Besides getting older, Justice Sonia Sotomayor has been beset by ongoing health problems. Liberals are worried they could have another ‘Ruth Bader Ginsburg’ situation again, a political Groundhog Day they could do without. The liberal wing is hanging by a thread, whereas the conservative bloc has been shored up under the Trump presidency for the most part. RBG was notorious for one thing: not retiring under the Obama presidency, which was attempted during a lunch with the former president in 2013. Ms. Ginsburg wasn’t leaving but died in the twilight of the Trump presidency, who quickly filled her seat with Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative Catholic. Ginsburg got dragged by some progressives for allowing this opportunity to happen under a Republican president.
With Sotomayor, who reportedly must travel with a medic due to her ailments, the Left is determined never to let this happen again. They bullied Stephen Breyer into retirement, only to be replaced by Ketanji Brown Jackson, a jurist who seemed gobsmacked that the First Amendment prevents the government from censoring speech. The progressives have their bayonets fixed, but what about the top Democrats in the US Senate? They’re not touching this right now (via NBC News):
Democratic senators are not joining calls on the left for liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor to retire. But for the first time, they’re publicly expressing an unease that history could repeat itself after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s refusal to step down in 2014 ended in the Supreme Court lurching sharply to the right.
Ginsburg, then 81 and a cancer survivor, could have retired and been replaced by a Democratic appointee when President Barack Obama was in office and his party controlled 55 Senate seats. She rejected the calls — and died in September 2020, allowing then-President Donald Trump to replace her.
It was a history-making moment: Ginsburg’s successor, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, gave rise to a 6-3 conservative majority. Barrett went on to cast a deciding vote to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights ruling less than two years later.
With that humbling history in mind, some liberal commentators say Sotomayor — who is 69, a lifelong diabetic and the oldest member of the court’s liberal wing — should retire while Joe Biden is president and Democrats control the Senate, echoing similar calls directed at Ginsburg a decade ago that went unheeded.
Democratic senators who serve on the Judiciary Committee remain haunted by the Ginsburg precedent. None are publicly calling on Sotomayor to step down, but they say they hope it doesn’t happen again and create a 7-2 conservative majority.
Recommended
That doesn’t mean they can’t change course. I think the order is to hold their fire…for now. We still have months until Election Day. If things continue to go poorly for the Biden White House on the 2024 campaign trail, specifically with the president’s not-so-good standing in the recent battleground polls and the defections among key liberal voting groups, Democrats could put the screws on Sotomayor to vacate her post to save the liberal wing of the Supreme Court. Justice, like RBG, has not signaled to any of her close colleagues that she intends to leave, albeit she has suffered the pain of more judicial defeats now that her body has changed. That doesn’t mean anything—Scalia was also at the receiving end of these matters. He still pushed on.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member