Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito says he is considering retirement and could hand Trump another nomination
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has revealed that he is considering retirement, potentially handing President Donald Trump another nomination.
“It’s something that I think that somebody at my age has to think about every term,” the 76-year-old justice told CBS News in a clip from an interview set to air Monday.
“But I thought that I could still make a valuable contribution, which is why I became a justice and a judge in the first place.”
There are already three Trump-nominated justices on the bench — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative lean wouldn’t change if Alito retired and Trump nominated a new justice. But Alito’s retirement would allow Trump to appoint a fourth justice to the court. Alito was nominated by then-President George W. Bush in the fall of 2005 and took his seat on the bench in January 2006.
Trump has lashed out at the Supreme Court for several rulings against him on controversial issues like his sweeping tariff policy and his challenge to birthright citizenship. Alito sided with Trump on those two issues.
The timing of a Supreme Court justice’s retirement is crucial because the party in power can change the court’s political leaning for decades.
Republicans blocked then-President Barack Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland in 2016 after conservative Justice Antonin Scalia died more than 11 months before Trump would be sworn into office. Trump then replaced Scalia with Gorsuch, who took his seat in April 2017.
While Trump has another two years in office, if Democrats take control of the Senate in November’s midterms, they could make it harder for a potential Alito replacement to be confirmed.
“You decided not to retire this year despite, I think, some pretty intense pressure from Republicans who thought, ‘Well, Republicans are in control of the Senate, so it would be easier to confirm your replacement,’” CBS News Chief Legal Correspondent Jan Crawford said in her interview with Alito.
When then-Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo asked Trump in April about rumors of Alito stepping down, the president said, “it’d be nice to say now I have somebody for 40 years,” but then praised the justice’s work.
“Justice Alito is an unbelievable justice and a brilliant justice — and he gets the country. He does what’s right for the country,” Trump said.
Alito said in his interview with CBS News that “it’s too hard to predict how, for anybody and particularly when you reach a certain age, what your situation will be a year from now, two years from now and so forth. And it’s too hard to predict what the political situation will be and what any president might do with respect to a replacement.”
