Pennsylvania, U.S., May 29, 2024. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz Elizabeth Frantz/ReutersCNN —
President Joe Biden promised Black voters Wednesday that he would appoint progressives to the US Supreme Court if elected to a second term, suggesting he expects vacancies on the high court over the next four years.
“The next president, they’re going to be able to appoint a couple justices, and I’ll be damned — if in fact we’re able to change some of the justices when they retire and put in really progressive judges like we’ve always had, tell me that won’t change your life,” he said during a campaign rally in Philadelphia.
It was as explicit a warning as Biden could offer about the stakes of the upcoming election, and a clear reminder that some of the nine justices have entered their seventies.
Clarence Thomas is 75 and Samuel Alito is 74; both are conservative and appointed by Republican presidents. Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal who was nominated by President Barack Obama, turns 70 next month.
Retirements of any or all of those justices could provide a key opportunity for either Biden, who has named one justice to the Supreme Court, or his Republican rival Donald Trump, who named three during his four-year term.
Just as a point:
- If Trump wins and Thomas or Alito (or both) retire or die, he'll nominate equally or more conservative people and we're still going to have a 6-3 conservative majority. Which is bad.
- If Trump wins and Sotomayor retires or dies, we will have a 7-2 conservative majority, regardless of what Thomas and Alito do. Which is also bad.
- If Biden wins and there is a Democratic majority in the senate, at best he completely flips the court (from 6-3 in favor of the conservatives to 5-4 in favor of the liberals), assuming both Thomas and Alito retire or die.
- If Biden wins, there's a Democratic majority, and no justices retire or die (or just Sotomayor), it's just status quo, which sucks but isn't worse.
- If Biden wins, Thomas and/or Alito retire or die, and a Republican-controlled Senate decides to just not approve any of his nominations to prevent a liberal majority (like they did with Obama trying to replace Scalia), it still evens the playing field a tad. An even split (4-4 or 3-3) is not considered binding precedent, so any cases that go up there can still be resolved on their own, but they don't dictate the outcomes of any other cases.
I will also remind y'all that in light of the recent 34 criminal convictions Trump has, keeping conservatives out of the Supreme Court is even more important. I do not want the inevitable "can someone be president if convicted of multiple felonies?" question to be decided by two hardcore insurrectionists and three people appointed to the bench by Trump himself.