Any chance to break the neoconfederate hold on the Court starts in November
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In the midst of a puff piece which pretends to believe Sam Alito when he explains that his robotically pro-Trump voting record is ACTUALLY the result of dispassionate historical analysis,* Alito confirms that he’s back for another term:
Reports of his end have been greatly exaggerated: “Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, is retiring, the court announced Tuesday.” National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg wrote those words as the court’s term ended on June 30, stuck them atop a canned story, and pulled the editorial trigger. Her enormous scoop turned out to be empty, and NPR retracted it in minutes. Ms. Totenberg, 82, said she had been confused by an announcement from Chief Justice John Roberts about staff retirements.
“Obviously I’m here for another term,” Justice Alito, 76, says a month later, during a rare summertime visit to his chambers. 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.”
I’ve seen people say that no Republican justice would do what Ruth Bader Ginsburg did. The obvious problem with this theory, as I’ve said before, is that William Rehnquist did exactly what RBG did, and he didn’t even survive a year into the next presidential term. He just had the Electoral College die land the right way in Ohio.
The stakes in November, then, are very high. The 2014 midterms were almost as crushing a blow to American liberalism as 2016 and 2024 — rebuilding involves starting with returning the favor in 2026.
*Alito is a “practical originalist,” that is an originalist unless originalism would lead to a result that differs from the most recent platform of the Republican Party of Idaho.