ALEXANDRIA, VA—With her parents leaving town to celebrate their 98th wedding anniversary, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made plans Friday for a major house party, inviting all her Supreme Court colleagues to what she promised would be “a classic Ginsburg throwdown.”
Ginsburg, a Clinton appointee who traditionally votes with the court’s liberal wing and whose 120-year-old parents explicitly told her not to have any friends over, confirmed that she waited until her mother and father had pulled out of the driveway before texting “it’s on” to her fellow justices and telling them to “get ready to drink [their] asses off.”
“My dad is seriously crazy if he thinks I’m not going to throw an epic rager when I have the house to myself all weekend,” said Ginsburg, whose father, a furrier and haberdasher by trade, reportedly wrote down the mileage on his 1928 Ford Model A so he would know if his daughter took it out for a spin. “As far as I’m concerned, when the cats are away, the mice will play.”
“Besides, I’m 79,” she continued as she prepared a tray of Jell-O shots using the mix favored by her supercentenarian mother for its softness on her toothless gums. “They can’t tell me what to do anymore.”
According to sources, Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Samuel Alito, Stephen Breyer, and Clarence Thomas arrived first, catching a ride to the party in the open-backed Jeep Wrangler of Chief Justice John Roberts, who had earlier persuaded his older sister Kathy to buy beer. Justices Sotomayor and Kagan showed up shortly thereafter, having taken longer than expected to dupe their parents into thinking they were sleeping over at each other’s houses.
Though David Souter had hoped to drive down from New Hampshire and party with the court “like old times,” the retired justice told reporters he had to cancel when his plan to “squeeze some gas money out of the old man” fell through.
Originally intended as a “justices-only thing,” the partygoers said the gathering grew much larger when Scalia posted the address of the house on the Justice Department’s Facebook page, inviting “everyone who views the writ of certiorari as essential to a robust judiciary” to “come get shwasted at RBG’s place.”
“Party’s off the fucking hook!” exclaimed Breyer, taking a body shot from a 58-year-old court stenographer who had come with friends from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. “Don’t get me wrong, [Elena] Kag[an]’s confirmation bash was the shit, but this one’s in a totally different league. I’d forgotten how cute first-year federal clerkship girls are. Damn!”
“I’m definitely getting ass tonight,” he added, excusing himself to “get blazed” with a group of special assistant U.S. attorneys in the family’s carriage shed.
Meanwhile, “reigning flip-cup champions” Kennedy and Alito reportedly set up shop on an oak bagatelle table in the parlor, with games getting so out of hand they nearly broke a porcelain vase recently given to Ginsburg by her 156-year-old grandmother.
Witnesses reported that at approximately 1 a.m., the revelry came to a grinding halt when a police car was spotted in the driveway, prompting the nine members of the highest court in the land to scatter into the woods behind the house.
After an initial scramble by the justices to hide the weed and reach a consensus on whether law enforcement in this instance had probable cause to search persons for possession of a controlled substance, Ginsburg, who was the most sober and once served as general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, was nominated to the do the talking.
“The cops were pretty cool and let me off with a warning to keep the noise down and make sure everyone got home safe,” Ginsburg said. “It’s a good thing, too, because my dad would have really let me have some 19th-century discipline if he found out I had people over.”
“He’s such an old fogy, and it sucks, because I’m much more responsible now than I was in my 60s,” she continued, adding that her father has never fully trusted her since smelling vodka on her breath one night in 1998. “He still thinks of me as being this much younger woman who just qualified for Medicare.”
Ginsburg confirmed she would clean the house meticulously Saturday to avoid what happened after her last party, when her father discovered an empty can of beer on his wind-up Victrola gramophone and grounded her for the remainder of the court’s term.