For those who thought U.S. Supreme Court justices served for life, think again.
There have been calls for Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal, to retire.
Democratic senators are having flashbacks to when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then 81, refused to step down in 2014. At this time, her successor would have been picked by then-President Barack Obama. However, when she died in 2020, her replacement was picked by then-President Donald Trump, NBC News reported.
Ginsburg’s successor, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, cast a deciding vote to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights ruling less than two years later — a historic win for conservatives.
People are now calling for 69-year-old Sotomayor to hang up her robe.
Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan said Sotomayor should retire so that President Biden could nominate another liberal justice to replace her. This would circumvent Trump from picking a replacement should he win in November, Fox News reported.
“With Joe Biden trailing Trump in several swing states and Democrats also in danger of losing their razor-thin majority in the Senate, are we really prepared for history to repeat itself? Sotomayor will turn 70 in June,” Hasan wrote in a column for The Guardian.
“I have PTSD from 2020, I think the Democrats didn‘t learn lessons. Look, what are we talking about, abortion rights. How did that happen? Dobbs [v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization], how did the Florida decision happen today? [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis appointed five of the seven judges. Republicans are very good at stacking courts and getting their people on courts and thinking strategically about filling courts. Democrats aren’t very good at seeing the power of the Supreme Court,” Hasan said.
“And that’s why I worry. I worry that, why would you want to repeat history? Why take the risk? You have a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate, and you have a justice who is about to turn 70,” he said on CNN.
Hasan said Democrats should be concentrating on Sotomayor’s legacy.
“Biden, elected Democrats, and liberals and progressives across the board should be both publicly and privately encouraging Sotomayor to consider what she wants her legacy to be, to remember what happened with [Ruth Bader Ginsburg], and to not take any kind of gamble with the future of our democracy,” Hasan argued in his column.
Hasan isn’t alone in his thoughts.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) is also talking about Sotomayor’s retirement.
According to Mediaite, Blumenthal is remembering what happened with Ginsburg.
“I’m very respectful of Justice Sotomayor,” Blumenthal told NBC. “I have great admiration for her. But I think she really has to weigh the competing factors. We should learn a lesson. And it’s not like there’s any mystery here about what the lesson should be. The old saying — graveyards are full of indispensable people, ourselves in this body included.”
Blumenthal added that Sotomayor is “a highly accomplished and, obviously, fully functioning justice right now.”
But, he added, “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.”
Regardless of what others think of Sotomayor’s possible retirement, the justice herself is not on the same page.
There are no signs that Sotomayor has any plans to step down, NBC News reported.
However, remarks she made in January did not emote that of a happy justice, but also one with some fight left.
Sotomayor, while talking at the University of California Berkley Law school, said she lived in “frustration” among a conservative-leaning Supreme Court, Fox News Digital previously reported.
“I live in frustration. And as you heard, every loss truly traumatizes me in my stomach and in my heart. But I have to get up the next morning and keep on fighting,” Sotomayor said.
