Liberals are mounting a pressure campaign to force liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to retire from the bench so President Joe Biden, who faces a tough reelection fight in November, can appoint a younger liberal successor before the election.
Democrats fear that the 6–3 conservative majority on the nation’s highest court could become a 7–2 conservative majority if President Donald Trump wins the election in November and she dies during his second term of office.
They point out that President Trump was able to replace liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died of pancreatic cancer complications on Sept. 18, 2020, at 87, with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett days before the 2020 election.
Justice Ginsburg refused to step down despite her fragile health.
Justice Barrett’s appointment, they say, helped supply the votes on the Court needed to overturn abortion rights precedent Roe v. Wade by a 5–4 vote in June 2022.
The ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization found there was no right to abortion in the U.S. Constitution and returned the regulation of abortion to the states, which Roe had taken away.
Justice Sotomayor, 69, is reportedly in good health, but activists have seized on the fact that she has had Type I diabetes since she was 7 years old and that she has had some health scares.
They note that she is the only Supreme Court justice to have traveled with a medic and remarked she was “tired” during a talk in January at UC Berkeley Law School.
In January 2018, she was reportedly treated at her home for low blood sugar by paramedics but was able to report for work afterward.
Left-wing activists seem emboldened because they successfully pressured liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, now 85, to retire in June 2022, which allowed President Biden to replace him with liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, now 53.
In an April 3 broadcast on NBC News, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), said Justice Sotomayor should consider stepping down soon.
“Justices have to make their personal decisions about their health, and their level of energy, but also to keep in mind the larger national and public interest in making sure that the Court looks and thinks like America,” the senator said.
“We should learn a lesson, you know? And it’s not like there’s any mystery here about what the lesson should be—that the old saying, ‘graveyards are full of indispensable people,’ ourselves in this body included.”
Before that, left-wing commentator Mehdi Hasan published a column in The Guardian (UK) saying it pained him to argue that Justice Sotomayor should make way for a younger successor who can serve for decades on the Court because she is a good standard bearer for the progressive cause.
He described Justice Sotomayor as “the greatest liberal to sit on the Supreme Court in my adult lifetime.”
Mr. Hasan added that she is “the first Latina to hold the position of justice, [and] she has blazed a relentlessly progressive trail on the highest bench in the land.”
“Whether it was her lone dissent
in a North Carolina voting rights case in 2016 (“the Court’s conclusion … is a fiction”); her ingenious referencing of Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Baldwin, and WEB DuBois in another 2016 dissent over unreasonable searches and seizures.
Although Justice Ginsburg had already survived two cancer diagnoses, she refused to retire even though liberal voices urged her to do so, Mr. Hasan wrote.
On her deathbed in 2020, she said her “most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed,” yet President Trump “nominated Amy Coney Barrett as RBG’s replacement just eight days after her death, and Senate Republicans confirmed Barrett to RBG’s vacant seat just eight days before election day.”
With President Biden now trailing President Trump in polls in several swing states and Democrats “in danger of losing their razor-thin majority in the Senate, are we really prepared for history to repeat itself?”
Justice Sotomayor could “easily” survive a second Trump term and continue serving until 2029, “but why take that risk? Why not retire now?” he wrote.
Molly Coleman, executive director of the People’s Parity Project, also wants Justice Sotomayor to resign.
“This isn’t personal. This isn’t about one individual justice. It’s nothing to do with what an incredible legal talent Justice Sotomayor is. It’s about what’s in the best interests of the country moving forward,” she told NBC News.
The Biden administration is neutral on the issue so far.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said: “President Biden believes that decisions to retire from the Supreme Court should be made by the justices themselves and no one else.”
The Epoch Times reached out to Justice Sotomayor for comment but had not received a reply as of press time.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared April 4, 2024, in The Epoch Times. It was updated April 5, 2024.
Photo: Supreme Court Jutice Sonia Sotomayor