Sometimes, when it’s been a while since Ruth Bader Ginsburg has made news for a well-judged but inflammatory comment, the period in 2013 in which Tumblr decided she actually had the personality of a battle rapper can feel a little bit like a dream. Thankfully the 86-year-old never stays too quiet for too long, telling NPR’s Nina Totenberg Tuesday a little tale about her seemingly immortal nature:

“There was a senator, I think it was after my pancreatic cancer, who announced with great glee that I was going to be dead within six months,” she recalled. “That senator, whose name I have forgotten, is now himself dead, and I,” she added with a smile, “am very much alive.”

Ginsburg understands that a true rap diss requires a bit of disdain, and forgetting his name is spicy. But we have Google to help us out, and it turns out that the senator was Jim Bunning, a Republican from Kentucky who served from 1999 to 2011. In a February 2009 speech, delivered while he was weighing a campaign for a third term, he discussed the cancer diagnosis Ginsburg had recently received. He said Ginsburg had “bad cancer. The kind that you don’t get better from. Even though she was operated on, usually nine months is the longest that anybody would live.” A former professional baseball player who remains the only Baseball Hall of Fame player to have served in Congress, Bunning had no medical background and eventually apologized if he had “offended” Ginsburg with his comments, in a statement that misspelled her name.

As it turned out, things only got worse for Bunning from there, proof that crossing Ruth Bader Ginsburg may make you genuinely cursed. A few months later, then Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declined to back his reelection bid on Fox News, and Bunning called him a “control freak.” A Fox Sunday prime-time producer wrote a HuffPost op-ed slamming Bunning, with its headline calling him “too mean and weird for the GOP.” In July 2009, he chose to drop out of the following year’s race, and Rand Paul eventually won his seat. He died in May 2017 at the age of 85.

So Ginsburg has now outlived Bunning’s prediction by a decade. She has used this burn before, in March 2010, but then she did remember his name. “I am pleased to report that, contrary to Sen. Bunning’s prediction, I am alive and in good health,” she said in a speech to a legal nonprofit. Let the tale of Jim Bunning serve as a warning to anyone who threatens the health of the Notorious RBG.

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