Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “As long as I can do the job full steam, I will be here.”

Dashing any hopes held by conservatives that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s retirement is on the horizon, Ginsburg promised a liberal audience recently that she’s planning to hang on until 2020. When asked about retirement, she reassured the crowd by saying, “As long as I can do the job full steam, I will be here.”

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She doesn’t want to give President Trump the opportunity to replace her with a conservative justice, as it would “decisively tip the court’s balance.”  Speaking in a conversational style interview with the liberal Forward publication’s editor-in-chief, Jane Eisner, at Adas Israel synagogue, the 85-year-old woman then delivered a challenge to legislators – pass the Equal Rights Amendment so that her three granddaughters could “see in the Constitution a statement that men and women are persons of equal citizenship stature.” Talk about a blast from the past.

The Amendment was proposed four decades ago, but failed to gain the approval of a sufficient number of states to have the force of law. “A very large part of becoming a more perfect union is to embrace more and more people,” she added.

This little bombshell conveniently ties in with the current #MeToo movement, with some congressional women taking up the 40-year-old battle. Sure, what’s a little more division among Americans these days, right? Last November Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) led a rally as the claims of sexual abuse and harassment continued to build.

Women with “ERA YES” signs led by Maloney gathered in New York Friday in one of the first public events linking the scandals involving Hollywood, Congressional and newsroom leaders to the call for an ERA. They urged Mayor Bill de Blasio to keep Wall Street’s iconic “Fearless Girl” statue in place until an ERA is ratified.”

More rallies and lobbying will follow as advocates work to explain the connection between the scandals and need for the ERA, said Bettina Hager, the ERA Coalition’s Washington director.

“We’ve been making this push for a while and this is just more fuel to why we need an Equal Rights Amendment,” she said.”

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The problem with passage of the ERA didn’t lie in Congress when they originally passed the Constitutional amendment in 1972, but in the failure of the requisite 38 states to ratify it within the 10-year deadline. Efforts since to re-introduce the bill and eliminate the deadline restrictions have failed. Another problem is that when polled, most Americans think that men and women already have equal rights, so a Constitutional amendment isn’t necessary.

Part of the difficulty is that most Americans — 80%, according to a 2016 poll commissioned on behalf of the ERA Coalition/Fund for Women’s Equality — believe men and women are already guaranteed equal rights under the Constitution, said Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., whose bill would remove the deadline.

Conservatives argue that the amendment could harm laws and programs that protect women.

Does anyone really think that had the amendment been in place, Harvey Weinstein wouldn’t have behaved as he did with all those women in the entertainment business? Of course not.

Ginsburg is all the rage today in the liberal world. Commonly referred to as Notorious RBG by the cool people, an autobiography is out now on her life. A documentary on her was screened at Sundance Film Festival last summer and was purchased for distribution.

The justice decided to skip this year’s State of the Union address but that is probably just as well, given her habit of falling asleep during the speech anyway. As Supreme Court justices are not to be publicly political, she has found a way to go around that. She wears a statement style of a necklace on her judicial robe on days she wishes to voice dissent.

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On November 9, 2016, members of the United States Supreme Court met, wearing their somber black robes. But fastened around Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg‘s neck was something different: a beaded, scalloped necklace that she wears on those days when she cannot express her dissent verbally. This necklace is infamously known as her dissent collar.

The bib-style sparkler (glass beads on a black scalloped base) reportedly came in the VIP gift bag at Glamour magazine’s “Women of the Year” gala in New York, where Ginsburg was among the honorees.

Just to get under President Trump’s skin, the publisher of RBG’s book sent him a copy with a handwritten note enclosed.

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