Exclusive | Justice Sonia Sotomayor Is Expected to Remain on Supreme…
Nov. 10, 2024 5:30 am
WASHINGTON—Despite calls from some liberal activists for Justice Sonia Sotomayor to step down while Democrats can fill her seat before Inauguration Day,she has no plans to retire from the Supreme Court, people close to the justice said.
“This is no time to lose her important voice on the court. She just turned 70 and takes better care of herself than anyone I know,” said one person close to the justice, suggesting that progressives turn their attention to other ways of safeguarding the Constitution after President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
Sotomayor, appointed in 2009 by then President Barack Obama, is the senior member of the court’s liberal minority, which by custom makes her its leader. Outnumbered by six conservatives, including three appointed by Trump during his first term, the liberals have increasingly been reduced to dissenting opinions that argue the majority has made grave errors on matters from abortion rights to presidential power.
Sotomayor, who has written a bestselling memoir and children’s books, appeared on “Sesame Street,” and championed civics education, is among the better-known justices. In February, a Marquette Law School pollfound that while many Americans were unfamiliar with the court’s membership, Sotomayor was viewed more favorably than any other justice.
“This would probably be a good day for Sotomayor to retire,” David Dayen, executive editor of the liberal American Prospect magazine, wrote the day after the election on social media. The same day, the former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, noting the justice has had Type 1 diabetes since childhood, resurfaced his April op-ed suggesting that it was time for Sotomayor to go.
Animating the discussion of Sotomayor—and of potential retirements by conservative justices of similar age—is Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death at age 87. Ginsburg had resisted calls from liberals to step down in the early 2010s while Obama and the Democrats held appointment power. Her death in September 2020 allowed Trump to solidify the court’s conservative majority by appointing Justice Amy Coney Barrett shortly before Democrats captured both the White House and Senate.
Fears of further diminution of the liberal minority led some on the left to pressure Justice Stephen Breyer to step down soon after President Biden and Senate Democrats took over in 2021, with one group sending a billboard truck to Capitol Hill bearing the message, “Breyer, Retire.” He stepped down in 2022 at age 83, allowing Biden to replace him with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, was among the first prominent legal progressives to call on Ginsburg to retire during the Obama presidency, with a March 2014 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times.
Chemerinsky said Saturday that conditions are different now.
“It is far more uncertain that the Democrats could confirm a successor than in summer 2014,” he said. “And Sotomayor is 70,” while Ginsburg was 81 when he urged her to step down.
Some conservatives, equally cognizant that political winds and health conditions can change rapidly, have suggested that the senior stalwarts of the court’s right wing, Justices Clarence Thomas, 76, and Samuel Alito, 74, might retire before the 2026 midterm elections.
“Justice Sam Alito is gleefully packing up his chambers,” Mike Davis, a conservative legal activist close to Trump, said on social media after Tuesday’s election.
Others find such talk impolitic. Treating Thomas and Alito “like meat that has reached its expiration date is unwise, uninformed, and, frankly, just crass,” Leonard Leo, a leader of the Federalist Society and onetime judicial adviser to Trump, said Friday.Neither justice has publicly indicated an interest in retirement.
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