Those who managed to stay awake during the State of the Union address last month may have noticed that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg … didn’t. Images of her head dropping to her chest began flying around immediately during the speech, a rare amusing moment in what may be the most excruciatingly meaningless and oddly monarchical political ritual in America. The pomp and the speech is so substance-free that it’s a wonder it doesn’t incapacitate the entire Congress. Maybe that’s where the tradition of leaping to their feet every three sentences originates — it’s SOTU calisthenics.

As the Boss Emeritus said, “We are all Ruth Bader Ginsburg now”:

We are all Ruth Bader Ginsburg now. http://t.co/2FCUGeVxxr #zzzzzzzzz #sotu

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) January 21, 2015

Justice Ginsburg has an explanation for her soporific SOTU status — a snootful before the speech:

“The audience for the most part is awake, because they’re bobbing up and down, and we sit there, stone-faced, sober judges. But we’re not, at least I wasn’t, 100 percent sober,” Ginsburg told an audience at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., Thursday night.

“Because before we went to the State of the Union, Justice Kennedy brought in … it was an Opus something or other, very fine California wine, and I vowed this year, just sparkling water, stay away from the wine, but in the end, the dinner was so delicious, it needed wine,” Ginsburg said. “So I got a call when I came home from one of my granddaughters and she said, ‘Bubbe, you were sleeping at the State of the Union!”

Well, who doesn’t need a snootful sit through one of these SOTU speeches? I refused to watch it this year, stating in a column for The Fiscal Times that SOTUs have become “a silly show for silly people who are interested only in posturing rather than actual governance.” The repeated standing ovations prompted by presidential throat-clearing are an embarrassment to the doctrine of co-equal branches of government. The best possible response to this is to sleep through it, and everyone in Congress should adopt that strategy next year.

Speaking of which, what would be the reaction if Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia fell asleep on Obama’s speech and afterward admitted that they’d been less than sober during the address? The media would rush to accuse them of disrespecting the President, much like they did when Sam Alito had a normal human reaction to being ignorantly lectured over the Citizens United opinion in the middle of an earlier SOTU speech.

The coverage of such a judicial snooze would be a lot less precious than Ginsburg will get over this, although it shouldn’t be harsh on Ginsburg either. She wasn’t tuning out Obama, with whom she gets along “famously,” she told Bloomberg this week, but just well prepared for the tedium of a SOTU speech. I’m sure the President is relieved to hear that.