Article on RBG should she decline further-historical perspec

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M-Quigley
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Article on RBG should she decline further-historical perspec

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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... lth-224014" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
The late Antonin Scalia waved off the idea of limiting the terms of justices as “a solution in search of a problem,” but the problem is not an imaginary one: Some justices really have clung to their positions long after their mental faculties have left them. Justice Henry Baldwin remained on the court for nearly a dozen years after his 1832 hospitalization for “incurable lunacy.” One of Justice Nathan Clifford’s colleagues described him as a “babbling idiot” in the final years before his death in 1881. Justice Stephen Field in the mid-1890s and Justice Joseph McKenna in the early to mid-1920s each reportedly spent the end of their tenures in a haze.

“Mental decrepitude” on the Supreme Court has continued into the modern era, as historian David Garrow has documented. Frank Murphy, who served in the 1940s, was likely addicted to illegal drugs by the end of his tenure, and his biographer wrote that “on at least one occasion,” with Murphy in absentia, his law clerk and two fellow justices “jointly decided what Murphy’s votes should be.” Justice Charles Whittaker teetered on the brink of nervous breakdown for much of his five-year stint on the court in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Hugo Black stayed on for more than two years after his wife concluded in 1969 that “his mentality has been impaired.”

Nor was Black the last justice whose mind slipped while he was still on the bench. In 1975, his last year on the court, William O. Douglas was so severely disabled by a stroke that his fellow justices agreed to delay any decision in which Douglas’ vote could swing the outcome. Justice William Rehnquist developed a dependence on a sedative that caused him to experience hallucinations during withdrawal; at one point in late 1981, he tried to escape from George Washington University Hospital in his pajamas. Rehnquist recovered, but two of his colleagues—Lewis Powell and Thurgood Marshall—faced doubts about their mental capacities at the tail end of their careers.
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