Demand Justice is a progressive advocacy group that’s focused, as the name suggests, on stacking the courts with liberal judges. This year, the group is sending out a warning designed to activate the left-wing base of their party in time for the midterms. The warning is that President Trump could still replace one or two more Justices on the Supreme Court.
For now, none of the nine Supreme Court justices have announced plans to retire, and Mr. Trump has no looming opportunity to keep stocking the court with younger conservative justices.
That isn’t stopping Demand Justice from preparing a multimillion-dollar effort to oppose potential Trump Supreme Court appointees before they happen — with a warning that Mr. Trump could be replacing two justices this year…
Josh Orton, the president of Demand Justice, said the project would cost $3 million to start and $15 million more if vacancies occurred and Mr. Trump nominated a successor to the court — most likely for Clarence Thomas or Samuel A. Alito Jr., the two oldest justices. Justice Thomas is 77 years old, and Justice Alito is 76…
“If you think that Trump is willing to leave two of the three justices he thinks are most loyal on the court in their 80s past when he leaves office, you are not paying attention,” Mr. Orton said in an interview Thursday. “There is no way that Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito would ever commit the fundamental miscalculation about power that we saw from Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Barack Obama and we as a movement.”
Justice Ginsburg looms over all of this because she has become the leading example of what not to do. There were calls for Ginsburg to step down in Obama’s last year in office in 2016. At the time Democrats felt pretty confident Hillary Clinton would become Obama’s successor but there was a small risk that, somehow or other, a Republican would win the White House. And that would obviously be a problem since Ginsburg was already 83 years old.
Sure enough, Ginsburg ignored the calls to step down and Trump won the election. In 2020, when she was 87-years-old, Ginsburg died from complications related to pancreatic cancer. So the most progressive member of the court was replaced by Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Neither Justice Thomas nor Justice Alito are as old as Ginsburg was when she refused her last chance to step down with a Democratic president, but women do tend to outlive men by 2-4 years so the situations are similar, at least they could be if Dems retake the Senate this year and a Democrat wins the White House in 2028.
And on that sour note, I’ll just highlight this story which appeared this morning on CNN:
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was taken to a hospital after becoming ill last month at a Federalist Society dinner in Philadelphia, according to people with knowledge of the March 20 incident.
The justice was evaluated and administered fluids for dehydration. He returned to his home in Virginia that night with his security team.
Alito and Supreme Court public information officials declined to comment for the record about the episode, which has not been previously reported…
Alito, who turned 76 on Wednesday and has served as a justice for 20 years, has become the subject of widespread speculation from commentators across the ideological spectrum and the news media over whether he might retire. (He has refused to answer journalists’ questions on the subject.)
That doesn’t sound serious but at age 76 anything can happen. As for Justice Thomas, he spent a week in the hospital back in 2022 but hasn’t had any incidents since then.
The decision is up to them but I doubt either Thomas or Ginsburg wants to have their successor chosen by President Newsom (god forbid) or President Harris (god help us all). There’s certainly no guarantee that will happen, but then there wasn’t thought to be much of a risk that Trump would win in 2016 and he did. Unlikely things do happen and counting on them not to happen is a risk.
The Supreme Court will be releasing decisions for this term in a couple months. Maybe after that point, someone will pull one or both of these justices aside and mention that it might be best not to take the chance with the future of the court that Justice Ginsburg did.
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