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Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I wasn't "100% sober" at the State of the Union

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Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.

During last month's State of the Union address, many eagle-eyed viewers noted that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg occasionally appeared … less than awake.

On Thursday night, during an event at George Washington University, Ginsburg gave an entertaining account of how she ended up nodding off. "The audience for the most part is awake because they're bobbing up and down all the time," she said. "And we sit there, stone-faced, sober judges. But we're not —at least I wasn't — 100 percent sober, because before we went to the State of the Union, we had dinner together."

Ginsburg added that there was a "very fine California wine that Justice Kennedy brought. And I vowed this year just sparkling water, stay away from the wine. But in the end, the dinner was so delicious, it needed wine to accompany it." Check out the video from CNN:

As Ginsburg pointed out, this isn't the first time she's fallen asleep during a presidential speech. Indeed, Vox's State of the Union bingo card had a square for "Ruth Bader Ginsburg falls asleep" this year. After Ginsburg recounted this story Thursday, Justice Scalia — who has skipped the State of the Union for years — quipped that sleeping during the speech was, "the first intelligent thing you've done," according to CBSDC.

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