionally separate executive and judicial branches of the federal government.”

That sounds comfortingly final, doesn’t it? In reality, it is no more than a handshake agreement among leaders, one revocable the moment a sufficiently bold president says, “Yeah, nah.” We will probably see how meaningless this arrangement is when the Trump administration decides to ignore a court ruling. Exactly which soldiers will the Supreme Court dispatch to enforce it? The Supreme Court’s authority rests on the president’s agreement not to challenge it. Which, well…

It is a stinging irony that the person who saw through this fiction was Donald Trump, a man so ignorant and incurious he understands very little else about governing. His own legal adventures taught him that the law isn’t a quasi-scientific program that churns out findings based on the facts plugged into it—though this is the way most of the legal and political establishment sees it. He has known for decades that it is a lump of clay waiting for the strongest forces to mold it.

The assertion of an objective law has always been refuted by its application. The Dred Scott case, which established that Black people could never become US citizens, was an early standout in politics masquerading as law, but there have been many more. 

I’ve always been amazed the interpretation of our various Bill of Rights hasn’t been the subject of more existential panic, to take another example. Consider the ways the second and fourth amendments were interpreted. In the 2nd, we have landed on an interpretation that expands the (poorly-written) text to guarantee each citizen the right to bear just about any gun they wish. This is not present in the language of the text, nor did the framers argue that interpretation at the time. So here the Court has used a maximal interpretation of liberty to serve certain political goals. 

In the 4th, however, which was supposed to protect against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Court has whittled away the clear-text protections to the point where cops now burst into people’s homes in the middle of the night, guns blazing. They have been permitted extremely broad latitude to search private property—cars and homes—and if they suspect a citizen of a crime, seize and sell that property before the accused has been convicted. In this case, the amendment has been substantially limited, again to serve political goals. 

Which means: the law isn’t going to save us. For forty years, conservative advocates have advanced increasingly fringe legal theories, many of which have in time become the law. They’ve spent millions advancing jurists who are faithful to their beliefs, rather than independent legal thinkers. GOP-appointees are, in other words, politicians in robes (google “federalist society” for more). One of their bedrock beliefs is that the bulk of the federal government is illegitimate, and they have been attempting to use the judiciary to dismantle it for decades. Six of the nine Supreme Court justices are Federalist Society judges in good standing, as well as about half the judges in lower courts. Trump is currently attempting to <check notes> dismantle the federal govenment. So don’t be surprised if they somehow find a way to call Trump’s measures “constitutional.”

Trump’s actions will take years to work their way through the courts, and he’ll suffer the kinds of setbacks he has the past couple weeks—but lower-court stays are hardly the last word. The Supreme Court may try to restrain some of the administration’s especially bad acts—they did this in Trump I—but they will be substantially in favor of his intent, if not his ham-handed legal rationalizations. And I do expect that an unrestrained Trump is itching for an opportunity to defy the courts altogether. So no matter how compliant they are, don’t be surprised to see that if the Supreme Court tries to inhibit Trump, he will ignore them. 

I can’t imagine anyone is still reading this, but one more point. Lawyers always have arguments. As non-employee Elon Musk is rooting around our most protected information, the administration has arguments. In 2020, his legal team tried to overturn an election. Again, they had briefs and arguments that, despite getting fewer votes, Trump nevertheless somehow won the states he lost. No matter how indefensible an act is, attorneys will defend it. That’s their job.

We mortal humans, and this is especially true of the press, don’t have the technical knowledge to parse these arguments. The law is, by design, a he-said, she-said proposition. It’s not like one side is going to stand up and say, “Look, we know our case is as bogus as it is stupid, but we’d still like you to rule in our favor.” We are going to have to listen to the argument and make that judgment ourselves. The media definitely won’t do this, and most Americans can’t do this.

In healthy democracies, people can trust the judicial process. We don’t have to know what the case law is, what the precedents are, what the constitution says, because the courts will sort that out. Most Americans still believe we live in a functioning democracy, so as rulings emerge in the coming years, we will accommodate ourselves to them. That is what we have done since 1803. It’s baked into the cake of our democratic system. And it will mean that most people will accept the rulings, the way they did Plessy and Dred Scott and Korematsu and Bush v Gore and Citizens United and Dobbs and Trump v US. 

This is what humans do: we accept and adapt. We have seen a similar dynamic in Russia, Hungary, and Turkey (etc). The Supreme Court’s approval ratings will drop, and Americans will report that they think the justices are partisan, and they’ll accept the rulings because, after all, what’s the alternative? 

The alternative is to recognize that the judiciary was never more than a gentlemen’s agreement and that it has no special powers that place it above politics. That it is a function of politics. I would encourage everyone to come to that recognition sooner rather than later, and in the meantime 🤞.

A Coup is Happening; Do You See It?

Elon Musk, apparently still a private citizen, has seized control of the federal government. This is not an exaggeration: he and his team (who are?—we don’t know) now control the U.S. Treasury’s payment system, which sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government. He earlier commandeered the records of federal employees, and locked them out of these databases. 

Donald Trump has started a trade war with Canada and Mexico, not just ancient allies, but integrated partners in our economy. (Economist Paul Krugman: “North American manufacturing has evolved into a highly integrated system whose products — autos in particular, but manufactured goods more broadly — typically contain components from all three members of the pact, which may be shipped across the borders multiple times.”) 

I’ve been keeping a tally of the administration’s major acts in the past two weeks, and it is now up to 51 items. Things like:

2. Issued EO nullifying “birthright citizenship” of 14th amendment;

3. Pardoned all J6 criminals;

15. Withdraw from Paris Accords;

32. Created “memecoins” for himself and Melania with unknown major investors;

35. Disbanded the Aviation Security Advisory Committee (working out well already!);

40. Froze all foreign aid;

46. Began firing FBI agents and supervisors who investigated Trump’s crimes;

49. Ordered Army Corps to “turn on the faucet” and flood fields with 1.6 billion gallons of water from Central California reservoirs, apparently believing it would somehow flow to Los Angeles. 

Human brains are extraordinary mechanisms, perhaps most noteworthy for their capacity to synthesize data points into usable information, mainly in the form of story. This happens almost instantly and is so seamless that most people fail to notice the moment data transmutes into narrative. A flash of silver color is data, but our mind synthesizes it into meaning: a SUV driving down the road. And our mind might go further, telling a story about who must be driving that car, why they chose that model, what their values and ethics are. If that flash of silver turned out to be an EV or a Tesla, our story shifts immediately and we understand its meaning in very different terms. 

Yesterday, I listened to an interview with judicial reporter Dahlia Lithwick. She discussed the legality of Trump’s two week reign (none in many cases), and expanded on the role of a judiciary placed by Donald Trump to rubberstamp these very acts. It was a dark and disturbing discussion, one of the few to lay out in stark terms how desperate things have gotten. 

And then, at the end of the conversation, her mind broke. She went into this bizarre tangent about how great it was that government employees have been standing up to argue that the work they do is important. “I love that,” she said, going on to argue that the only thing that will stop a speedy restoration of the past two weeks are people failing to have “a discourse.” Her voice sweetened as she thought of democracy rising up to put things right. After a fifteen minute discussion where she made the case that Trump and the GOP have fractured our democracy and offered us no recourse, her mind retreated to a happy place where none of this was really happening. 

We are in the early stages of a coup that will lead in directions no one can predict.   Trump and his team, busily enacting Project 2025 precisely as they outlined before the election, know where they want to go, but they are not the only actors here. To me, the most destabilizing fact of this moment is that the other actors, the Democratic leaders in the Congress, local politicians, corporations, the media, the portions of the judiciary not captured by the Federalist Society—none of them seem to realize that a coup has happened. Like Lithwick, their brains can’t go there. 

Our wonderfully creative, synthetic minds create realities we can comprehend, and ones that make the world comprehensible. Most Americans literally cannot conceive of a reality in which the federal government is overthrown by a dimwitted narcissist whose lies are as tangled and dumb as his hairdo. And so for them that reality doesn’t exist. 

Since the election, I have been trying to think what I, a single citizen, can do amid a coup. It is very little because the mechanisms that used to empower the people are the very ones under assault. The one thing that would be very helpful, however, is if regular citizens could actually bring themselves to see what is plainly happening in front of our eyes. Many of us had the luxury of living in our little fantasy worlds before the election. There was no cost to thinking everything would be all right. The cost now is that the coup will succeed or fail depending on our response in the coming days and weeks. If we can’t see that a coup is under way, if our imagination isn’t large enough to accept this story of our reality, the cost will be very dear. It may not seem like much, but bearing witness in these times is so critical. 

I believe a resistance will organize itself such that individual citizens can take action (meanwhile, write or call your leaders and put a fire under their dazed butts). In the meantime, we need to develop the skill of seeing reality for what it is. A coup is underway in the United States. Do you see it?

All The Things the Trump Administration Will Bring

It’s going to be a very long 1,461 days. If we’re lucky, it will only be 1,461 days, and if we’re very, very lucky, we might be able to piece our fragmented democracy back together. There is no scenario in which many bad things don’t happen, however. 

I am not breaking any news here. Because of Trump’s unstable personality, not to mention the dysfunction of the congressional GOP, it’s hard to guess how things will play out and guessing is not time well-spent. For me it’s more helpful to think of categories of worry—within these, trouble is guaranteed, if not specific details. 

1. Corruption. Americans have never seen serious corruption before. We’ve had corrupt politicians—men like Menendez who take bribes for favors. But it’s been a century plus since the *system* was corrupt (though less in the South). We got a foretaste of what this will look like with Supreme Court justices taking large, unreported gifts from billionaires with many interests before the court. 

Trump is going to make that look tame. In his first term, he made a mockery of emoluments, coaxing foreign governments to use his hotel and Mar-a-Lago as they came calling to affect U.S. policy. Now he will accept open bribes. Tariffs? Exemptions available if you make certain donations. Regulations short-circuited? Mining rights opened? Certain mergers approved? Safety laws dumped? No problem! Just buy some TrumpCoin and we’ll put this issue at the top of the list. 

The ways Trump can monetize being president with the DOJ, courts, and Congress aligned with him are going to be something to witness. He will also be running his usual kinds of Trump Steaks scams, penny-ante, obvious frauds that are beneath a mail carrier, what to speak of a president. They will be so many and so resplendent we will soon lose track of them. 

Worse, government itself will be oriented toward corruption. Trump will direct agencies to benefit wealthy patrons, political cronies, and allies. This stuff is going to be legion and people are going to mostly ignore it. Republicans have already perfected the mechanisms of much of this over the past 45 years, so the wheels are well-greased. The President oversees the vast federal governments, and agencies have broad latitude to direct their resources where he wishes (sadly, still “he”). So the IRS can either conduct the business for which it was designed—taxing and gathering revenue—or it can be an engine for rewarding favors to rich friends. Gut the agency and tell workers to go after lower-income Americans and the IRS is still doing work, but it’s doing *your* work. The FDA, Transportation, Interior, Ag, Energy—these will become the mechanism of a vast spoils system. 

2. Punishing political foes. We have never seen a president to use the power of the DOJ to go after his antagonists (or protect himself from his own corruption), so this will be a little startling. Yet it won’t be unprecedented: Trump signaled his instincts in the way he attacked enemies in the Andrew McCabe case (indeed, everything I’m worried about has precedents in Trump’s first term). 

Trump employs a mob boss’s sensibility to punishment and reward, so this will likely be capricious and negotiable. The more foes who bend the knee, take deals, and so on, the stronger his hand. We’ve seen a shocking amount of pre-obeying already, so I wouldn’t expect many to stand their ground. This is, needless to say, total banana republic stuff. It is the foundation of autocracy. Trump’s choice of Pam Bondi for AG is a five-alarm fire—she is a complete sycophant and is happily signing up to become Trump’s trigger-man. 

3. Red states. Trump won’t be the only one pushing the envelope. Red states are going to test laws that wouldn’t remotely pass constitutional muster in normal times, with a normal judiciary. Some of these will affect voting rights, others will attack civil and possibly racial liberty, and others might test novel theories about state power to control their borders or women’s access to contraception or the flow of commerce. They will be significant because they’ll move through the courts and some will get judicial approval. At that point, they can become national law as well. 

4. Foreign policy. The President has nearly unrestrained control over U.S. foreign policy and the military. In addition to more opportunities for corruption—and this has always been an area soft for corruption, anyway—Trump can literally upend world politics. Americans don’t really get foreign policy and thanks to saber-rattling (Saddam Hussein is the greatest and most dangerous monster since Hitler! Iran is an existential threat!), they have felt the world a dangerous place even since the fall of the Soviet bloc. But for the U.S. and our allies it has been good, safe times. 

Every indication is that Trump isn’t happy with this stability—and why would he? Chaos has always been his friend. Again, predictions are a mug’s game, but figures like Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and Kristi Noem are very telling. Russia/Ukraine and China are the biggest worries, but with Trump putting Greenland and Panama on the table, basically anything is possible. 

The bigger issue the potential chaos unleashed by a United States no longer trusted by allies. South Korea, Taiwan, and Ukraine are in the immediate crosshairs, but the instability would ripple across the world. The Democratic world has guided international relations for most of the past century, restraining actors like China and Russia. If the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner on team democracy, it strengthens our enemies. A chaotic world is a dangerous one. This could be disastrous. 

5. The system’s reactions to these stresses. Whether things are merely bad or catastrophic will depend on the way various internal and external mechanisms react to all these stressors. Will the judiciary enable or restrain Trump and red states? Will military leadership stop Trump if he attempts something insane and/or unconstitutional? (If they did, that would trigger a major constitutional crisis—and that would likely be the *better* outcome, just to illustrate haw dark times are becoming.) How will agency heads respond to Trump’s pressure? These internal gears can either spin freely and speed Trump’s and the GOP’s agenda, or be gummed up and slow it. 

Then there are the outside actors—the media, Democrats, business leaders, and the public. Will they take personal and financial risks to oppose this agenda, or go along to get along, figuring that it will be safer to comply? (Early indications are not encouraging.)

There are a couple of other things I’ll be watching. A number of people have pointed to the narrow margin in the House, the fractious GOP coalition, and Trump’s many deficits as reasons for hope: his incompetence and stupidity, age-related decline, and status as an instant lame duck. Again, if we’re lucky, these factors may mitigate the worst outcomes. But let’s be clear, things are going to be bad, immediately, no matter how chaotic and dumb Trump is. He has a lot of power, unified government, and the experience of a first term. I don’t think people are doing themselves any emotional favors thinking it’s going to be all right. It’s not. 

That doesn’t mean there’s no hope. The last thing I’ll be looking at is the way blue states battle all these forces. Trump and the GOP will have a free hand to do a bunch of bad things—but they can’t do *all* the bad things. Blue states can help slow things down. They just need to take a page out of the GOP playbook, and resist in all the ways the law allows. A big part of managing the second Trump term is slowing it down. 

Moreover, blue states can also pass a bunch of laws that contrast sharply with the direction of the federal government. In terms of creating a contrast in visions that actually break through a lazy and incurious public, this is our best bet. The parties have radically different visions for the U.S., and they have ground Washington to a stalemate—which has been part of the reason these visions haven’t broken through in the minds of that dozing electorate. 

States are a different matter. Dems have complete control of 15; the GOP 23. They are passing starkly different laws and that split is going to get even more dramatic. So we need good, effective leadership that addresses the real needs of citizens in blue states. If Trump and the GOP are the disaster we expect, a competing vision is critical.

Finally, and most importantly, I hope we all take care of ourselves. The sun will still rise each morning and most of the things that make our lives joyful and meaningful will still be close at hand. Trump will make our lives tangibly worse, and for some of us, much, much worse. But that makes it even more important that we don’t grant him control of our inner lives. Both for our own wellbeing and as members of a resistance movement, it’s important not to fall into a depressive hole. Things will get worse. We will persevere. 

✊

What Does the Ash Tree Say?

Well folks, yesterday was grim. Grimmer even than I expected. I take comfort in my canine companion, however, who seemed unaware of the events of the day. She is a sundog, so despite the chill, she was full of energy—when she wasn’t snoozing in the rays. 

Looking for other opinions, I consulted our ash tree, but they were silent. (Pronoun intuited.) That is not surprising; if we’ve learned anything from Tolkien, it’s that trees are insensitive to human affairs, and very slow to speak. 

A mugging of crows gathered on the roof. (The congregation was two shy of a full murder.) They had been pecking the metal cover on the bathroom’s fan vent, which brought me into the back yard to investigate. I listened to them as they chatted, and although my crow is a bit rusty, they seemed to be joking about messing with the humans. They glanced at me and smirked. 

I studied the squirrels and shrubbery for signs of disturbance, but could detect no change. As far as I can tell, all the four-leggeds and two-wingers and deep-rooteds were unaware of, or unalarmed by, the winds of change in Washington. 

You may argue that a squirrel or fern is hardly the best authority to consult regarding legally-dubious executive orders. Point taken. I have no idea where that fern did her undergraduate work. And yet, I couldn’t help finding solace in their stolid, untroubled ways. Or perhaps it was just too early to rouse them to action. I will observe them again today and report back.

Elite Media

Paul Krugman decided to give up his column at the New York Times, a job he’s been doing since January 2000. (He earned it; he’ll be 72 in Feb.) In his final, very Krugman-y post, he contrasted the mood of country in 2000 and today. Then it was happy times and people trusted institutions. Today we are united in our agreement that the country is headed the wrong way, and institutions and leaders have failed us. And we’re really mad. 

All true. But I don’t quite agree with the way he framed the issue: “As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.”

I would argue that the elites have failed us, and more depressingly, that we’ve failed ourselves. The 90s were pretty awesome. The decade started with the collapse of communism. Good governance helps us out of an early-decade recession. Democracies flourished across the world, Europe became united under the euro, and technology was ushering us into the digital, online age.

Then things went to hell. The dot-com bubble burst in 2002. 9/11 shook Americans’ confidence in their safety and the world’s stability. A pretty sketchy crowd of ideologues lied us into a massively costly and bloody war. Just as it was ending, the economy suffered its worst collapse since the 1930s—thanks largely to greedy financial companies and the lax regulators in their pockets. Things improved, but more slowly than they should have. Then we had a global pandemic, followed by another financial crisis. 

Through all of this we learned that our media was incompetent: they beat the drum for the war, failed to report on the causes that led to the 2008 financial crisis, grossly mishandled the political rise of Donald Trump and, by 2020 had so little credibility they weren’t trusted to provide accurate information about the virus killing thousands every week. 

Except for one mention of a politician —who was and unavoidable part of this narrative—I did my best to divorce those events from partisan politics. The vast majority of Americans are too incurious and too civically uneducated to investigate how elections, politicians, and public policy intersect to create the very catastrophes afflicting societies. To most Americans, the last quarter century has just been a series of unfortunate events. In this way, it must have felt like something happening to America, much as Krugman described it. 

So of course they’re mad. In America, the contract is that the public mostly ignores politics and politicians mostly keep the trains running on time. But all but one of those events were caused by human decisions. To say they happened to us, like a ln earthquake, lets the agents of these catastrophes off the hook. Except for the pandemic—but not excepting the response to it—those disasters were intentional choices by our leaders. We live in a democracy, and every two years Americans had an opportunity to throw the bums out. We never did, and so a hefty portion of culpability lands with us. 

The U.S. is suffering the familiar decline of decadent empires throughout history. We’ve had it so good for so long we’ve stopped being vigilant. Our leaders have gotten greedy and corrupt and we haven’t held them to account. Krugman started writing at the end of the “American Century” (its rise) and documented the first era of its decline. But it wasn’t passive—there were actors all along the way. Including, sad to say, the public who let it happen. 

(The silver lining is that a lot of counties, post-empire, are very nice. The Netherlands, Britain, Germany, and Spain had their periods of rising and falling, and they’re all doing relatively well now. The interregnum between the fall and the post-empire can be a little rough, but the story keeps on unfolding.)

Edit: I didn’t mention climate change in this post, which I should have done. (Facebook posts are pretty first drafty.)

Autocracy or No Big Deal

This interregnum is fascinating in one key way: people across the political spectrum are divided as to whether Trump II is going to be a mostly-normal continuation of Trump I, or a radical departure into a post-democratic autocracy.

What is emerging is a psychological/emotional Rorschach. The analysis seems to have very little to do with Trump, who has been pretty clear in word and deed exactly how he’ll govern. Instead, it expresses the speaker’s most deeply-held views of the United States.

For those on the left, the hope is that T2 will be mostly harmless, the wreckage as fixable as T1. The fear is that T2 is the end of democracy. The normalcy bias here is the optimistic outlook. For the right, the fear is that in T2 the “swamp” will win again (ie, status quo). The hope is that T2 restores the US’s pre-1960/ historic shape of a nominal democracy that favors White norms and powers. The normalcy bias here is the pessimistic view.

Trump II is going to surprise half the country. This period between election and inauguration will be an interesting time capsule in that we will see the way people interpreted the election, either willfully gaslighting themselves, or understanding events in clear, historically predictable terms.

People aren’t actually talking about the future right now. They’re expressing their own relationship to and understanding of the American experiment. The second election of Donald Trump will either confirm or upset these views. For half the country, that will mean reevaluating a bedrock understanding of the way the world works. 

As a lefty worried that we’ve lost our democracy, being wrong would be a wonderful surprise. It would mean reevaluating the strength of our institutions, the durability of post-1960s gains in true, multiracial democracy, the courage and selflessness of our leaders, and the relative weakness of the money attempting to bend politics to its will. When I look at my own psychology and relationship to the US, I see that it is a good deal darker than many Americans’. What a joy it would be to be wrong. 

Needless to say, I am pretty convinced mine is a the gimlet-eyed, rational understanding of events, not wishful thinking. We’ll know in the coming years. 

(I’m going to include a link with an example of this discussion in comments, hoping to avoid having the algo downgrade this post because of its political nature.)

Get Off Her Back, Man

I’ve been avoiding news and politics lately, but every now and then something sneaks by. One thing I saw recently was an effort to get Sonia Sotomayor to step down before the next administration. The commenter compared her to RBG and implied that mere hubris could be the only reason a 70-year-old diabetic wouldn’t step down. I’ve heard this call countless times during the Biden admin, always invoking RBG, always with the same scolding, moralizing tone. And I gotta say: dude, slow your roll. 

At 70, Sotomayor is FIVE presidential elections younger than Ginsberg was at her death at 87. Moreover, of the justices appointed over the past 50-odd years (I went back to 1970), only one Supreme Court justice has ever stepped down as early as 70 years old:

    • Breyer, resigned at 84

    • Kennedy (82)

    • Souter (69) 

    • Stevens (90)

    • O’Connor (76)

    • Powell (80)

    • Blackmun (86)

That’s an average retirement age of 81. It’s mostly men, who live shorter lives than women, and over an era when healthcare outcomes were far worse. (Life expectancy for men was 72 in 1990–but 79 for women.) Women have a life expectancy of 80 years today, which is three presidential elections longer than Sotomayor is—as well as the average of the justices listed above. And that RBG example is especially galling because Ginsberg, at 84, had had four bouts of cancer as well as cancer surgeries, but still decided she needed to roll the dice. 

Sonia Sotomayor may die in the next four years. Anyone may die in the next four years. It is hardly unreasonable for her to make the same decision nearly every Supreme Court justice in the past half century has made and stay on the court. 

Like, get off her back, man.