Sonia Sotomayor Must Retire

[pstokely]

https://www.joshbarro.com/p/sonia-sotomayor-must-retire

On Election Day in 2006, Antonin Scalia was 70 years old and had been serving on the Supreme Court for 20 years. That year would have been an opportune time for him to retire — Republicans held the White House and the Senate, and they could have confirmed a young conservative justice who likely would have held the seat for decades to come. Instead, he stayed on the court, and I don’t recall a lot of conservative dissension about this at the time. Scalia, after all, wasn’t merely a vote on the court — he was a leading voice for conservative judicial thought, the sort of person you would eventually name law schools after, and conservatives really liked having him around, personally, to write opinions.

Scalia tried to stay on the court until the next time a Republican president would have a clear shot to nominate and confirm a conservative successor, but he didn’t make it — he died unexpectedly in February 2016 at the age of 79, while Barack Obama was president. Conservatives were nonetheless fortunate: there was divided control of government, and then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to even hold confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to the seat. Donald Trump won that fall’s election and he named Neil Gorsuch to the seat that McConnell had held open.

But imagine for a moment that Anthony Weiner had actually stopped sexting teenagers after his first sexting-related scandal in 2011. In this alternate universe, there would have been no Weiner’s Laptop story in the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign (and thus no announcement from James Comey that he was reopening the email investigation 11 days before the election) and Hillary Clinton probably would have won. By running a couple of points stronger, she might have taken Democratic candidates across the finish line in close races in Pennsylvania and Missouri, gaining Democratic control of the US Senate. In that scenario, Clinton would have named a liberal successor to Scalia — more liberal than Garland — and conservatives would have lost control of the court, all because of Scalia’s failure to retire at the opportune moment.

[Lovie777]

1. NO..................................

[msongs]

2. ruth bader ginsburg should have quit and let obama replace her. nt

[spooky3]

3. but as we now know, anyone he would have nominated would have been slow walked. nt

[stopdiggin]

4. I'm fairly confortable leaving this up

to the people at issue. And - I'd be terribly surprised if all of those people - are not fully aware - while having, (repeatedly?) heavily weighed and considered ramifications.

And, with full knowledge of what has gone before ... Still their decision.

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[bottomofthehill]

5. She needs to retire while the Democrats still control the Senate

This mistake has been made before, an aging Justice with health issues , and look where we are now. Time to go for the good of the order.

[Thunderbeast]

6. Nominate "Seal Team Six" Florence Tam!

[thesquanderer]

7. Even if you agree, wouldn't you want to wait until after the election?

On November 6 (or thereabouts, absent a Bush-Gore style debacle), we will know who will be president and who will control the Senate in 2025. If Dems lose one or both, they would still have at least until Jan 2 to get a replacement confirmed. They could do the "behind the scenes" work to line up who it would be in advance. Is there any advantage to doing it sooner?