You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who believes that Joe Biden will win the 2024 presidential election. Few expected him to seek reelection in the first place, and polls are rife with indicators that Biden’s candidacy is doomed. This puts Democrats in a major pickle because whoever serves as president for the next four years is likely to get at least two Supreme Court nominations — potentially three.
The oldest justices on the court are Clarence Thomas, 74, Samuel Alito, 72, and Sonia Sotomayor, 68, and it’s reasonable to expect any, if not all, of them to consider retirement over the next four years. This concern underscores the potential impact of the next presidential term on the composition of the highest court in the land and why Democrats want Sonia Sotomayor to retire while Biden is still in office.
Sotomayor hasn’t been on the court very long — Barack Obama nominated her in 2009 — but between the likelihood of Republicans winning back control of the U.S. Senate in November and the presidential election looking extremely favorable to Trump right now, Democrats have been urging her to step down for over a year now.
Recent revelations about her health are giving them added anxiety. According to a recent report from HuffPost, Sotomayor travels with a medic — something no other justice does.
“The revelation comes from newly released U.S. Marshals Service records obtained by the nonpartisan court watchdog Fix the Court, which requested information about security for current and former Supreme Court justices,” the outlet reports. “And it amplifies questions that many only whisper about the long-term fitness of the oldest Democratic-appointed justice on the court.”
In February 2018, a medic from Grand Junction, Colorado, accompanied Sotomayor on a trip she made to southern Florida, according to the records.
On a three-day book tour with stops in Illinois and Tennessee in October of that year, the Marshals Service incurred costs for “baggage (medic),” which could refer to medical personnel or be a more benign reference to medical equipment in the justice’s luggage. Sotomayor was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at age 7 and gives herself insulin shots multiple times a day.
Both trips occurred after a January 2018 episode in which paramedics treated her at her home for low blood sugar.
In 2021 and 2022, Sotomayor made at least four trips — to Florida, New York and Puerto Rico — in which the Marshals Service mentioned baggage containing “medical gear,” or redacted a description of “baggage/medical supplies.”
Concerns over Sotomayor’s health come as the sting of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in the fall of 2020 still lingers for many liberals. Ginsburg faced health challenges for years, and according to reports, Obama even attempted to convince her to step down during his presidency.
Her death allowed Trump to nominate her successor, Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett’s confirmation secured a conservative majority on the court, resulting in several constitutionalist rulings that have triggered the left — particularly the overturning of Roe v. Wade and sending the issue of abortion back to the states to regulate.
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While several Democrats and liberal activists openly called on former Justice Stephen Breyer to retire — which he eventually did in 2022 — so far, there hasn’t been a major push to do the same with Sotomayor, mostly because of the optics of pressuring the first Latina justice to retire. The revelation of her medical issues may change that.
And it’s not outside the realm of possibility that Sotomayor, who has recently expressed frustration with being on a conservative Supreme Court, may opt not to make the same “mistake” that Ruth Bader Ginsburg made.