It was the mistake heard ’round the world. In late June, NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg misheard an announcement on the final day of the Supreme Court’s most recent term and reported that Justice Samuel Alito was retiring.
The report sent shockwaves through legal and political circles, but as NPR soon made clear, it was wrong and the conservative jurist had made no such announcement.
Nevertheless, the reporting generated a new round of chatter about Alito and his future, and in the weeks that followed the NRP error, there were even some reports about who Donald Trump might consider as Alito’s successor, which struck many observers as a signal from the president to the justice who so consistently sides with the Republican White House.
If Alito noticed the hints, he chose to ignore them. The Wall Street Journal recently spoke to the 76-year-old jurist in his chambers and reported:
“Obviously I’m here for another term,” Justice Alito [said]. … Some conservatives have publicly suggested he should retire and take one for the team, as Stephen Breyer did in 2022 and Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn’t when Barack Obama was president, both under intense pressure from the left. Do such calls bother Justice Alito?
“It’s not pleasant, in the sense that it’s a reminder of mortality,” he says. “It’s like, what are those vultures doing up there? They are flying around. But it goes with life tenure.”
Alito, the second-oldest sitting justice on the high court (Clarence Thomas is two years older), did not elaborate as to when he might step down, although his on-the-record comments suggest his retirement is not near and won’t happen this year.
The political relevance of this is significant: If Alito had decided to retire, he could take comfort in knowing the incumbent president would appoint a successor who shared the justice’s ideology and who would very likely be confirmed by the Republican majority in the Senate.
His decision to put off that decision opens the door to a provocative possibility. If he were to retire in 2027 or 2028, would a potentially Democratic-led Senate confirm Trump’s nominee? (The last time a Senate led by one party confirmed a Supreme Court nominee chosen by the president of the other party was 1991.)
The stakes in the midterm elections were already high. Alito just pushed them a little higher.
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