The Left isn’t going to wait this time concerning their moves for the Supreme Court. It doesn’t deal with the conservative jurists. It involves shoring up the liberal wing and avoiding a Ruth Bader Ginsburg situation, where a Republican gets to fill a crucial seat. Obama tried to hint to the late RBG about retiring under his presidency, given that he could fill her vacancy with a younger replacement. Ginsburg refused, later dying during the 2020 election, which led to Trump filling that seat with conservative catholic Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
This pressure campaign isn’t new. Liberals got Stephen Breyer to retire, replacing him with Ketanji Brown Jackson, who appeared to be gobsmacked that the First Amendment prevents the government from curtailing free speech. Yet, the latest target is one that’s been mentioned for years: Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who, while considered ‘young’ in SCOTUS years, is racked with health issues and seems generally depressed that there’s a solid conservative majority on the Court, saying that every loss personally pains her.
Jonathan Turley wrote about the Left’s campaign to force Sotomayor into retirement while also noting the disturbing devolution within the liberal legal community regarding how the Supreme Court has changed—where mob tactics are not just endorsed but encouraged concerning decisions they don’t like:
On CNN, journalist Josh Barro bluntly wondered why Sotomayor remains on the bench when younger jurists could be brought on to guarantee a liberal vote for years to come. He indicated that many liberals are frustrated with her for not stepping down: “I find it a little bit surprising, given what Justice Sotomayor describes there about the stakes of what is happening before the Supreme Court, that she’s not retired. She’s 69 years old, she’s been on the court for 15 years.”
Sotomayor gave her frank assessment of being “tired” and “frustrated” during an appearance at University of California’s, Berkeley. She suggested that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority contributes to her daily burden. It was a notable interview not only for its content but for its moderator, UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.
Chemerinsky previously shocked many in the legal community by denouncing Sotomayor’s six conservative colleagues as “partisan hacks.” In response to Chemerinsky’s probing, Sotomayor took an implied swipe at her colleagues and declared: “I live in frustration. 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.”
[…]
None of this is surprising in a time when law school deans have called conservative justices “hacks” and law professors have called for protesters to aggressively target individual justices.
Seton Hall Law Assistant Dean Brian Sheppard treated such turnovers on the Court in strictly transactional terms, calling for Congress to “buy out” justices by offering them “large sums of money.”
Georgetown Law Professor Josh Chafetz and others are interested in taking a more active approach to making continuation on the Court as unpleasant as possible — at least for conservatives. Chafetz previously declared that the “mob is right” in targeting and harassing justices, and he told a law school panel in 2022 that “I want to suggest that courts are the enemy, and always have been.” He suggested that Congress should retaliate against conservative justices by considering the withdrawal of funding for law clerks or even “cutting off the Supreme Court’s air conditioning budget.”
When the audience laughed at that absurd suggestion, it reportedly triggered fellow panelist and Harvard law professor Ryan Doerfler, who shot back at the crowd: “It should not be a laugh line. This is a political contest, these are the tools of retaliation available, and they should be completely normalized.”
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As Turley observed, these are the people teaching the next generation of lawyers. Impartial analysis of the law is absent. It’s now undergone this revolutionary Chavista transition that is illiberal and rooted in authoritarianism. Liberals seem to have forgotten basic biology here: no one lives forever. The Dobbs ruling on abortion, which has driven the Left mad, is their fault. Since 1973, Democrats and pro-abortion wingnuts had generations to codify abortion rights. The late Justice Antonin Scalia even conceded that with nothing in the Constitution that prohibits the practice, a national law permitting abortion would be permissible, along with gay marriage and the right to suicide. In short, you keep a society updated through the ballot box and legislatures, not through the courts and the Constitution. But the Left doesn’t care about that—it’s all about breaking the institutions that will get in the way of a progressive agenda, and the Supreme Court is the main barrier there.
Make no mistake. The Left is trying to bully Sonia Sotomayor into retirement too.
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) March 18, 2024
A sampling of recent "reporting": https://t.co/lmC3e7zs5f pic.twitter.com/B1LfikCMBj
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