Being a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court has its privileges. For one thing, you have job security — all justices are tenured for life — and the pay is good: $255,500 per year for the chief justice and at $244,400 per year for each associate justice as of 2014.
Plus, if you nap on the job, no one will notice. Er … make that everyone will notice. Everyone noticed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg nodding off at this year’s State of the Union address. Some commentators wrote the embarrassing episode off to age — Ginsburg is 81 — while others used it as a critique of the content of the speech, which was widely dismissed on both sides of the ideological spectrum as out-of-touch and in denial: There wasn’t a single mention of the word terrorism in the text.
But Ginsburg has owned up to the real reason for her cat nap. She “wasn’t 100% sober.” From the International Business Times:
Ginsburg had set tongues wagging after slumping in her chair as US President Barack Obama addressed the joint session of Congress in the House of Representatives on 20 January.
She was asked about the incident by the moderator during a joint appearance with Justice Anthony Scalia at George Washington University on Thursday evening.
“The audience for the most part is awake, but they’re bobbing up and down all the time. And we sit there as stone-faced, sober judges. But we’re not,” she said, as the audience laughed.
“At least I wasn’t 100% sober when we went to the State of the Union,” she confessed, blaming the wine served before the speech.
“The dinner was so delicious,” she went on to explain, that “it needed wine.”
I understand where’s coming from. Every time Obama opens his mouth, I feel tempted to reach for the bottle.
Actually, this is not the first time the president’s oratorical skills have sent a “senior statesman” drifting off to dreamland. During a much-ballyhooed deficit speech in 2012, cameras captured the man who is one heart beat away from commander-in-chief catching a few midday Z’s.
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