If Trump wins in 2020, should RBG be put into suspended animation/hibernation?

[Florida Man for Crime]

This thread is partly posted in jest. However, there are serious points to it (see further down in particular, below the picture of Sleepy Ruth).

If Trump wins the electoral college in 2020, should Ruth Bader Ginsburg allow herself to be put into suspended animation/hibernation, to ensure that she is preserved? The Notorious RBG could remain in this state until such time as there were a Democratic President, and possibly also a Democratic Senate majority. Possibly she could be occasionally woken up temporarily until that time for key votes.

The technology basically exists, although it is still being developed and perfected. However, over the coming year or 2 or 3 (or 5), the technology may improve to the point where this is really a viable option.

Doctors Put a Patient in Suspended Animation for the First Time

For the first time, scientists have used therapeutic suspended animation to purposefully induce hypothermia and slow organ functions in patients with traumatic injuries, such as gunshot and stab wounds. The procedure, called emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR), prolongs the amount of time that surgeons have to operate on a patient by up to two hours, reports Helen Thomson for New Scientist. At least one patient was put into suspended animation for surgery, but the nature of their injuries and whether they survived have not been announced. The clinical trial is still ongoing.

...

In an EPR procedure, surgeons pump ice-cold saline into the aorta (the main artery exiting the heart) at a rate of at least a gallon per minute. Once the body temperature has lowered to 50 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit, blood circulation and brain activity slows dramatically, giving the surgical team extra time to operate. After the wounds are stitched, surgeons pump blood back into the patient using a heart-lung bypass machine, increasing the temperature incrementally until their body is warm enough to circulate blood independently.

You Could Probably Hibernate
The science of adapting to cold weather could change treatment of inflammatory diseases, insomnia, and trauma.

“It’s very possible that humans could hibernate,” says Kelly Drew, a professor at the University of Alaska’s Institute of Arctic Biology. Drew studies arctic ground squirrels, chunky little creatures that disappear into burrows for eight months of the year. When she and I spoke, it was 35 degrees Fahrenheit below zero (without wind chill) at her lab in Fairbanks, at 2:00 in the afternoon (just before sunset). Suddenly my case for hibernation felt trivial.

The essence of hibernation, Drew explains, is body-temperature regulation. Dropping the body’s core temperature induces a low-metabolic state of “torpor,” in which animals require almost no food. Most of the calories we “warm-blooded” animals burn go into maintaining our body temperatures—our basal metabolic rate. The squirrels Drew studies, for example, curl up into little balls and plummet from 99 degrees to 27. This drops their basal metabolic rate by about 99 percent.

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This question is being treated seriously by NASA. Beginning in 2014, the agency funded research on long-term hibernation as a way to facilitate long-term space travel. Going to Mars, for example, is limited by the stubborn needs of astronauts to do things like eat and move around. But if their metabolic processes could be slowed to almost zero, they could theoretically travel much farther. “The obvious benefit is needing less food,” says John Bradford, an aerospace engineer who worked with the agency to develop a human-hibernation protocol. One crew member would stay conscious while the others hibernated for two-week periods. They could be kept in small pods, minimizing the amount of space in the ship that needs to be encased in radiation-blocking shields, which are extremely heavy and fuel-inefficient.

While in suspended animation, while hibernating, or while in cryogenic sleep (whatever the case may be), RBG would not be dead and she would not need to resign from her position (nobody can make her resign, that is entirely her choice). So no replacement Justice could be nominated/appointed. She would simply be absent from the court a good deal of the time, in which case the court would continue to function with 8 Justices while she was "away." As mentioned, if there were a super-important vote, she could be presumably woken up for the vote, and then be re-frozen a day or two later. Possibly this could even occur at the end of every court Term, so that she could break any and all ties all in a single go.

Since this hasn't yet been extensively used yet on humans for long periods of time, there is some risk. RBG would be something of a pioneer in this venture. However, there is also some risk from normal biological processes and accidents if this is not done. The question is partly what would be more risky? At some point, normal biological processes and accidents become significantly more risky.

You may wonder - do we have any right to expect such a thing from RBG? It seems like maybe a lot to ask. Perhaps she might not wish to do this. But what is the reason we are in this mess in the first place? Because she decided not to resign when she had the chance with a Democratic President and a Democratic Senate (During Obama's Presidency up until the 2014 midterms). Since she is the one that partly got us into this mess by not resigning, she arguably has a duty to the nation to allow herself to be preserved, if possible.

It is also partly Bill Clinton's fault (isn't everything partly the Clintons' fault?), for choosing to appoint RBG in 1993 when she was ~61 years old (maybe +/- 1 year depending on timing with birthdays and the exact date of appointment). There was nothing stopping Clinton from nominating a 50 year old, a 40 year old, or even a 30 year old. Unlike with Senators/Representatives/Presidents, AFAIK there is also no constitutional minimum age for SCTOTUS Justices, so maybe he should have even appointed a very left-liberal child/teenager instead? AOC was 2 years old at the time and would have been the first Latina Justice (beating out Sonia Sotamayor).





This thread is partly posted in jest. However, there are serious points to it.

First ---

While this may not really be viable now, if the technology continues to develop, it may be viable in the future. And at some point in the future, there would probably end up being a Supreme Court Justice diagnosed with some terminal malady, who doctors estimate has only months or a year to live. And perhaps this Supreme Court Justice's retirement might significantly shift the partisan balance of the Supreme Court significantly. In that case, provided that the technology does really exist, there would be every incentive to have the SCOTUS Justice be cryogenically frozen/hibernated/put into suspended animation.


Second ---

What does it say about how poorly designed the system for SCOTUS nominations is that this is even a question? Even if the system sort of worked in 1800, when there were much shorter average life spans, things are totally different now (just one of many examples where the Constitution has become hopelessly outdated). It doesn't make any sense to have a system in which there is any incentive to do this sort of thing. The problem arises from the facts that:

1) The Supreme Court is in fact a partisan institution, no matter how much some persist in denying it.
2) Supreme Court Justices have lifetime terms.

Together, these factors incentivize attempts to game the system of SCOTUS appointments by timing retirements with control of the Presidency/Senate, so that seats are not "given to the opposition." And it also incentivizes trying to game the system by appointing Justices based on whether or not they are young and healthy, as opposed to whether they are qualified and would make good Justices. Meanwhile, if a Justice randomly dies through a freak accident, it can have a profound impact on the law and the course of history, in particular if they get replaced by a Justice from the other party. Surely the fate of the nation ought not to depend on random changes in the health of a handful of senile lawyers who wear funny robes and talk all highfalutin-like?



It seems to me that a good solution for this is that SCOTUS Justices should not have lifetime terms. If there are 9 Justices, a better system would be something like rotating fixed terms of 18 years (1 seat coming up every 2 years) with a term limit of 1 term. One can imagine similar systems with some variation from this; however, whatever the precise details of a better system might be, it should be pretty clear that the current system makes little sense and creates a lot of bad/senseless incentives. The same could be said to a lesser degree for the non-SCOTUS judiciary.

One could also try to adjust the issue by changing point #1 rather than #2, so that SCOTUS was no longer a partisan institution, but this seems like fantasy talk. While I would say that SCOTUS has become more partisan, it has always been partisan to a significant degree (and more so than partisan, but relatedly, has been ideological).

[Florida Man for Crime]

"Balance" is a joke — you need to stop lending cover to partisan Republicans. Likewise, the death of the egotistical Ginsburg would be a godsend. People would learn to view the Court as illegitimate, and question why the social mores of AL — pretty much disgusting from the 19th century onward — should enjoy undemocratic weight relative to those of CA. They shouldn't, and we don't have to respect their illegitimate judicial decisions or even share a country with increasingly enfeebled rural whites.

I am sort of inclined to agree that there could be advantages over the longer term of the court temporarily shifting even further to the right with RBG (and/or Breyer, who let's not forget is 81 years old and no spring chicken) getting replaced.

What is set to happen now, with SCOTUS packed with the stolen seat and , is we are likely to get Conservative rulings, but Roberts will be smart about it and go slow and gradual (as he has been doing ever since he got on to the Supreme Court), so as to try to minimize backlash.

For example, rather than overruling Roe v. Wade outright, he will probably pretend to "uphold" it but in actual fact weaken it over a series of successive cases to the extent that it amounts to the same thing as if he would have overturned it.

Death by a thousand cuts, if you will. It is similar to the story about the frog put in boiling water:



There still seems to be a surprising amount of resistance even to basic/obvious and fully constitutional moderate court packing and regulation of the Judiciary (which Congress has for a long time mostly ignored, even though doesn't require anything more than simply passing ordinary legislation as a Judiciary Act). A lot of that I think is because things changed gradually, and people normalized/got used to it.

But with RBG and/or Breyer gone, Roberts would no longer be in control of the pace of "Conservative" activist change. A lot would likely change quickly, which would create larger and more powerful backlash and build up support for court packing and other judicial reforms to the point that they could/would actually get implemented. And assuming they then did actually eventually get implemented and we ended up with a more functional and fair judicial system, then we would all be better off in the long run.

However, the downside of that is particularly in relation to voting rights, though. One could imagine (as mentioned above) a court on which the swing vote is even to the right of Roberts (!!!) overturning the VRA entirely, or endorsing full-on old time voter suppression.

And the problem there is that if people can't vote, then it is not possible to implement any reforms, and you are stuck with no within-the-system remedy.